Heretic and Hexen released under GPL

[Macil]

Wait, does this mean that ALL the heretic and hexen stuff can now be editable with decorate? Or was it not being released under GPL not the problem before of all the stuff being "Hardcoded"?

All this means is that its now a lot easier for zdoom to become GPL now, but a few obstacles are still there.

Once zdoom becomes GPL, zdoom will be able to use code from other GPL ports and programs, and require that derivatives (like skulltag) were open source too (unless they only use source code from before the switch to GPL).

[Amuscaria]

Open Source Skulltag

That's like a "Welcome ALL Hackers". (not that it's much better now).

[Ghastly]

That's like a "Welcome ALL Hackers". (not that it's much better now).

At the moment, it's "Welcome ALL Idiots", it it was open sourced, it'd be "Welcome ALL Hackers and Idiots" .

@Graf: After Doomscript, would it be possible to externalize all those functions, without such a massive mess?

[Gez]

Some could probably be "externalized" (actually, shifted up the hierarchy ladder to be native to actor or inventory) right now. But others require special elements to work -- for example, a PodGenerator keeps track of all pods it has created so that it can stop generating them once a certain number is reached, so if any actor was able to use the PodGenerator's special there'd be a bug as the engine would try to update variables that don't exist.

[Graf Zahl]

@Graf: After Doomscript, would it be possible to externalize all those functions, without such a massive mess?

They will be externalized but still belong to the classes they are defined in now. But you could copy and adjust them to your needs if you'd wanted to use them in your own classes.

[Chris]

WRT FMOD, there shouldn't be any issue replacing it with OpenAL and FFmpeg. FFmpeg is LGPL (or GPL, depending on what it's configured with), and its source can be included for ZDoom's Windows source release. Linux users shouldn't have any problems with using the external/system lib, and get the benefit of using any formats its configured to handle (the Windows version can use DirectShow for external formats, aside from the ones it handles itself, AFAIK). OpenAL is just a simple API, and has a few different implementations with different licenses (OpenAL Soft and OpenAL SI, both cross-platform, are LGPL, Creative's wrapper and hardware drivers are closed-source proprietary, as are nVidia's), so I don't think you can be bound by any particular license when using it.

As a bonus, OpenAL Soft implements a couple EFX effects (EFX is OpenAL's version of EAX) and works with surround sound in Linux, something which FMOD didn't do last I checked (a few years ago). So moving to OpenAL+FFmpeg may be beneficial regardless of license issues.