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Free Unreal Engine Release Planned
Thanks to Beyond Unreal for pointing to an article revealing that Epic are planning a standalone, non-commercial release of the Unreal Engine. The previously un-noticed September email from Epic's Mark Rein reveals "...a free version of UT2003 but without any of the gaming content or code" is in the works, including a standalone executable and a full release of Epic's Unreal toolset. According to Rein, "The runtime will be a free download, and free to use for non-commercial and educational use", and commercial licenses for this forthcoming release are also possible, with limited Epic support, and "...will [cost] considerably less than the US$350,000+ we charge for [an Unreal engine license]."
They don't stand to loose much as 2003 is already an "old" engine. On the other hand if lots and lots of excellent fanmade material is made freely available then will people still buy the latest offcial engine/game just because it sports a few more polys?
/me slaps himself. Silly of course they will.
For modders does this however make any difference? After all they only get the engine NOT the code to the engine so they can't made supermods. So all this really means is that they can release standalone mods. No requirement for people to own the game. Good for players.
Considering there is no obvious money angle that I can see I can only say that this is incredibly nice of them to do. Perhaps they want to create more content creators so they can then hire the best for commercial games?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
God what a load of moaning minnies. Some people are only able to interpret anything in terms of how it relates to Open source. Ever heard of orthogonality?
Many people use the Unreal engine for non-gaming purposes - the scripting language that comes with it is about the best around and having a version without the game-specific content will be really useful.
The "get the gamers onside" model has been around for years, now Epic are doing the same with the architects, scientists, designers and so on. Good on em, I hope the miserable competition get off their butts and make something a bit better than feggin' Superscape. And maybe a few projects will save a bit of money they might have unwittingly blown on SGI.
Wouldnt an opensource engine be better for non-educational engines? Just wondering if someone should use a commerical engine with all the ties to the license. How does it compare to Crystal Space which runs on many platforms, and has a large amount of developers?
Havnt read the guidelines, just the little article, but wonder what restrictions could make a difference. Maybe you might want to take the game retail later, do you then need to spring 350,000 bux for a license?