I stumbled upon this yesterday and it bears some similarities with what the devs here and the open-source community is doing with Uru.
In July 2001, Microsoft released a game called "Microsoft Train Simulator" which was widely adopted by the world-wide train sim community. While the official release was rather limited, tits architecture was open and documented, so in a matter of months hundreds, then thousands of add-ons were created by fans: models, sounds, routes, activities, textures, etc.
But the game engine dates back to 2001, and a MSTS2 project was abandoned a year ago, so players until recently had to contend with the outdated game. Other train sims have been made, but none has achieved MSTS's following and sheer number of fan-made add-ons.
Then a few capable devs started OpenRails, an open-source project for a new game engine compatible with all existing MSTS content. It has no data files, you must have MSTS installed. I tried the current version and, while it doesn't yet implement all of MSTS's features, it is quite close and it does everything better than the original. It is truly impressive.
I thought this was an interesting parallel to what people here have been doing, with the Alcugs server, libHPlasma, DirtSand and of course GoW's CWE branch.
Guild of Writers
