3 ms·

I've worked on games before. We ported our game to havock between versions. That took 8 months for one dev. The code review was 3 weeks. Ripping ours out was a

I've worked on games before. We ported our game to havock between versions. That took 8 months for one dev. The code review was 3 weeks. Ripping ours out was a month by itself. There were several libraries like that. The sound system was similar and we had to upgrade it every game which was similar work to havock. Heck there was a really simple font to bitmap lib/utility we used and that would have taken several months to replace. A month to rip out. I moved us from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4 for our debugging UI and literally just removing all the calls to the old debugging UI system was something like 2 weeks my only goal there was to get it to not compile. Wiring up all 3,900 debug UI connection points to the engine with access to all the rest of the game engine library and having written parts of both systems in the engine and the debugging library and the new UI library still took me almost 2 weeks I did it with both systems working at the same time which was actually easier than doing a full rip out. The studio I worked at tried really hard not to use proprietary libraries and it was a big deal for us using havoc but we needed to they ended up going back for the next title. They also wrapped literally every library with shims to make it easier to Port but things like physics engines are just basically impossible to wrap fully as our sound engines and font libraries the implementation details leak into everywhere. The suggestion you're making is a very large amount of work probably on the level of several engineers for several years on a Triple-A title now you're talking like a million dollars for the company to open source it and locking up some good devs for a year or more. There's literally no economic trade off in doing that unless you can come up with a way to make one. Porting would be an okay economic trade off there.

torginus 3y ago
Thanks for taking your time to answer my suggestion in detail. I was just trying to suggest something very simple - just don't include the files that you don't have the rights to - so in your case just don't publish those font and physics library files. No need to completely rip out all references to it. The resulting code will be broken, but if the community cares enough, they can fix it up. I don't think this would be a huge effort to do - do you see any issues (legal or otherwise) with this approach?
- grogenaut 3y ago
  We did have our code mostly sorted into 3p and 1p... However I'm not a lawyer and not sure how the taint might leak up. I forget where Google/oracle landed on apis being copyright but havock ids and other concepts leak into your code everywhere. Heck even proprietary details might or algos. It would still be hard and the lawyers would be skeptical. You'd need a business case besides goodwill to get over those humps. I bet a ton of companies don't follow those best practices. And there's also the fact that you've now exposed yourself to litigation where some dev violated copyright of previous companies or libraries or whatever and put it in the wrong place or copied it. Before open sourcing you were fine. After you have essentially incriminated yourself. The doom/quake case is kinda an exception. In that you likely (I'm guessing) had Carmack who is a founder/owner, deeply understand the tech base, understands cost and estimates, likely understands licensing quite well, able to go do the work, but also able to make the cost benefit tradeoff and override objections in some cases. That's not common in many companies.

torginus 3y ago

Thanks for taking your time to answer my suggestion in detail. I was just trying to suggest something very simple - just don't include the files that you don't have the rights to - so in your case just don't publish those font and physics library files. No need to completely rip out all references to it. The resulting code will be broken, but if the community cares enough, they can fix it up. I don't think this would be a huge effort to do - do you see any issues (legal or otherwise) with this approach?

grogenaut 3y ago
We did have our code mostly sorted into 3p and 1p... However I'm not a lawyer and not sure how the taint might leak up. I forget where Google/oracle landed on apis being copyright but havock ids and other concepts leak into your code everywhere. Heck even proprietary details might or algos. It would still be hard and the lawyers would be skeptical. You'd need a business case besides goodwill to get over those humps. I bet a ton of companies don't follow those best practices. And there's also the fact that you've now exposed yourself to litigation where some dev violated copyright of previous companies or libraries or whatever and put it in the wrong place or copied it. Before open sourcing you were fine. After you have essentially incriminated yourself. The doom/quake case is kinda an exception. In that you likely (I'm guessing) had Carmack who is a founder/owner, deeply understand the tech base, understands cost and estimates, likely understands licensing quite well, able to go do the work, but also able to make the cost benefit tradeoff and override objections in some cases. That's not common in many companies.