Ubisoft recently revealed on its forums that an open-source version of Massgate, the multiplayer server software for World in Conflict, is being released for free and unrestricted use. The alternate-history RTS was originally released in 2007, developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Sierra Entertainment. Ubisoft purchased Massive in 2008 and kept the game’s multiplayer servers running for several years before shutting them down in late 2015 due to decrease in players. Now, the Massgate code is available on GitHub for download.
“The code itself is more or less the same as how the code looked like back when the game is released,” GitHub’s Massgate readme says. “Only minor tweaks have been made to make it build on a relative modern compiler and to remove the necessity to manage CD-keys. Not much of the code has survived into later releases done by Massive Entertainment and does not really reflect the code of the company today, apart from the code standard and the general look and feel of the code. As a piece of game development history, and for anyone interested in how online servers were written at the time, it can definitely be a point of interest.”
Note that because this is not the actual game, but rather the backend that allows players to recreate World in Conflict‘s multiplayer, other software is required to run Massgate. MySQL, CMake, and a version of Visual Studio are all required to build Massgate, and GitHub’s Massgate readme has specific instructions for starting up a server, running it, and connecting with the game.
World in Conflict is available now for PC.