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Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
anomnomnomymous writes "Just a week after Unity announced its engine is now available for free to indie users, Epic Games has revealed a free version of its popular Unreal Engine technology. Called the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), it is a free edition of UE3 that allows community, modder and indie users more access to the engine's features and is available for all. Epic said game developers, students, hobbyists, researchers, creators of 3D visualizations and simulations plus digital filmmakers can all take advantage of the UDK for non-commercial use. The UDK site also offers detailed product features, technical documentation, commercial licensing terms and support resources."
Here is a link to the official press release from the Epic site: Epic Games Announces the Unreal Development Kit, Powered by Unreal Engine 3.
Don't think of it as a flame, more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage.
Well I guess if your goal is to GPL engine then ok. However in general that isn't the goal of a company, they want to make money so they can do things like pay their employees to develop more software. So how have licensing the engines gone? Well Unreal Engine 3, which was released after iD Tech 4, has about 150 games out using it. iD Tech 4? 7 games.
So I'd say Epic has been pretty successful at their primary goal of making a good engine that people wish to license for designing games.
GPL is a terrible license for a game engine if you plan to have a multi-player mode, because releasing the code to your game makes it really easy to make cheats.
No. Bad design makes it really easy to make cheats. A server naive enough to trust the clients makes it really easy to make cheats. A well designed multiplayer game is no easier to cheat in with or without the source code. If releasing the source code makes it easier to cheat, the game was poorly designed. Conversely, if a developer knows the source code will be available, they may be motivated to do the job right. Since people can make cheats for a poorly designed game anyway, regardless of whether you release the source code or not, a game that releases the source code and is designed to be secure anyway is certainly going to be harder to make cheats for than games which mistakenly think if they don't release the source code, their game will be more secure, a fact proven wrong again and again and again.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
No. Bad design makes it really easy to make cheats. A server naive enough to trust the clients makes it really easy to make cheats. A well designed multiplayer game is no easier to cheat in with or without the source code. If releasing the source code makes it easier to cheat, the game was poorly designed. Conversely, if a developer knows the source code will be available, they may be motivated to do the job right. Since people can make cheats for a poorly designed game anyway, regardless of whether you release the source code or not, a game that releases the source code and is designed to be secure anyway is certainly going to be harder to make cheats for than games which mistakenly think if they don't release the source code, their game will be more secure, a fact proven wrong again and again and again.
The same thing was said by open source supporters when Quake 1 source code was released and cheating went rampant. It's, of course, absolutely true, if you desing so that automating your input doesn't give you an advantage, and so that having the information that your RAM hides doesn't give you an advantage, then there's no cheating problem! The catch? This involves adding auto aim into a FPS game and not hiding players behind walls, which would make them flicker on sight, degrading severely the gaming experience. And yes, open source supporters said this. I'm quoting from here, for example: http://catb.org/esr/writings/quake-cheats.html
If Quake had been designed to be open-source from the beginning, the performance hack that makes see-around-corners possible could never have been considered and either the design wouldn't have depended on millisecond packet timing at all, or aim-bot recognition would have been built in to the server from the beginning.
Yeah, that would be really fun. Carmack himself, the guy that gave you the GPL'd quake code said that the only solution to the cheating problem is a little closed source program that verifies the binaries, i.e: closed source.