7 ms·

There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be more open than Unity in some ways, but it's still not really open. And speaking

by shmerl 8y ago

There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be more open than Unity in some ways, but it's still not really open. And speaking of openness, didn't Epic push exclusivity approach recently in their store? That's bad.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
aphextron 8y ago
>There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be more open than Unity in some ways, but it's still not really open. This just isn't possible with game engines. They are the single most advanced pieces of desktop software in existence. Sure, there are things like Godot that are perfectly suitable for a simple indie game. But making a AAA game engine requires the expertise of literally hundreds of top level senior engineers with advanced physics and mathematical knowledge. There's probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4. Furthermore, open source is really the exception to the rule in game dev. Practically everything is done closed source with some kind of licensing fees involved. It's quite a different culture from web dev.
- shmerl 8y ago
  Collaboration solves this. Instead of reinventing the wheel, collaborating on the engine can pool resources. This works in other cases, so why not with engines? It's not engines that are sold, but games. Having good open engine doesn't prevent developers from selling games made with them. > There's probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4. That's really bunk. I mean "only elite can do it" it claim. Sure, it's not something you can create in one day, but it's not something that out of reach either, especially when people are collaborating on it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - aphextron 8y ago
    >That's really bunk. I mean "only elite can do it" it claim. Sure, it's not something you can create in one day, but it's not something that out of reach either, especially when people are collaborating on it. The graveyard of hundreds of abandoned open source game engines begs to disagree with you. I agree that it seems absurd, but you really can't underestimate the amount of man hours put into these things. Unreal has been under constant development for over 20 years. It's the same as flight simulation. Why is there only one viable flight simulator (X-Plane) on the market? It's because that kind of coding is simply beyond 99% of developers, and it takes a huge well funded and focused team to make something state of the art.
    - shmerl 8y ago
      Same claims have been made about codecs. "Only elite can do it", "you can't make it open" and etc. Yet, we have great open collaborative projects today for state of the art video and audio codecs. So it's not a technical issue.
      - ulasbilgen 8y ago
        There’re are some difference between a codec or OS with a game engine. One is the user base. I think there’re simply not enough game developers to extensively use the open source engines, every single computer needs an OS and in most cases needs a codec. But not everyone is a game developer. Another one is requirements I guess. For OS and codecs, I think the requirements are much more defined and manageable, but for a game engine the user uses it to create something else, hence the capabilities needed from the game engine may change wildly per project.
      - bsder 8y ago
        And yet those codecs still aren't in hardware devices or widely implemented in all browsers. I wouldn't cite open source codecs as a success story ... A GUI toolkit is probably more on point and of the correct scale, and those also demonstrate that without significant backing from somewhere, progress doesn't get made at that level of complexity.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  You could have made many of the same claims about operating system kernels not very long ago.
- Cmerlyn 8y ago
  > There's probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4 Thankfully, there are millions of people who can build something at the scale of linux or firefox. Why else would it be possible for them to be open source?
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  This sounds more like an excuse rather than any sort of rational argument as to why game engines can't be open sourced. The reality is that there are plenty of projects out there helmed by incredibly talented engineers with extremely high level knowledge that exist in the open source realm; one only has to look at the geospatial community to see this. Unity fucked up hard here and I hope that their planetary-level screw up will lead to game developers pushing for open source engines to avoid the control of their games being stolen.
  - aphextron 8y ago
    >This sounds more like an excuse rather than any sort of rational argument as to why game engines can't be open sourced. The reality is that there are plenty of projects out there helmed by incredibly talented engineers with extremely high level knowledge that exist in the open source realm; one only has to look at the geospatial community to see this. I'm not saying there aren't talented developers working in open source. But the sheer breadth of expertise required is unimaginable. You need top-of-their-field engineers from practically every conceivable discipline within CS to build a AAA game engine. Physics, lighting, rendering, networking, audio, UI, and that's just the tip of what I can think of. Engines like Rockstar's RAGE are easily on par with the Linux kernel for complexity.
    - TomasSedovic 8y ago
      I was about to bring out Linux as a thing that according to your argument just isn't possible with open source. But you've mentioned it yourself, so you presumably don't see that as a contradiction. What do you think makes the complexity of Linux achievable with FOSS while the comparable complexity of a AAA engine not?
      - aphextron 8y ago
        >What do you think makes the complexity of Linux achievable with FOSS while the comparable complexity of a AAA engine not? It just comes down to incentives. Practically every living human being stood to gain from the existence of a high quality general purpose FOSS operating system, and so Linux naturally came about. The people who would benefit from a AAA open source game engine are... closed source AAA game development studios. As such there's really no incentive for some physics whiz to spend their extremely valuable time toiling away on something that is only going to be used for someone else's profit. The intersection of people who build game engines, and people who make games with those engines, is extremely small. There's really no such thing as open-source game development except for hobbyists, because that would be literally giving your product away. Games are a hit based, one-and-done type product much more akin to movies than other software.
- meditate 8y ago
  Godot doesn't get much interest from AAA developers because typically they are interested in shipping on consoles, and it's impossible to support the current crop of locked-down proprietary consoles in a free and open source engine. Despite this I am actually very surprised at the speed that Godot has accumulated features. I think we will start to see it shape up a lot more when Vulkan support becomes first class. The culture change is happening, give it time.
  - crazysim 8y ago
    Impossible? There's a company offering porting of Godot games to consoles. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
    - meditate 8y ago
      Sure you can port it, but as it stands that code will never be mainlined. Meaning it will be mostly impossible for AAA developers to come together to improve it.
  - ndnxhs 8y ago
    Impossible because its too hard or impossible because legally you can't?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Consoles never were open after 1983's crash, actually that is what saved them from the dumpster like quality from copy-cats on other platforms.
    - shmerl 8y ago
      > actually that is what saved them from the dumpster like quality Did it? Lot's of gamers see consoles as something that holds developers back from using better hardware, since they need to target 5 year old systems. Quality both artistic and technical isn't something consoles can claim to be leading in. And clearly, "consolization" in its various forms isn't something gamers appreciate, when it spills out into PC gaming.
- jononor 8y ago
  It has been demonstrated possible for a large range of projects that are similar in complexity. For example: web browsers (Firefox), OS kernels (Linux), 3d-modelling applications (Blender), compilers (GCC), databases (PostgreSQL). Won't be easy for sure, neither on technical nor marketing level. Many of the successful examples took 10+ years before they got really viable. But to say it is impossible to do this for a game engine, just because no-one has done it yet, is defeatist.
- nothis 8y ago
  Same could be said about operating systems, yet we have Linux.
- nogbit 8y ago
  It also requires solid partnerships with console companies (MS, Sony, Nintendo etc) unless they were to also go a FOSS route with their systems.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Exclusivity is key to break the Steam monopoly, unfortunately. Right now, everyone's game libraries are effectively Steam libraries. So when people go to buy one more game... they go to Steam, naturally. The best way to break that is to not sell games on Steam. Another way is what Epic is also doing, giving away free games to build up people's library on their store as well.
- shmerl 8y ago
  > So when people go to buy one more game... they go to Steam, naturally. Not really, I personally go and buy it on GOG. Sure, Steam is the biggest store these days, but there is competition. And it's good when developers release in all stores. That's the proper way. Exclusivity is a bad method to fix monopoly, since it simply creates another monopoly. I.e. if you had one problem, now you have two.
  - chrischen 8y ago
    Doesn’t GOG just give steam keys?
    - callahad 8y ago
      No, GOG provides full, DRM-free downloads. It's its own marketplace. Maybe you're thinking of the Humble Bundle? Many products there are sold as Steam keys.
      - crysin 8y ago
        Could also be thinking of Green Man Gaming.
        chrischen 8y ago
        Yes! Sorry that was what I was thinking. Although to be fair a lot of steam games appear to simply install non-DRMd version that you can just run by finding the executable file.
codetrotter 8y ago
Be the change you want to see. https://www.patreon.com/godotengine https://www.patreon.com/godotengine https://github.com/godotengine/godot https://github.com/godotengine/godot
- hex12648430 8y ago
  And I'll add https://armory3d.org https://armory3d.org Which is very much in alpha but quite promising.
openbasic 8y ago
More? https://github.com/nem0/LumixEngine https://github.com/nem0/LumixEngine https://www.banshee3d.com/ https://www.banshee3d.com/ https://github.com/AtomicGameEngine/AtomicGameEngine https://github.com/AtomicGameEngine/AtomicGameEngine http://torque3d.org/ http://torque3d.org/ https://www.panda3d.org/ https://www.panda3d.org/ https://github.com/xenko3d/xenko https://github.com/xenko3d/xenko https://github.com/begla/Intrinsic https://github.com/begla/Intrinsic https://github.com/godotengine/godot https://github.com/godotengine/godot https://github.com/fredakilla/GPlayEngine https://github.com/fredakilla/GPlayEngine https://github.com/volcoma/EtherealEngine https://github.com/volcoma/EtherealEngine https://casual-effects.com/g3d/www/index.html https://casual-effects.com/g3d/www/index.html

by shmerl 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

aphextron 8y ago

>There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be more open than Unity in some ways, but it's still not really open. This just isn't possible with game engines. They are the single most advanced pieces of desktop software in existence. Sure, there are things like Godot that are perfectly suitable for a simple indie game. But making a AAA game engine requires the expertise of literally hundreds of top level senior engineers with advanced physics and mathematical knowledge. There's probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4. Furthermore, open source is really the exception to the rule in game dev. Practically everything is done closed source with some kind of licensing fees involved. It's quite a different culture from web dev.

shmerl 8y ago
Collaboration solves this. Instead of reinventing the wheel, collaborating on the engine can pool resources. This works in other cases, so why not with engines? It's not engines that are sold, but games. Having good open engine doesn't prevent developers from selling games made with them. > There's probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4. That's really bunk. I mean "only elite can do it" it claim. Sure, it's not something you can create in one day, but it's not something that out of reach either, especially when people are collaborating on it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- aphextron 8y ago
  >That's really bunk. I mean "only elite can do it" it claim. Sure, it's not something you can create in one day, but it's not something that out of reach either, especially when people are collaborating on it. The graveyard of hundreds of abandoned open source game engines begs to disagree with you. I agree that it seems absurd, but you really can't underestimate the amount of man hours put into these things. Unreal has been under constant development for over 20 years. It's the same as flight simulation. Why is there only one viable flight simulator (X-Plane) on the market? It's because that kind of coding is simply beyond 99% of developers, and it takes a huge well funded and focused team to make something state of the art.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    Same claims have been made about codecs. "Only elite can do it", "you can't make it open" and etc. Yet, we have great open collaborative projects today for state of the art video and audio codecs. So it's not a technical issue.
    - ulasbilgen 8y ago
      There’re are some difference between a codec or OS with a game engine. One is the user base. I think there’re simply not enough game developers to extensively use the open source engines, every single computer needs an OS and in most cases needs a codec. But not everyone is a game developer. Another one is requirements I guess. For OS and codecs, I think the requirements are much more defined and manageable, but for a game engine the user uses it to create something else, hence the capabilities needed from the game engine may change wildly per project.
    - bsder 8y ago
      And yet those codecs still aren't in hardware devices or widely implemented in all browsers. I wouldn't cite open source codecs as a success story ... A GUI toolkit is probably more on point and of the correct scale, and those also demonstrate that without significant backing from somewhere, progress doesn't get made at that level of complexity.
throwaway2048 8y ago
You could have made many of the same claims about operating system kernels not very long ago.
Cmerlyn 8y ago
> There's probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4 Thankfully, there are millions of people who can build something at the scale of linux or firefox. Why else would it be possible for them to be open source?
fzeroracer 8y ago
This sounds more like an excuse rather than any sort of rational argument as to why game engines can't be open sourced. The reality is that there are plenty of projects out there helmed by incredibly talented engineers with extremely high level knowledge that exist in the open source realm; one only has to look at the geospatial community to see this. Unity fucked up hard here and I hope that their planetary-level screw up will lead to game developers pushing for open source engines to avoid the control of their games being stolen.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >This sounds more like an excuse rather than any sort of rational argument as to why game engines can't be open sourced. The reality is that there are plenty of projects out there helmed by incredibly talented engineers with extremely high level knowledge that exist in the open source realm; one only has to look at the geospatial community to see this. I'm not saying there aren't talented developers working in open source. But the sheer breadth of expertise required is unimaginable. You need top-of-their-field engineers from practically every conceivable discipline within CS to build a AAA game engine. Physics, lighting, rendering, networking, audio, UI, and that's just the tip of what I can think of. Engines like Rockstar's RAGE are easily on par with the Linux kernel for complexity.
  - TomasSedovic 8y ago
    I was about to bring out Linux as a thing that according to your argument just isn't possible with open source. But you've mentioned it yourself, so you presumably don't see that as a contradiction. What do you think makes the complexity of Linux achievable with FOSS while the comparable complexity of a AAA engine not?
    - aphextron 8y ago
      >What do you think makes the complexity of Linux achievable with FOSS while the comparable complexity of a AAA engine not? It just comes down to incentives. Practically every living human being stood to gain from the existence of a high quality general purpose FOSS operating system, and so Linux naturally came about. The people who would benefit from a AAA open source game engine are... closed source AAA game development studios. As such there's really no incentive for some physics whiz to spend their extremely valuable time toiling away on something that is only going to be used for someone else's profit. The intersection of people who build game engines, and people who make games with those engines, is extremely small. There's really no such thing as open-source game development except for hobbyists, because that would be literally giving your product away. Games are a hit based, one-and-done type product much more akin to movies than other software.
meditate 8y ago
Godot doesn't get much interest from AAA developers because typically they are interested in shipping on consoles, and it's impossible to support the current crop of locked-down proprietary consoles in a free and open source engine. Despite this I am actually very surprised at the speed that Godot has accumulated features. I think we will start to see it shape up a lot more when Vulkan support becomes first class. The culture change is happening, give it time.
- crazysim 8y ago
  Impossible? There's a company offering porting of Godot games to consoles. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
  - meditate 8y ago
    Sure you can port it, but as it stands that code will never be mainlined. Meaning it will be mostly impossible for AAA developers to come together to improve it.
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  Impossible because its too hard or impossible because legally you can't?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Consoles never were open after 1983's crash, actually that is what saved them from the dumpster like quality from copy-cats on other platforms.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    > actually that is what saved them from the dumpster like quality Did it? Lot's of gamers see consoles as something that holds developers back from using better hardware, since they need to target 5 year old systems. Quality both artistic and technical isn't something consoles can claim to be leading in. And clearly, "consolization" in its various forms isn't something gamers appreciate, when it spills out into PC gaming.
jononor 8y ago
It has been demonstrated possible for a large range of projects that are similar in complexity. For example: web browsers (Firefox), OS kernels (Linux), 3d-modelling applications (Blender), compilers (GCC), databases (PostgreSQL). Won't be easy for sure, neither on technical nor marketing level. Many of the successful examples took 10+ years before they got really viable. But to say it is impossible to do this for a game engine, just because no-one has done it yet, is defeatist.
nothis 8y ago
Same could be said about operating systems, yet we have Linux.
nogbit 8y ago
It also requires solid partnerships with console companies (MS, Sony, Nintendo etc) unless they were to also go a FOSS route with their systems.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

Exclusivity is key to break the Steam monopoly, unfortunately. Right now, everyone's game libraries are effectively Steam libraries. So when people go to buy one more game... they go to Steam, naturally. The best way to break that is to not sell games on Steam. Another way is what Epic is also doing, giving away free games to build up people's library on their store as well.

shmerl 8y ago
> So when people go to buy one more game... they go to Steam, naturally. Not really, I personally go and buy it on GOG. Sure, Steam is the biggest store these days, but there is competition. And it's good when developers release in all stores. That's the proper way. Exclusivity is a bad method to fix monopoly, since it simply creates another monopoly. I.e. if you had one problem, now you have two.
- chrischen 8y ago
  Doesn’t GOG just give steam keys?
  - callahad 8y ago
    No, GOG provides full, DRM-free downloads. It's its own marketplace. Maybe you're thinking of the Humble Bundle? Many products there are sold as Steam keys.
    - crysin 8y ago
      Could also be thinking of Green Man Gaming.
      - chrischen 8y ago
        Yes! Sorry that was what I was thinking. Although to be fair a lot of steam games appear to simply install non-DRMd version that you can just run by finding the executable file.

codetrotter 8y ago

Be the change you want to see. https://www.patreon.com/godotengine https://www.patreon.com/godotengine https://github.com/godotengine/godot https://github.com/godotengine/godot

hex12648430 8y ago
And I'll add https://armory3d.org https://armory3d.org Which is very much in alpha but quite promising.

openbasic 8y ago

More? https://github.com/nem0/LumixEngine https://github.com/nem0/LumixEngine https://www.banshee3d.com/ https://www.banshee3d.com/ https://github.com/AtomicGameEngine/AtomicGameEngine https://github.com/AtomicGameEngine/AtomicGameEngine http://torque3d.org/ http://torque3d.org/ https://www.panda3d.org/ https://www.panda3d.org/ https://github.com/xenko3d/xenko https://github.com/xenko3d/xenko https://github.com/begla/Intrinsic https://github.com/begla/Intrinsic https://github.com/godotengine/godot https://github.com/godotengine/godot https://github.com/fredakilla/GPlayEngine https://github.com/fredakilla/GPlayEngine https://github.com/volcoma/EtherealEngine https://github.com/volcoma/EtherealEngine https://casual-effects.com/g3d/www/index.html https://casual-effects.com/g3d/www/index.html