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> The problem I have is: where are all the GPL'ed games? All the id engines have gone GPL. Ogre3d is a popular engine base. A lot of game studios use some der
by zanny 14y ago
> The problem I have is: where are all the GPL'ed games?
All the id engines have gone GPL. Ogre3d is a popular engine base.
A lot of game studios use some derivative of Unreal 3, which Epic will never GPL because they make money selling rights to it.
Most other engines, even beyond that, will have some proprietary inclusions that they don't hold licenses over, such as with the JK launch.
The lack of community FOSS game engine projects from the ground up is strange to me. It seems it would make a lot of sense for major industry players to band together and develop a really rock solid engine in the FOSS world to minimize the costs of engine development, even if in the short term they lose the benefit of being able to license their engine or profit off specialized graphics or gameplay tech they put in it.
- wtallis 14y agoI suspect the biggest reason this hasn't happened is that the big studios want engines that can also target consoles, which don't have publicly available SDKs. It would be hard for a project to ensure that they weren't constantly breaking the console ports when they might not even be able to run nightly builds and share the logs publicly. And, of course, software patents are a constant threat.
- james4k 14y agoAside from third party licensing for middleware like Bink, Scaleform, Havok, console APIs, etc. I'd guess some if it has to do with the constant competition over graphics technology that's only just started to slow down in the last couple years, and perhaps that will be picking up again with the next-gen consoles. I completely agree, though. There is a complete lack of solid open-source game software.