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Jet3d Game Engine
Mark Komus writes: "A co-worker just pointed me to this great looking new game engine, called Jet3d. From what I gathered from the license it is available freely, source included, to anyone that wants it on the condition that you must release any source code changes you make along with any product you produce with it. You can also release a product with unmodified binaries they provide, or you can pay to license the engine and you get to keep your modified source to yourself." Wow! This looks sweet!
Jet3D was first called "Genesis" but they sold that 3D engine to some company and then started anew under the name "Jet3D" It's not that bad of a graphics engine considering it's free. It could be better though... and hopefully it will be.
The license looked like a standard NPL-ish thing until I got to this clause:
That's somewhat evil. Apparently you can change it and use it in your product as long as you give them back the changes, and keep your product open source. Otherwise, you must negotiate an agreement with them (if you want to keep it closed source)... So you could make a Linux version of this or whatnot, I'm guessing, but everyone would still be bound by the original license agreement? Might as well just write a 3D engine from scratch, or build off of whatever's out there. (id?)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, the screenshots look pretty...
Quake I is a GPL engine..
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part of it still works http://apps.cyrix.com/, course all the pics from the www. are broken.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I think starting with the closed team worked well, because it got it off the ground and released in a very organized and clean fashion. Then when the source was opened, a huge number of requested features started getting put in there. There's a BeOS port (it's slow, though), and some people are supposedly working on a Linux port. There's also an OpenGL driver somewhere around there.
The major caveat I found when working with it was that it's (IMO) poorly documented. Some people are working on docs, but I really haven't seen anything but stuff generated from symbols (which I could easily look in the headers for). I got too frustrated trying to figure out initialization order for the components. Like working with DirectX without the help reference. =p
I love their editor, though. Very nice, and a huge improvement over the one they had for Genesis. I'm still figuring out Crystal Space's MazeD.
This engine doesn't impress me much at all. The Genesis 3D engine is like the Unreal engine with better shadowing and alpha stippling. To heck with flat structures, give me curved structures a la Q3A. Curved structures and mirroring are probably the two most important things (graphically) that most games today seriously lack. Curved character models is a bit out of the question (for now) but good curved structures add a good deal of realistic form to things. If you're running through a network of sewers or charging a castle wall it looks much better if the sides of the sewer or the wall has a real curve, it looks MUCH more realistic. Mirrors are also something you see in real life that would make games more visually appealing, jumping into a pool of water and have it reflect your character and anything else near it would be just awesome to see. Genesis 3D doesn't appear to provide these, at least not from all of the screenshots I've seen. Maybe someone can convince id to license the Q3A engine out so we can see some more good looking games. Maybe someone can talk to Bungie too...
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Why not? Which of the following four definitions of Free Software taken from the FSF pages, does this license not meet?
1) freedom to use the software for any purpose
2) freedom to copy and redistribute the software
3) freedom to modify the software
4) freedom to distribute the modifications
Any license that meets the OSD is also free software.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Can you please give your opinion on this?
Why do you need someone else's opinion? Think for yourself. Read the license and read the OSS definition and the Free Software definition and make your own conclusion. You don't need someone else to tell you your opinion.
I'm leaning towards the opinion that it fails the GPL test
GPL test? What GPL test? Why should any other license be tested against another?
I would hazard a guess that if such a test were found, every license except the GPL (and the LGPL which can convert into GPL) would fail.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Under the GPL, if you start a GPL'd product and someone else contributes to it, you no longer have the right to re-license it
Sorry, bud. The copyright holder can relicense their stuff however they want. If you contribute code to gcc, it is no longer yours, it belongs to the FSF. You have no sayso over it anymore. If you submit a contribution with the proviso that you keep the copyright to it, they will reject it, and rightfully so. The law specifically states that any single holder of copyright can relicense the whole without permission from the others. So keep the copyright holders to one, or create a legal entity as an umbrella.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
First off, the "obnoxious advertising clause", a phrase with originated with RMS also was included with BSD. And RMS called the BSDL a free license (he thought it was *too* free).
Second, there's a lot of free software licenses that don't allow me the permission to modify any way I like. The GPL is one of these. There are numerous conditions within the GPL that I must follow before I can modify GPL code.
The FSF definitions of Free Software no not include the terms "unconditional and absolute freedom". If you're bitching that the license in question does not give you unconditional permissions, why not bitch at other licenses that don't either, like the GPL, the LGPL, the AL, the QPL, the MPL, etc.
Yes, it is problematic that you can't use the Jet3D engine in a web browser. But it's also problematic that you can't use the emacs editing engine within KDevelop. The Jet3d license is discriminatory towards the application it is used in while the GPL is discriminatory towards the library it is linked to. I don't see much difference between the two. When one favors the unrestricted licenses of MIT and BSD, all the restricted licenses start looking the same.
"But you don't understand!" thou protesteth, "They baptize by sprinkling and not by immersion, and will surely go to hell!"
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Jeez, people are tripping over themselves to give the things away. You wouldn't want be relying on this to pay the rent, would you?
:)
Obligatory Crystal Space link.
Commentary on all this vs LithTech (USD250,000 I understand), UnrealEngine (USD Loads), and Quake 3 engine (I dread to think how much) would be appreciated.
Oh! And another. So many engines, so little time.
Dave
BTW, this got rejected - is Cyrix's website still broken?
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
It doesn't support OpenGL as far as I see.
Only Glide and Direct3d.
This means that cross-plattform development
is much more difficult.
We have Glide on Linux, but then the game
would only be able to run with Voodoo-cards.
The Quake2 engine is GPL isn't it?
And the Crystal Space engine, also looks good.
I have a feeling that they didn't port it to Linux in hopes that the Linux community would. The licnesing appears to be be extremely close to the GPL, based on this their thoughts are probably along the lines of...
"Lets releas a 3D graphics engine for the more popular gaming platform, Windbloz, open up the source and reep the benifits of the open community"
Oh, I wish more companies would adopt this mentality. I wouldn't mind doing the work my self!
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
There are many open source 3D game engines out there, why is this the only one which gets a headline? Mine is called World Foundry, and can be found at www.worldfoundry.org. The engine runs on windows and linux. We are looking for developers to help port the asset production pathway from windows to linux, email me if you are interested. Physics, scripting, dynamic asset loading, C++, very general design with few assumptions about type of game, blah, blah, blah. ;-)
Kevin Seghetti: kts@tenetti.org, HTTP: www.tenetti.org GPG key: http://tenetti.org/phpwiki/index.php/KevinSeghett
I think it would be cool to have a 3D game engine that's open source, but allows people to use it for commercial products, provided they release any modified engine code. (not necessarily the whole game/whatever) That way, companies could cut out the engine dev time, and just start with the latest stable engine release. We'd probably all be better off, since we'd have a standard (probably cross-platform) engine, that hasn't been rushed to market full of bugs.
Umm... no... actually, when you contribute code to GCC, you keep the copyright on the code you wrote. You give the code to them copyrighted by yourself, but licensed under the GPL. This is VERY important for obvious reasons.
If you don't believe me, check /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/3c501.c. Notice that it is copyright 1993 by none other than the NSA. Last I checked, Linus Torvalds was NOT the director of the NSA, and never was, but I could be wrong. If you look around, you'll notice many other copyright holders as well.
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It would seem, and I'm completely guessing here, that if you modified the code heavily, then any updated code they released wouldn't integrate into your completed application. Thereby granting you release from said obligation. Honestly, they can't expect you to break your work just to keep up to date.
Going with that thought, I can only hope that they don't ask that you make "reasonable efforts" to include the newest code in your next releases, and am terrified that they would request you make "reasonable efforts" to take the updated code, and create patches to work with your pre-existing application. Certainly, it's a nice thing to increase functionality and usability after the initial sale, but forcing you to do it doesn't seem right.
Again, I don't know. IANAGL, and don't claim to be. I have no insight to this situation other than what my own sleep-addled brain has supplied.
Anyone else have any thoughts?
Well... looking through the link, there doesn't appear to be a linux version of this, but since it's open source someone is bound to try to port it. Forgot to look closely though, is it "open source" or just "source available"? Is there a difference?
Aftershock is also open source and does quake3arena rendering. Ok, it's not totally finished but therefor the source is open in it's own CVS.
http://www.planetquake.com/aftershock
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Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
My company looked at using first the Genesis 3D engine (http://www.genesis3d.com) and then the Jet3D engine for the FPS we are working on. The engine has potential, but as others have commented, there is no linux support, and from the examination of the source tree I saw it does not look to be a quick and dirty port project. It may well be a detailed and well supported engine in a few years, but in the last 6 months that ive been watching it has changed from little to none at all. Of course Id have to agree with the previous comment, ID (http://www.idsoftware.com) has them beat by far, and you can work in linux on that one!
pGina, http://www.xpasystems.com - Making the big boys play nice.
If you use a highly modified version of their engine and distribute with source, you're covered until they release a new version. If your changes aren't compatible with theirs, it becomes a question of who defines what reasonable efforts are. Of course, one always has the option of actually buying a license to the code -- which, if you're selling a product that uses the library, makes sense and is even the right thing to do.
This provision gives them a pretty big stick in getting commercial users of the engine to cough up some cash, but depending on their benevolence, may allow non-commercial developers some leeway.
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"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
Umm... No, it is not certifiable open source. The reason being that when you contribute to thier product, you give them special rights over you code that no one else gets, including yourself. Under the GPL, if you start a GPL'd product and someone else contributes to it, you no longer have the right to re-license it, unless you remove everything that they added. Very different. The NPL had this problem originally, and it didn't pass because of it. That is why they created the MPL.
The must update clients thing effectively allows them to end the open source version at any time. They say that future versions may be under a different license. So, they decide they have taken advantage of the community enough, they release new version without source code, you can't use old version anymore. I doubt that could pass as OSI certified.
I really hate it when people reply incorrectly to my posts and get moderated up.
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From the license:
So, they can take all your enhancements, relicense them, and sell them, but you can't. There are several other annoying conditions as well, like the "you must display our logo" condition and the "when we release new versions, you must update your clients" condition.
This is not open source. How did it get on Source Forge?
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Time for a shameless plug :-)
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:-)
Have a look at Crystal Space. This is an Open Source and portable 3D Engine that runs on Linux, Windows, BeOS, DOS, OS/2, FreeBSD, SGI, Solaris, Macintosh, OpenStep, NextStep, MacOS/X,
It supports OpenGL, Direct3D, Glide, and software rendering. Some of the features are dynamic and static colored lights with soft shadows, curved surfaces, volumetric fog, halos, ROAM landscape engine, portals, octree/BSP-tree/c-buffer rendering, hardware accelerated transform support, triangle meshes with LOD and skeletal or frame based animation,
It is written in C++. Is very modular and very Open Source. Up to 90 people have already contributed to it. You can too
By the way, we're also hosted at SourceForge and we're the second most active projec there. The main site for CS is http://crystal.linuxgames.com
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
- is a quantification of "Exceptionally fast rendering". Eye candy and advanced physics are all well and good, but if the engine pulls 20 fps with a 1000 poly scene on a decent system, forget about it.
On a slightly different tack, I'm always mystified about how many people get their panties in a wad about this or that free 3D engine. People, if having a working 3D engine was even 25% of the work of game creation, Daikatana 2 would have hit the shelves yesterday. Getting a team of designers, writers, artists, architects (i.e. mappers), and programmers of the right talent, and keeping them focused on task and happy has always been a bigger burden by far. How Epic pulled it off for what, 3, 4 years for a single game has always impressed me a lot more than Unreal ever did. As a rule, creative vision is the single most precious commodity in the developer community currently, and it's likely to stay that way. There's a lot more chaff out there than wheat.
Damn, those stills are pretty, though.
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Trade Wars Lives
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I was browsing the features list and notably, there is no OpenGL support. It says it supports Direct3D and Glide, but there's no mention of Linux.
:)
Also, there doesn't appear to be any NURBS support in the renderer. 3D sound positioning is a nice touch but once again... probably Win32 / DirectSound. If it has a software 3D sound capability then that's probably better for Linux anyhow. I'll have to take a look at the CVS repository and get a better feel for it because the features list leaves me with more questions than answers
On the bright side, considering their licensing policy, I would expect people to add in some of these features / portability sooner or later.
Best regards,
SEAL