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Interestingly "You patch the issue and ship the patched library in your game" is not on the list. Comparing to popular game engine Unity, let's say you are mak

Interestingly "You patch the issue and ship the patched library in your game" is not on the list. Comparing to popular game engine Unity, let's say you are making a game that uses time-travel dead-reckoning netcode and polls inputs at 60hz. So you'd like to poll inputs at 60hz even if the game is rendering at 20hz, and you'd like to send those inputs in UDP packets immediately, not up to 50ms later than you got them. You don't need to roll a d12, we already know what happens: you start waiting in June 2005 for the ability to poll inputs at 60hz while rendering the game at some other rate, occasionally posting about this issue on the official forums. You continue waiting for at least *17 years*. It's a good thing you didn't depend on an open-source library instead!

dkersten 4y ago
Isn’t Unity’s code available? Unreal’s is, at least. It’s not quite the same as having official support and you don’t have the same rights as in open source, but you can at least change the code and fix it yourself if you really need to (with the difficulty of understanding a complex codebase, but that’s the case in open source engines too)
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  A post about releasing the source of the editor from 2018 says "the main engine will remain proprietary for the foreseeable future."
  - dkersten 4y ago
    The other commenter answered it (that unity’s source costs money to get access to), but my comment wasn’t about whether it’s proprietary or not, but rather if the source is available/accessible. Unreal’s source code is on GitHub, but it’s still proprietary. You cannot redistribute it or anything like that.
- jwitthuhn 4y ago
  Unity is a lot more choosy about who gets their code than Unreal. To get the source you need to be in at least the $1800/seat/year tier and pay an additional cost that isn't specified. https://store.unity.com/index.php/compare-plans https://store.unity.com/index.php/compare-plans
ratww 4y ago
Sorta unrelated, but I see the existence of engines to also be sort of a problem for Open Source libraries too. They create sort of a maintenance bottleneck. In other areas where open source is more prevalent (like web dev), there will be virtually a guarantee that someone running into some long-lived issue within a library will try to patch and contribute back, or in the worst case fork it. Because the end users of frameworks/libraries often have the skills needed to patch those libraries. In Games, however, there's fewer and fewer true consumer of libraries, since everything go through engines, and there's a lot of consolidation going on. Also, the popular engines aren't targeted at programmers that could fix the libraries, quite the opposite. That puts a lot of pressure on library maintainers and engine maintainers, as they become the only people able to fix those deeper issues. Bevy of course is a bit lower-level, an others have source-available, but still...

dkersten 4y ago

Isn’t Unity’s code available? Unreal’s is, at least. It’s not quite the same as having official support and you don’t have the same rights as in open source, but you can at least change the code and fix it yourself if you really need to (with the difficulty of understanding a complex codebase, but that’s the case in open source engines too)

anonymoushn 4y ago
A post about releasing the source of the editor from 2018 says "the main engine will remain proprietary for the foreseeable future."
- dkersten 4y ago
  The other commenter answered it (that unity’s source costs money to get access to), but my comment wasn’t about whether it’s proprietary or not, but rather if the source is available/accessible. Unreal’s source code is on GitHub, but it’s still proprietary. You cannot redistribute it or anything like that.
jwitthuhn 4y ago
Unity is a lot more choosy about who gets their code than Unreal. To get the source you need to be in at least the $1800/seat/year tier and pay an additional cost that isn't specified. https://store.unity.com/index.php/compare-plans https://store.unity.com/index.php/compare-plans

ratww 4y ago

Sorta unrelated, but I see the existence of engines to also be sort of a problem for Open Source libraries too. They create sort of a maintenance bottleneck. In other areas where open source is more prevalent (like web dev), there will be virtually a guarantee that someone running into some long-lived issue within a library will try to patch and contribute back, or in the worst case fork it. Because the end users of frameworks/libraries often have the skills needed to patch those libraries. In Games, however, there's fewer and fewer true consumer of libraries, since everything go through engines, and there's a lot of consolidation going on. Also, the popular engines aren't targeted at programmers that could fix the libraries, quite the opposite. That puts a lot of pressure on library maintainers and engine maintainers, as they become the only people able to fix those deeper issues. Bevy of course is a bit lower-level, an others have source-available, but still...