Penumbra: Overture released as open source

Frictional Games provides fans with the complete code to the game

Posted on May 26, 2010 - 9:01pm EST

Frictional Games has announced the release of the source code for their first game "Penumbra: Overture", together with the source code for the engine and tools used in its creation. This comes as a reply to the great success of the Humble Indie Bundle, in which over 1 million dollars has been donated to the participating developers and charities.

Penumbra: Overture contains a unique physics interaction system for first person games, a system that has been exclusive to the series and not found in any other game. With the release of the source code, developers hope this will change as the interaction system can be used for much more than the genre specific horror games. The source code is currently running on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux – with the public release of the source code, perhaps even more platforms can be supported!

"We have been talking about releasing the engine and game code as open source for quite some time. With the success of the Humble Indie Bundle came the perfect opportunity and we decided to join the other games in releasing our code. Although the code for the game and engine encompass several years of work, it is not actively used today." said Thomas Grip, Programmer and Co-Founder. "It was basically just rotting away in the dark corners of our hard drives. It feels much better to have it published in the open, where it has a chance to grow and do some good. I hope that it will be found useful and I am excited to see what people can do with it!"

The source code has been uploaded to GitHub where it is easy for people to download the latest version, suggest patches, make new versions of the code and much more. To kick start the development, the developer have also put up a dedicated section in their forum, where people can discuss the code and where Friction Games will try to provide as much help as they can.