Anyone here remember the game Startopia from 2001? The game had quite a few bugs but overall it was a nice experience in single player. The multiplayer mode however was super buggy and basically unplayable. As with all good games the developers stopped at fixing it and the game was left in this semi-broken state.
I was hoping that the source code for this game be published at some point or that someone would start reverse engineering it. However the game is now exactly 20 years old and basically I had given up all hope. Similar to Supreme Commander the IP for the game belong to Square Enix.
So you can imagine that I was quite surprised when I had a news article in my Steam UI telling me that there is a new beta patch for Startopia released in 2021. Usually the only party that can add fixes for these old games on Steam ist the original publisher. Fan patches would rather show up as mods or similar.
So I was reading the forum of steam. As it turns out one of the original developers bought the whole IP for Startopia from Square Enix and is continuing to develop it.
Essentially I'm still a realist. And my brain tells me play this is not going to happen for Supreme Commander. Especially are some additional things that are quite different to the situation of Supreme Commander. I guess the Startopia IP was not "as big" as Supreme Commander (which could be seen as Triple A + Expension + part 2). Also if you read the forum post you will see that the original developer always the source code and then he continued to keep it compilable on newer versions of Microsoft Visual Studio (C++ IDE). As far as we Know there is no developer left who kept the source code Supreme Commander (or at least they're all denying it) and it doesn't seem to be the case there is someone still keeping the original source code in a shape but it's still compiles in a modern environment.
But a man can dream, right?
Here is the forum post for those who are interested: https://steamcommunity.com/app/243040/discussions/0/2790494800085438116/#c2790495251254568347