Keen Software House, developers of Miner Wars 2081 and owners of a fantastic company name, have opened up the source code to their "action-survival space-shooter simulation-game", dishing out the code to both the game and its engine - providing it's used to create mods for Miner Wars, and you own the game on Steam. They haven't quite made it open source - they still own the rights to the code - but if you're the sort that enjoys poking around in the guts of games to make new and interesting things, this could be very good news. Miner Wars 2081 is currently 75% off in the Steam Spring sale, until March 29th.
As RPS note , you can find all 360,000 lines of code here , and you won't be able to just change one line and release it as your own game, because Keen have forbidden such nasty behaviour in the license . Still, this is pretty exciting news, provided you can read codelish, and you're a fan of space wars and/or space mining. Keen have just updated the base game too, so it should be more stable than the buggy release we reviewed at the end of last year.
For no reason, here's the game's launch trailer:
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.