VCMI - it’s re-written from scratch, open source, multiplatform Heroes 3 engine with many improvements and mods manager. It requires some files from the original game though.
I played this in high school circa 2013. There was a server up 24/7 that hosted an infinite loop of the Venice map that always had the highest server pop. You’d occasionally find other servers going, or be able to host your own and get randoms, but more often than not, I played a TON of Venice for about a year. Good times.
Too many amazing moments and memories to even count, always more to learn. I love how the open source nature of the game means there’s many different servers branching off from each other, running their own custom versions of the game. Smaller servers “downstream” pick and choose which features they want to keep when the upstream servers implement something new.
It’s not open source, but I do want to mention Barotrauma here – it’s not totally unheard of, but I don’t think many people realize that it’s a spiritual successor to SS13. Supports a lot less players, but still up to 12 or something on the bigger ships, and it manages to turn the absolute insanity of SS13 into a compelling survival game that still has plenty of goofiness.
I entered SS13 with the ssethtide and I stuck around past the worst of it but I haven’t logged in since probably 2021. Is it a good time to come back and see what’s up? I enjoyed high population servers and a lot of people were leaving with the tide around and before when I did. What’s an average server pop these days?
The overcomplexity of the game is part of why I love it so much but it’s also what drove me off of it, because I couldn’t figure out how to run an offline server to practice roles and I wasn’t trying to do my first day of engineering or doctoring on a public lobby if I could help it. I had a lot of fun in Mining and Cargo and occasionally just faffing about as an assistant helping Botany grow weed or bringing monkeys to the chef - but I’d like to learn “a real job” one of these days (he says, knowing exactly how pissed off everyone gets if mining or cargo either die or are understaffed). And most folks didn’t usually seem inclined to adopt assistants, unfortunately. Remember folks, adopt wandering assistants and then spay and neuter them because unattended assistants will cook their hands off trying to break into the armory.
I mostly play on tgstation’s european server Terry, which often gets up to 100 players in the busy hours.
I know exactly the kind of anxiety you mention when it comes to having to learn a new role. That was partly why I also had the idea of installing a server locally to tinker with the mechanics in, which fortunately tgstation actually makes very easy. My problem then is that I only have like 10 minutes alone on the station before the power runs out, and I have to go set up the solar panels to continue my experiments. Turns out being solo crew on a space station isn’t all that easy.
I don’t know if it counts, but I think the source code of Freespace 2 was released eventually und a non-profit license. The community did some great things with it, especially the Blue Planet campaign.
Open source is not the same as source available. I’m not going to do a deep dive on definitions and licensing, but open source generally means that you are allowed to do what you want with it. It also usually implies that if the creator updates it, that updated code will also be shared.
The leaked Cyberpunk 2077 source code is from 2022 at the absolute latest (released 2024 from a hack done in 2022), is not open source licensed for re-use (meaning any use of it by people outside of CDPR is illegal), and they have released numerous patches, updates, and an entire DLC since.
The modding scene is (or, well, was) pretty active though, if you’re into that. There are still official te4 forums, but most folks hang out in the discord (yeah, I know.) including a couple old head modders that are pretty familiar with the codebase if you’re trying to do something exceptionally interesting with it.
Probably not unless you get public funding (eg, run a massive deficit, take control of the public AI to build stuff, debug features, etc) or you first create a resource chain or two to pay for transit.