I heard that a long time ago the source was available. Back when it was free or even before that. I was wondering if I could find a copy of it?

Thanks in advance!

That would have to have been a loooooooong time ago. Even if such a thing exists, it would be such an early version it would be as good as useless.

I have never heard of the Cortex Command engine being open-source. Even the original builds of D.I.R.T were closed-source and precompiled.

Nobody seems to have the compiled versions of D.I.R.T. either.

Really? Never? even a old version of D.I.R.T would be fine. it is just for educational reasons and experimentation.

Grif was kind enough to post up links to downloads of all 22 CC builds, right here. That's as far back as we can go- you may find something helpful there, and you may not, but as Grif himself has brought out, Cortex Command was never open-source. As that post also goes on to say, "D.I.R.T, unfortunately, went out with the attachments when we moved servers.", so I don't think anybody short of Data (if even Data) has D.I.R.T.

Data won't have it. Because it's an ongoing project, he'll only have the latest version he's working on. Which is either 23.9 or 24.2, depending on if he's done all his 24 stuff already.

Why would he not keep all the previous released versions? It makes no sense to just burn it once you're done with it.

No, he'll just keep compiling it to the same output folder once he's done, and probably always has done.

That's what I figured, but he might still have archives floating around somewhere

Like, on an old hard drive he no longer uses.

Roast Veg, you would be silly if you didn't keep some sort of archive of your versions while making a major game.

SVN people. Data prolly has old source. BUT ALL THIS IS MOOT, as it's closed source AFAIK.

DIRT wasn't really major in any way. The game has been around for a long time now. It started as a high school project, sat on the backburner for years, and eventually got somewhat popular. Most people keep separate version of their games in their compiled form, but not in source code, and it seems Data's way of doing that was keeping it on the forums. That's why it's all gone.
Back on-topic, no, the game has, unfortunately, always been closed-source. I'm a content developer for the game and the closest I've come to seeing the source is Data pasting an excerpt from the header file for the Box class to me

Darn. I was hoping for a simple but good 2D physics engine with destroyable terrain. If anyone know of a good one let me know. It doesn't need to support huge maps or anything. I wanted to make a cool like ant empire game or something but with a similar theme to Cortex Command at least art wise.