It's a long shot, but...
 

... can we get a petition started to ask Ubisoft to open source SH3? The game is nearly 20 years old. It is extremely unlikely Ubisoft are going to do much with it. Heck, if we're to go by the latest news, it's unlikely Ubisoft will even be a thing pretty soon. It's highly unlikely that they would do such a thing. But what do we have to lose, really? And think of what we have to gain. All the extremely talented people that have taken this game so far with hex edits alone. Think of what they could do with free access to the code.

C'mon. Can we get the ball rolling? Who here carries weight in this community?

Welcome back!
 

Remaster?
 

I guess that SH3 is still making Ubisoft a thousand dollars or more a month in return for no effort. I'd estimate they would give it up in return for about 3 years revenue, but they may not actually own all the rights needed to do so and would not be willing to spend more money untangling the issue.

The modern thing seems to be to release a "remastered" version to squeeze a few more dollars out of ageing titles. This is typically little more than a recompiled 64 bit release with a few graphics tweaks. Whilst not as good as an open source release it does make the game available to modern users not prepared to fight against Windows.
My observation is that uboat is now about on a level with modded SH3 and it is based on the Unity engine so has the potential for massive modding whilst Unity remains stable. It is still painful at times: Belfast with no ships in port - not even a trawler, brightly lit modern office buildings in 1940, how many times to rescue a stranded uboat, how many merchant ship types... I get the feeling most of these are due to a shortage of the manhours which the community can provide.

The time has finally come to move on i think. Unless the new version of GWX is really spectacular....

I doubt that Ubisoft will do it.
The best they did so far were giveaways of their old games (which was nice). But I didnt hear about them making any of their game open source.

Now they want to resurrect Heroes of Might and Magic. They can keep SH3 and do some similar remaster / remake of SH3 as well to make more profit.

UBoat is a very different game, in my mind. It plays more like a crew/resource-management game than a pure simulator. From my play throughs, UBoat doesn't provide that SH3-alike itch.

I'm honestly surprised that there hasn't been an engine re-implementation effort a la OpenMW. It would not be an easy nor quick engineering effort, but may lead to better outcomes unencumbered by a publisher.

really? I prefer the simulator side of the game over crew/resource-management - I have even turned off the fatigue in SH3 because I dont like to do babysitting of my crew during long travels when I have officers for it.

Very likely. But what have we got to lose?