MicrosoftAt the request of a netizen named Foone on Twitter, agreed to open-source an old 3D movie-making software that was launched 27 years ago. The name of this software is very straightforward “3D Movie Maker”, which mainly allows users to make movies by placing cartoon characters in a pre-rendered environment. However, Microsoft does not have the ownership of its BRender rendering engine. Fortunately, the owner of BRender said that as long as he can find a source code, he is willing to open source BRender, and some people still hold the source code of BRender, so Microsoft can Open source the entire 3D Movie Maker software.
According to PCGamer, Foone plans to update 3D Movie Maker to work on modern PCs, as well as add features to make the finished movie easier to share. Depending on the number of issues encountered, Foone expects to deliver a basic update “in the next month to several months.”
The source code of 3D Movie Maker is open sourced under MIT license terms and has been put on GitHub. In addition to 3D Movie itself, the BRender engine has also been used in some contemporary games such as “Carmageddon”, so the release of the BRender source code means that these old games may also be executed more smoothly on modern computers.