Blood Source Campaign
For the Blood modification worked on for the Source Engine see Blood Source
"BloodSource was a campaign launched in August 1999 by Greg '\frightfan/' Enright to obtain the source code of Blood from its owners... The Blood source code was the only missing part, since the BUILD source code (the engine Blood used) was released by its creator, Ken Silverman. Even the Watcom C compiler is free now. During the campaign's lifetime, Greg obtained legal and technical information from various people, including officials from Monolith, 3D Realms and Infogrames, and Blood developers. Matt Saettler (Project Manager and Coder) and Nick Newhard (Game Designer) were particularly helpful in this quest and deserve a big thank. The BloodSource campaign gave birth to the ReBUILD project in August 2000, which in turn gave birth to the Transfusion Project in March 2001 (known as qBlood at the beginning). Greg stopped his work for the BloodSource campaign in February 2001 and passed the reins to Timothy Hale. Timothy announced the official end of the campaign in November 2001." — Transfusion page
The Blood Source Campaign (also called the Blood Source Release Campaign and the BloodSource Campaign) was a campaign launched in August 1999 aiming to convince Monolith Productions to release the Blood source code under a free software license. Blood is the only of the big three Build engine games whose original source code is still proprietary. The Build engine which powers Blood was released under a source-available non-commercial custom license in 2000 by Ken Silverman, and the other two major Build engine games Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior were both released under GNU General Public License by 3D Realms in 2003 and 2005. The source code to the Capstone Software games on the engine were released in 2007 by developer Les Bird. Redneck Rampage was built directly on the Duke Nukem code, as was the Matt Saettler produced NAM and World War II GI and the much derided Extreme Paintbrawl. PowerSlave used the Build engine on MS-DOS, but this was somewhat eclipsed by its console versions using Lobotomy Software's own Slavedriver engine.
The campaign mostly involved e-mailing people at 3D Realms, Monolith Productions, GT Interactive and the Blood development team asking for a release and asking legal questions. After long years of effort, the campaign officially died in November 2001. The founder and long time leader was Greg Enright (frightfan), who later passed on the title to Timothy Hale (Protoplasmatic) who lead the campaign until its end (with a promise to maintain the Planet Blood campaign site for as long as Planet Blood remained online, which proved to be until 2009). Instead, the former campaigners switched to rebuilding Blood on top of the free software (GNU GPL) DarkPlaces engine through the Transfusion project. This was the first of many attempted recreations on other engines, the most complete and accurate being BloodCM which was declared finished in 2016, and utilized the ReBUILD tools created by the Transfusion project.
Bloodites continued to campaign for the release of the Blood source code, sometimes circulating petitions and often discussing it and its prospects. There were also rumours that Monolith had lost the Blood source code, similar to what happened to Strife. Matt Saettler, the Blood project manager, is now also said to have a copy of the source code, but due to legal fears is not willing to release it at this time. In 2012 former CEO of Monolith Jason Hall stated that he also had access to the source code, but was unwilling to release it for similar reasons.
A very early version of the source code is also publicly available, though legally questionable, in the form of the full Blood Alpha; a slightly later version was leaked in January 2023 by x0r_jmp called Blood.Source.1996.07.22-x0r_jmp.rar and is currently being distributed on Archive.org. It was from these in part that a reverse engineered source port was produced in 2017 called BloodGDX. The source code to the reverse engineered source port NBlood, based on EDuke32, was publicly available from initial release, as are its various forks such as that contained in the Raze project. The code for BloodGDX was ultimately released on April 24, 2019.
On September 1, 2023, Alexey "Nuke.YKT" Khokholov released a reconstruction of the DOS source code titled Blood-RE. As such, a release of the original source code would mostly be of historical interest at this point. Components of the Blood II: The Chosen game logic code were released in 1999, but under a restrictive license mostly for fan modification purposes only. Some have also called for more of the Blood II source code to be released to allow for proper source ports (later LithTech code surfaced in 2009).
External Links[edit]
- Blood Source Campaign on the Transfusion SourceForge site
- Blood Source Campaign on Planet Blood
- Blood Source Campaign mirrored on DeathMask
- Post from alt.game.blood
- Duke Nukem 3D on RISC OS? from Acorn Arcade
- Thread on the Guru3D Forums
- Thread on the Monolith Forums
- Entry on PetitionOnline
- Blood-RE source reconstruction on GitHub
