hey thanks for sharing the links! i just dont understand why its so unusual...
Viewing post in Acces to code?
Is that a serious question?
What use is the source code to a normal user? They do not have the knowledge, nor the tools to create the game from the source code. And even if they have some of it, chances are the game might not work, because of slight oversights or technicalities.
Users are here for the game, not the source code.
And this is not even considering that some developers might not want to share their code.
It is also kinda the name giver for open source. Everything not open source could be called closed source. And you do not share code from closed source in general. So it is unusual to see source code outside of open source projects.
Well, my answer was of course just my take on why source code is not typically released. It makes no sense for a typical user computer. The necessary development tools to compile the code are missing.
It is a bit different on Linux. There you could have dependencies and all and a makefile to actually distribute your game as source code. And there were times when this actually made a lot of sense, since there are different architectures and such, so you would have had to compile for each target architecture - or just distribute the source code.
It also depends on the type of source code you are interested in. Unless you code your basic stuff yourself, you will probably use an engine or another.