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>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 is

>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
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- 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.
  - dkersten 8y ago
    What about the hundreds of thousands of abandoned open source web apps/tools/libraries? I guess only a small few elite are able to write any functionining code at all, then? A commercial quality game engine is a huge project, and as such, requires a huge projects worth of time and effort to build. Same as any other huge software project (which all have countless abandoned open source attempts). Remember that most open source projects start of tiny (one developer is common, certainly very few start off with more than a handful) and work on it in their free time, while commercial teams like Unity have hundreds of peolpe working on it full time. The reason they are abandoned is typicaally that 1) the developers, who are doing it in their spare time, don’t have the time anymore; or 2) they get frustrated at the amount of work/lack of contributors/lack of interest and stop working on it; or 3) they simply lose interest and work on something else. Its not lack of ability, its lack of time/motivation/interest to keep working on it for many, many years.
- bsder 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. You need to be damn near Johnathan Blow levels of skill and perseverance to create a decent game engine. Maybe you wouldn't classify him as an "elite", but I sure would.
- lasagnaphil 8y ago
  From what I've heard and experienced, you need at least the following knowledge to create a good game engine: - Understanding of modern CPUs / GPUs and the capabilities/shortcomings they have - Understanding the behaviors and quirks of the OS - Familiarity with multicore programming - Skillful memory management (such as making your data structures less prone to cache invalidations) - Mastery of a low-level language (C++, Rust, whatever) - Familiarity with build systems (CMake, SCons, etc, ... or sometimes you might have to roll your own) Already I could see the number of contributors who would know all this stuff being pretty low. (I've dabbled a bit in graphics and made a simple OpenGL scene graph renderer and a fluid simulator, but I still don't feel like I'm competent enough...) An engine is comprised of multiple components (Graphics, Sound, Physics, etc...). So you wouldn't need to know all of it, but contributors would need to have a clear grasp on at least one. So for each component, you would need... - Entity System: You need a universal way to handle game entities. Implementing it efficiently requires a good knowledge of computer systems, because you need to think carefully about how you store data in the memory. - Job System: You need a system to execute various tasks (rendering, physics, game logic, ...) simultaneously on multiple processors, so that a single game frame can finish in less than 16 milliseconds. Implementing this would require some knowledge in concurrency as well as OS concepts. - Resource Management: You need a way to store and keep track of the game's various data stored in files, such as images, models, sounds, game objects and their parameters, settings, etc. You need to implement efficient serialization and compression for this. - Graphics: Mastery of a graphics API (OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan), and understanding its various patterns and shortcomings. You also need knowledge in how rendering works (which also requires some math), and nowadays a PBRT renderer (https://www.pbrt.org/ https://www.pbrt.org/) is basically a minimum requirement for modern 3D game engines. - Physics: Lots of math and physics (Linear Algebra, Differential equations, Mechanics, etc.), and also optimization skills like assembly and SIMD (speed is critical in this area!). Fortunately many people just use already-built middleware such as Havok or Bullet.. - Sound: This is actually the most neglected part in game engine development, and it is hard to find good resources on this. I think the people who would have the knowledge to build a game engine would be already busy working on other stuff, such as working for an AAA gamedev company (which sometimes does a lot of crunch, so they might not have enough time for open-source stuff), or a proprietary game engine company like Unity or Unreal. But I still see some hope around the edges. From what I've seen, Handmade Hero (https://handmadehero.org/ https://handmadehero.org/, which is a livestream of making a game engine from scratch, accompanied with various education materials) is the most impressive. It tries to teach those skills needed to make a game engine to interested programmers, which I think is a crucial first step in encouraging open-source gamedev.
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.

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.
- dkersten 8y ago
  What about the hundreds of thousands of abandoned open source web apps/tools/libraries? I guess only a small few elite are able to write any functionining code at all, then? A commercial quality game engine is a huge project, and as such, requires a huge projects worth of time and effort to build. Same as any other huge software project (which all have countless abandoned open source attempts). Remember that most open source projects start of tiny (one developer is common, certainly very few start off with more than a handful) and work on it in their free time, while commercial teams like Unity have hundreds of peolpe working on it full time. The reason they are abandoned is typicaally that 1) the developers, who are doing it in their spare time, don’t have the time anymore; or 2) they get frustrated at the amount of work/lack of contributors/lack of interest and stop working on it; or 3) they simply lose interest and work on something else. Its not lack of ability, its lack of time/motivation/interest to keep working on it for many, many years.
bsder 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. You need to be damn near Johnathan Blow levels of skill and perseverance to create a decent game engine. Maybe you wouldn't classify him as an "elite", but I sure would.
lasagnaphil 8y ago
From what I've heard and experienced, you need at least the following knowledge to create a good game engine: - Understanding of modern CPUs / GPUs and the capabilities/shortcomings they have - Understanding the behaviors and quirks of the OS - Familiarity with multicore programming - Skillful memory management (such as making your data structures less prone to cache invalidations) - Mastery of a low-level language (C++, Rust, whatever) - Familiarity with build systems (CMake, SCons, etc, ... or sometimes you might have to roll your own) Already I could see the number of contributors who would know all this stuff being pretty low. (I've dabbled a bit in graphics and made a simple OpenGL scene graph renderer and a fluid simulator, but I still don't feel like I'm competent enough...) An engine is comprised of multiple components (Graphics, Sound, Physics, etc...). So you wouldn't need to know all of it, but contributors would need to have a clear grasp on at least one. So for each component, you would need... - Entity System: You need a universal way to handle game entities. Implementing it efficiently requires a good knowledge of computer systems, because you need to think carefully about how you store data in the memory. - Job System: You need a system to execute various tasks (rendering, physics, game logic, ...) simultaneously on multiple processors, so that a single game frame can finish in less than 16 milliseconds. Implementing this would require some knowledge in concurrency as well as OS concepts. - Resource Management: You need a way to store and keep track of the game's various data stored in files, such as images, models, sounds, game objects and their parameters, settings, etc. You need to implement efficient serialization and compression for this. - Graphics: Mastery of a graphics API (OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan), and understanding its various patterns and shortcomings. You also need knowledge in how rendering works (which also requires some math), and nowadays a PBRT renderer (https://www.pbrt.org/ https://www.pbrt.org/) is basically a minimum requirement for modern 3D game engines. - Physics: Lots of math and physics (Linear Algebra, Differential equations, Mechanics, etc.), and also optimization skills like assembly and SIMD (speed is critical in this area!). Fortunately many people just use already-built middleware such as Havok or Bullet.. - Sound: This is actually the most neglected part in game engine development, and it is hard to find good resources on this. I think the people who would have the knowledge to build a game engine would be already busy working on other stuff, such as working for an AAA gamedev company (which sometimes does a lot of crunch, so they might not have enough time for open-source stuff), or a proprietary game engine company like Unity or Unreal. But I still see some hope around the edges. From what I've seen, Handmade Hero (https://handmadehero.org/ https://handmadehero.org/, which is a livestream of making a game engine from scratch, accompanied with various education materials) is the most impressive. It tries to teach those skills needed to make a game engine to interested programmers, which I think is a crucial first step in encouraging open-source gamedev.

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.