Epic has stated they think NDAs are a failure as a model and they won't make any more such agreements. They also asserted they wouldn't open the sources because parts of the original code is still present in more recent versions of the engine and they don't want to release things they are using.
This entire model is screwed. They plain said it.
As for reverse-engineering, it's pretty much always illegal AFAIK, and forbidden by the EULA IIRC.
Reincarnation of Quake 1
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Re: Reincarnation of Quake 1
That line is not that clear. If you make something that is able to run UEngine packages completely independently from UEngine itself and you call it your own engine and start to expand on it, that's illegal, however if you make something work *with* UEngine because you figured something out (aka reverse-engineering), and it still needs the UEngine itself to run, that's absolutely ok, otherwise in that regard many mods would be illegal (including my own, which had a bit of reverse-engineering in order to make some stuff work), and 90% of the native ones would be illegal as well (to not mention that Mark Rein wouldn't let Shadow's SDK go past where it was already some years ago).Hellkeeper wrote: As for reverse-engineering, it's pretty much always illegal AFAIK, and forbidden by the EULA IIRC.
I think the real boundary here is if whether or not you modify engine packages to expand them or if you recreate most of them so the stuff runs independently from the original engine.
On another hand, when it comes to native mods specifically, it's very difficult for them to prove that you reverse-engineered anything at all as long as the original engine and its packages are still intact and your mod depends on them to run, since their intent was for people to be able to mod for the engine anyway when they released the public headers and sources to a couple of specific packages, and their EULA clearly states that boundary of modding and content creation using their engine.
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Re: Reincarnation of Quake 1
Ah yes, in this case you're absolutely right, I apologize. That would be akin to some sort of plug-in.Feralidragon wrote: however if you make something work *with* UEngine because you figured something out (aka reverse-engineering), and it still needs the UEngine itself to run, that's absolutely ok
As for reverse-engineering things in mods, I think what's important there too is that the UE is still a mandatory requisite to play the mode. Hence, it's easier to let it fly under the radar (not to mention, as you said, that proving that some R-E was done would be quite difficult).
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