Battlezone Forums

I'm on break from horrendous school work, so here I am.

-I've heard that the Dark Reign 2 source code was released to the public, but WHO did and WHY was it released? I at least hope someone will try to re-code the networking portion of the game to fix the multiplayer option.

-I know the composers behind the game's music, Christian A. Salyer and Eric Klein, but does anyone know how to get in touch with them? The music for that game was nothing short of amazing. I have some questions to ask them.

you can get DR2 at Good Old Games (GOG.com)

I like source code, where?

i downloaded it and promptly got a msg from MS security essentials saying it detected a threat, so i had it remove it and clean

Nielk1 wrote:I like source code, where?

http://code.google.com/p/darkreign2/

It appears that the Aureate Adware Malware is in this source, curiously in the form of a 3rd party library. Basically, if you compile this as is, you will subject yourself to ads.

R4SOURCE\3rdparty\won\Ad\Aureate

I figure if you clean out those ad libraries and then remove all the calls and includes it should be fine. Though there might be other things in it.

If this source is legit it should not be compiled right away.

Edit: Did more checking, looks like it might be a user including an unsafe networking/matchmaking system.

Does this mean it is possible to re-hash DR2 to work on modern networks/servers? How about the OS compatibility? Viruses/trojans/keyloggers/rootkits embedded in the source code?

Doing more checking it looks like this is something always in the source code, which is odd. Not sure. Either way, it is easily removable considering its the damn source code.

I thought DR2 used the same, or much of the same code as BZ2?

Psychedelic Rhino wrote:I thought DR2 used the same, or much of the same code as BZ2?

I don't think so but I could be wrong.

We share a lot of underlying code-- the varsys code, some system code, etc. But, BZ2 got a snapshot of that code quite a while (a year?) before BZ2 shipped. DR2 code diverged, significantly, after that. And the BZ2 version of that code also changed up a lot.

Yes, I eyeballed the code in BZ2 originally from DR2 back in the early 2000s, and decided it was too different to safely merge.

-- GSH

BZ2 and DR2 both use the Zero engine, which definitely explains similarities between their codes. I believe that Dark Reign 2 was an underlooked piece of gaming history as it may have been the very first fully-3D RTS game. It may have been insanely popular at one time in the early 2000s, as the Internet Archive shows. There were so many clans and rave reviews left for it as well.

But the music, however, was nothing short of incredible. I even played the seventh track off the game disc at a party once, and it had everyone dancing near the end. (qdql)

*sigh* Interesting news article about the game from the Pandemic website archive here.

forgottengames wrote:BZ2 and DR2 both use the Zero engine, which definitely explains similarities between their codes.

No. Definitely not. Zero wasn't used until Battlefront II. The wikipedia article on Battlezone II has been horribly wrong on a number of things and we're finally getting towards changing it. If you read the talk page on the DR2 article, you'll see a quote from Ken stating that BZ2 was built from the same start point as DR2s (as GSH said above), and that DR2 used its own engine, which was in turn based on the i76 engine.

Thanks for clearing that up, AHadley. But does anyone agree with me concerning the music? Anyone?

BTW: If someone would show me how to set up a free VPN on my computer, I'd be more than happy to host a few DR2 multiplayer games for us to enjoy.

UPDATE: Recently I got in touch with Chris Salyer, one of the composers of the DR2 score, and he now has his own company, "Blazed Out Music, Inc." (To me, it sounds like a stoner haven.) And Salyer doesn't look as nerdy as I expected him to be...

I've never played a game I didn't love the music to. Hell, video game music introduced me to three of my favourite artists; Front Line Assembly, Nine Inch Nails and Sonic Mayhem. Dark Reign 2's is just as good.

Never played the game though. Always meant to. Maybe I should put it on my laptop or get a Raspberry Pi for legacy use.