In the Age of Free AAA Game Engines, Where Does Our Open Source Engine Stand?

New submitter erlend_sh writes The game development industry just got hit by a tidalwave of free: Unity 5, Unreal Engine 4 and Source 2 all give away their flagship product for free now. They're all different brands of 'free,' but who cares? The average game developer certainly won't. Which left us wondering: Are hobbyist-run open source game engines like jMonkeyEngine still relevant? From the linked article: This just in: Physically Based Rendering isn’t dark magic, cross platform publishing is not the thing of fairy tales, and a solid asset pipeline is not exclusive to a million dollar budget. They’re not easy; faaar from it. But as long as we can show that these things can be accomplished by a part-time hobbyist just for the heck of it, the end user gets a fair price (i.e. free!), and our fellow hardcore misfits will continue trying to solve the most difficult problems the industry has to offer. ... If this exciting new thing called “free” keeps going in the right direction, everyone still in the race gets a leg up.

Comments

what problem is your product trying to solve?

[alen]

the Pro products have support departments and support for assets and other additions to their products. when a game has a 2-3 year dev time your product stands out by making it easy for devs to cut their time to market and save money

no one cares if it's open source or hobbyist made, they care about having their devs who cost $200,000 or more per year EACH spend less time making games

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[Mashiki]

Well that's easy, they want 18 competing engines and standards. Queueueueueueue up xkcd joke here.

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so many misconceptions here. Firstly, devs don't cost $200K each. Almost no game developers earn that level of income. $85K is a good mid-level wage, and unless you own the company you're unlikely to ever pass $150K. Especially now there's no real demand for the top-level guys, because you're outsourcing all the hard stuff to Epic (and they're not even doing that good a job).

Secondly, of course they care if it's open source. This is why Unity will never be used to make a true AAA game. There's no source. UE4's source offering is absolutely key to acceptance. You can't cut time to market by using closed-source software that you can't fix. Those (cough) $200K developers are earning that level of income because they can fix shit, any shit, whatever shit comes up. You think time to market is improved by having them debug the assembly code?

I mean, yes, you kind of get it, but your details are so far off that your getting it is equivalent to misleading everyone as to what it is, and your conclusion is simply incorrect.

The problem jMonkeyEngine has isn't that it's competing with free, it's that nobody in the industry has ever fucking heard of it. And the reason nobody's heard of it is probably because it's shit. You don't make assets with Blender (contrary to popular belief, asset creation is 80% of project budget) and you don't make maintainable project code by linking obscure WIP libraries. The "hobbyist" moniker certainly isn't going to help them here. But if there was some F/OSS engine which was as good as Unreal - and that's a 200-man-year uphill struggle - then everyone would use it, and UE4 would die (at last).

Same with Blender, though. If they got it as good as Maya, people would stop using Maya. The problem is, they haven't.

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[Bengie]

Depending on several variables, an employee costs about 30%-100% more than their salary.

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[schlachter]

what do game devs make? a few years back, friends of mine at EA were making around $80K/yr although they were working 60+ hrs/wk.

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[west]

$80K/yr? With presumably the elite skills and technological flexibility you need along with incredibly bad hours?

With that level (none) of job security?

Boy, am I glad I never got suckered into the game industry. Scary!

(Unless that's what they're paying right out of school.)

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[Creepy]

I got ~$35k (in Minnesota, making straight to Wal-Mart cheapie games) at one employer while still in school and $45k (in California making A list games) at another in 1996 straight out of school. $45000 is about $65000 today, adjusted for inflation. Pay in the industry has gone up way faster than inflation, so it would not surprise me if $80k/year was starting in California.

And yeah, crappy hours doesn't even begin to address it - we literally lived off of pizza and cola in the office during crunch. I went home to shower and water the plants I think twice during the final week and that was the only time I spent at home that week (they set up cots for us in the office, and that is where I slept).

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly true.

The term "open source" tends to run along the same lines as "libre source", which means "nobody is allowed to close it", but the GNU license effectively makes it impossible to make a AAA game with it. So irony is that nobody is willing to make a game with an open-source engine unless it's a strict PD or BSD variant that allows the developer to "close" the game engine to prevent people from ripping it apart to make their wiki's and gamefaq's with it.

This is why stuff like Ren'py is moderately popular to play with, but the target platform it would be the best to use on (tablets and game consoles) is impossible due to the underlying licenses of the engine.

Something like Unity is unfortunately a better choice, but these "3D" game engines are a huge codebloat full of feature-creep that prevents making tiny "32MB" size games that people can download in a few minutes over cellular. No games made with Unity are often in the half-GB range, and completely unusable on most mobile devices, because most mobile devices have weak GPU capabilities. (Indeed, look at any Unity game on an Android device and it's somewhere between PS1 and PS2 quality, often entirely because the weakest GPU (typically MALI) is used in all the cheapest and most common Android devices, and the PowerVR cores are only in the high end parts)

There is still "room" for a scaleable open source engine, one that utilizes the 3D features correctly for 2D style games (think Angry Birds) without the codebloat and overhead of having a "plugin" for every single thing. Really, there is room for being able to just compile the game without so many frameworks and libraries being included because they "might" be used in other games but will never be used in yours.

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[west]

Well, $80K right out of school for a grueling job (and presumably top students) isn't insanely bad, although a choice I'd personally have avoided.

I was thinking $80K for 10+ years experience, which is insanely bad. (Although with those hours, perhaps after 10 years, there's only a a burned out husk left :-))

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

Secondly, of course they care if it's open source. This is why Unity will never be used to make a true AAA game. There's no source.

Open source doesn't mean what you think it does. Nobody in the industry making AAA games cares if it's open source, they care if the engine is good, if the tools are good, and if they can license the engine source code. Oh, yeah. Unity does license the source code to their engine. No, if you're making the next Fappy Bird, they're not going to license it to you.

From Unity's FAQ:

We license Unity source code on a per-case and per-title basis via special arrangements made by our business development team. As this can be quite expensive, we do not generally license source code to smaller operations, educational institutions, nor to companies in countries which do not have adequate legal intellectual property protection.

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[tlhIngan]

$80K/yr? With presumably the elite skills and technological flexibility you need along with incredibly bad hours?

With that level (none) of job security?

Boy, am I glad I never got suckered into the game industry. Scary!

(Unless that's what they're paying right out of school.)

Supply >>> Demand.

That's generally considered good pay, too, because they know if you quit, there are 10 people waiting by the door for your spot.

Video games are a terrible business - you're spending years on a product that has no future - once the game is released, other than small amounts of DLC, it's done. Abandon it and begin afresh on a new codebase (even if it's for a sequel). There's no maintenance, future versions or anything for all but a handful of games.

And then there's the generation growing up with video games. I mean, the urge to get into the video games industry is fairly strong, given the appeal of modern video games and "how cool it is to have a job involving video games". I mean, think what a job description for a QA tester would sound like - "you play video games all day!" Hot damn, your parents have always said to hit the books instead of playing Call of Warfare for 8 hours a day to be able to get a job, and they make jobs where you do nothing but play video games?

Similar thinking goes towards "eSports" as well.

The video game industry is very seductive, the heads of video game companies know it, and they know they have a vast pool of those they can abuse because, well, "videogames!".

Try to drum up excitement on say, writing tax software, or writing an accounting program. Yeah.

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[schlachter]

Well, $80K right out of school for a grueling job (and presumably top students) isn't insanely bad

It's actually insanely good. $80K/yr would be WELL above average for just out of school.

These were people around 30 yrs old with 5-7 yrs of experience and MS degrees.

They weren't top students/coders, but they were competent enough to get hired by EA.

When thinking about salaries, I think people need to separate out what top hires make in Silicon Valley from most people who are more average and not living in SF.

$60K/yr out of school would be pretty solid/good for an average university CS grad in a random town. In SF it would be rough.

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[west]

It's actually insanely good. $80K/yr would be WELL above average for just out of school.

I'll admit that's a really good income (out of school) for a general CS job, but for a job that's 80 hours/week? That's like oil-rig platform hours (except the oil rig sends you home every so often), in which case oil-rig platform pay would be expected.

You are absolutely right about where you live making a *huge* difference in what's reasonable. I imagine there are parts of the country in which $80K/year would allow you to purchase a house some day.

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

The only open source game engines that are worth anything are ones that began life as commercial products, such as the id Tech and Torque 3D engines.

"Are hobbyist-run open source game engines like jMonkeyEngine still relevant?" is such a ridiculous and pretentious question because nobody uses whatever jMonkeybuttfuckEngine is. I've certainly never heard of it before and I am a long time game developer.

Re:what problem is your product trying to solve?

[schlachter]

Yeah, I agree about the hours. I wouldn't want that job.

Where I am, there are plenty of older but decent middle class homes for $250K. I would imagine new CS grads are making around $50K to $80K in my area.

never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[iggymanz]

looked it up, never heard of any the jMonkeyEngine based games or engine. It's not relevant, developers wasted their life

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[iggymanz]

The question of relevance was asked in the summary, I merely answered it based on impact to gaming community. They are the arbiters, for gaming open source projects

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[hairyfeet]

Why is this marked troll? Has ANYBODY HERE heard of this thing before this article?....crickets....yeah, thought so.

I'll get lots of FOSSie hate but fuck it, truth is truth...take away the "free as in beer" sales pitch? YOU BE FUCKED, your support is lousy, docs are terrible, if you even have any docs instead of "to do" place holders, its like they translate "free" to be "lazy". What you end up with is the Gimp, which isn't even comparable with Corel Draw from 5 years ago much less Photoshop.

This is why I think the future has to be scary as hell for the FLOSS crowd because it looks like most of proprietary is going to a "make it on the back end" kinda deal which makes free as in beer? Free as in worthless. I mean who is gonna care about jumping through the hoops and dealing with the bullshit of a Linux desktop if they can get the latest Windows for $20 or even free? Who is gonna want to deal with all the fiddling and crap from some 'jMonkeyChunky' (BTW let me guess, the j is Java or JavaScript...yes? Ugh) if they can use the latest Unreal or Source with zero costs upfront? Very damned few people, that's who.

Of course this may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, as it might finally kill the 50 million "me too!" apps in FLOSS and leave only those that are dedicated to making something really truly great, as opposed to now where you got tons just shitting out half baked crap to get a little FOSS cred.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[elfprince13]

You didn't wait for the crickets ;) There are quite a few free engines on the market that predate the Unity/UE show, and if you've spent any time in the area you know the landscape pretty well. jME, Panda, Torque, Irrlicht, OGRE,....

Your post says "I don't know anything about game development, but I've got this sweet anti-F/OSS rant I've been waiting to post for a while"

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when Irrlicht was hyped to destroy everything because of a stencil shadow system.

and that Crystal Space thing.


There is Godot and Darkplaces at least. The issue with them all are all documentation-related, and perhaps no-killer-app for any of them. And then there's the issue of open source game designers that believe switching engines and deprecating APIs will make a game modern and better than ever.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Ambassador Kosh]

Some things are free and done very well like OpenMP and MPI however for many other tools the free version is just not as good.

I have been a professional python developer for about 10 years now but when writing matrix based simulations and doing data visualization numpy, scipy and matplotlib are not viable competition to MATLAB.

Most free software projects have HORRIBLE documentation and epicly horribly defaults. The problem is that the people that know how to change these things are also too busy doing other work. Yes I do have the skills to fix many parts of matplotlib and numpy but I can also just use MATLAB and get my work done.

Since the work I do is on writing computing simulations for drug manufacturing the more time it takes me to solve a problem the more people DIE. I like free software a lot and have used it for a very long time but I am passed the point of caring much about the license or the cost of the software.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[jsveiga]

Even on the desktop I doubt that lots of people choose Linux because of the price of the OS.
It's security, flexibility, stability, availability of free tools, etc.
Most hardware come with Windows preinstalled, yet some people choose to wipe it out or dual-boot Linux although their Windows is already paid for.
My (not computer person) wifehas been using Linux for more than 10 years at home, and she is amused when relatives complain about their troubles with ad/malware, bsods, forced upgrades that render the computer unbootable, etc. She does not want Windows, even if she's paid to have it.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Anonymous Coward]

What about open source software from a reproducible research point of view? Don't you think it's important that everyone can look under the hood of the scientist tools you're using?

About MATLAB: I know a world renowned statistician who ones wrote a statistics toolbox for MATLAB that was way better than the one you could buy from MathWorks. This is around 2000. He submitted it to their site for third party toolboxes. It was very popular. It was taken down because it was competing too well with their toolbox (don't know what the official reason was). Now he's a master contributor to R. I jumped the ship for similar reasons (unaware of this story at the time).

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Anonymous Coward]

but I've got this sweet anti-F/OSS rant I've been waiting to post

Don't be silly, hairyfeet would never wait an appreciable amount of time before posting an anti-FOSS rant.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

That "some people" is down to less than 1%. The only way it gets to even 1.34% is because of chromebooks. This is down from a peak of about 2% "way back when" - when everyone, including myself, still believed in the possibility of a "year of the linux desktop."

Many of us have just given up due to distro-hopping fatigue.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[cheesybagel]

Well duh. You are comparing numerical libraries for Python to what's basically an IDE with its own language. Try R instead.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[jsveiga]

So?
I was answering to "I mean who is gonna care about jumping through the hoops and dealing with the bullshit of a Linux desktop if they can get the latest Windows for $20 or even free?", meaning that most people who "jump through the hoops" do not do it because Linux is free and Windows is not, which the comment implied. If it is 1% or 90% was not the point. The reason for doing it was.
Yes, Linux fares better in servers - I have 5 of them at work, and my wife would never have switched, nor have been able to keep Linux up and running if she hadn't married a Unix sysadmin, but the point is, those (1, 0.1, 0.001%, I don't care) who choose Linux mostly do not do it because of the price.
If you, or most people, got dissapointed because your distros are not going where you wanted them to go, too bad (really, I do think it is bad. I loved Symbian, but it was killed by bad decisions).
Yet some people have true reasons for using Linux on the desktop, and implying that they are just being cheap is kind of dull.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Anonymous Coward]

If bsods are still a concern I can understand why she's been running linux for 10 years. You might consider buying hardware produced after the Mesozoic era.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

It's a slashvertisement submitted by the guy doing the jMonkeyEngine. The focus seems to be on price. "The price of everything and the value of nothing" comes to mind.

If you don't want to go the subscription route, you can download Unit5 5 Personal for free, and then buy the Pro version for a single payment of $1,500.00 once you exceed $100,000 per year of revenue. Future upgrades are half price. Sounds like a very fair offer.

Anyway, I'm downloading Unity to give it a look-see. Just 'cuz.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[elfprince13]

I was damn happy with Torque, but then they went through a bunch of mismanagement with InstantAction and then when they recovered, put money into good documentation but not into maintaining OS X compatibility and I split. Nothing I've looked at since then has hit the right combination of cross-platform, having solid networked physics, and allowing me to hack hardware-instancing support into the graphics pipeline (or supporting it out of the box in the closed-source cases).

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Web surfers dont agree with your 1% goal. They leave the desktop computers and use mobile computers today.
Windows is down to 55% of the net surfers. The winner is Linux.

20% of the webpages on Internet are today served to client computers running the Linux kernel.

Thats mostly because of Android. Another 20% are using an Apple operating system.

In 5 years, client computors running a Linux kernel will surf on more web pages then Windows machines.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[murdocj]

So this is the year of Linux on the desktop?

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

nor have been able to keep Linux up and running if she hadn't married a Unix sysadmin

And this is why there will can't have nice things from open source. Seriously, after wasting a few decades trying to get people to use linux, it's not worth it. Too darned fragmented, too many "home user" tools that are poor clones of the real thing, etc.

Also, linux users ARE cheap. Look at what happened to Loki Games - nothing has changed.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

Don't forget that Android can fairly easily swap out linux for FreeBSD if and when. Linux isn't the winner - google is.

Also, because of the fragmentation and other issues (systemd, etc), people are taking another look at FreeBSD. Linux is just too much of a hassle. I'll probably stick it on a USB key sometime in the future to run on an older laptop, because linux is now just too much politics / hassle / whatever.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

No, but considering that Apple has put an open source operating system (FreeBSD) on more desktops than linux ever will, maybe 5 - 10 years from now it'll be the year of the FreeBSD desktop :-) (and no, I have no plans of buying an Apple - I can't stand Darwin)

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Billly Gates]

I think software by nerds is for nerds.

Not Joes. Apache, linux, freebsd, samba, cordova, openssl, and others are invaluable but are for developers.

Ceos make stuff for people in the private sector. A nerd won't get the colors or calibration right for the gimp as he is not a ceos who speaks with customers or a photographer. Many startups for from those specialized in a field who know a little programing and a guy from work who does code as a partner. Jobs did with Wazchniak. The Open SourceCPU is no Apple as a result.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Billly Gates]

Linux is not Andriod. Users do not know what a kernel is or care.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Paradise Pete]

And that is the only measure of, as you put it, "wasting" one's life? I've never written any program that didn't teach me something, and I've been doing it since 1981.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[serviscope_minor]

Also, linux users ARE cheap. Look at what happened to Loki Games - nothing has changed.

EagleCAD make their not very cheap EDA tools for Linux. I knwo this because I have a copy, and it's native, not Wine or anything. Apparently it's worth their while to do so.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[serviscope_minor]

Thats mostly because of Android.

And this is why, yet again, that after years of pissing and whining from the internet, RMS was right again.

The reason he calls it GNU/Linux, not Linux is not out o some jealousy (as people complained), but because without that qualifier this confusion happens. Android is not GNU/Linux and is nothing like what people actually mean when they talk about "Linux". When referred to as an OS, "Linux" really means GNU/Linux.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Simon Brooke]

jMonkeyEngine has been around for years, and is pretty good. It's the engine I use for choice - and yes, I do also have Unity. If you don't know anything about game engines, don't post your ignorance!

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[jsveiga]

Dang, just realized I originally replied to a Troll.

Ok, you won. All Linux users are cheap. I only keep using Linux not because it is safer, easier to maintain (for me), needs less hardware power to run, does not turn the GUI upside down on every release, nor because it does everything my wife needs done. It's because I don't want to pay for Windows (no, wait, it came with Windows from Dell, no option to refuse it - darn, I didn't NEED Linux!)

Few home users would be able to maintain Windows sane for almost 10 years without the help of someone with higher expertise (oh, right, not being cheap, they should scrap their PC and buy a fresh one with a clean Windows once a year).

My wife doesn't know what distro fragmentation is. There are too many religions; that's no reason for going jihad nor being atheist (it's one of the reasons for being agnostic though, which is quite different).

The only "tool" my wife (and lots of users) care about is a browser. Crome and Firefox are pretty good "clones" of their windows counterpars. She browses the web, does webmail, youtube and lots of home banking. She doesn't want Windows although she has a license paid for.

People are different, and have different needs. "I'm tired and disappointed with Linux/Open Source because of this and that" are civilized arguments. "Nothing nice can come from Open Source" and "Linux users are cheap" means I'm wasting time feeding trolls. Bye.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Simon Brooke]

I think software by nerds is for nerds.

Not Joes. Apache, linux, freebsd, samba, cordova, openssl, and others are invaluable but are for developers.

Exactly. And the people who write games are necessarily nerds. So the fact the jMonkeyEngine is build by and used by nerds is just fine - non-nerds do not have the skills to create games.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[mjgday]

>

Most free software projects have HORRIBLE documentation and epicly horribly defaults. The problem is that the people that know how to change these things are also too busy doing other work. Yes I do have the skills to fix many parts of matplotlib and numpy but I can also just use MATLAB and get my work done.

Which is fine if you an afford it, but from my experience matlab licenses are not cheap, I worked somewhere were we had one and they were too tight to buy another which meant that one chap got to do all his lovely matlab and the rest of us got to wait until he had the time to do it for us.

If everyone embraced FOSS then everyone could use the best software to solve their problems. The reason the OSS projects lag behind in usability is that they are not used as much.

Seeing software licensing as anything but an impediment is a sure symptom of being deeply infected with capitalism.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Ambassador Kosh]

I don't do much in the way of statistics and R just does not seem like a good fit for what I do at all. MATLAB has better PDE solvers, better non-linear optimization and stiff ODE solvers.

Most scientists I have seen publish their MATLAB code however I am more concerned about industry than open research.

How much slower do you think it is okay to get work done in order to put it in a completely free software framework? How many people is it okay to have die from the additional time?

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Ambassador Kosh]

How is R a comparison to MATLAB for engineering work? From what I have looked at it does not have a development environment to compare to MATLAB, it also lacks all the solving and non-linear optimization methods that MATLAB has built in. R may be very nice but solving systems of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of coupled ODEs, PDEs and doing non-linear optimization just does not look like something it is very good at.

I am doing very little statistics and mostly writing simulations.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, linux users ARE cheap. Look at what happened to Loki Games - nothing has changed.

For Loki Games to have succeeded, Linux users would not only have had to be not cheap, but actually spend more than a Windows user. So, your example is not good. Loki ports suffered from several disadvantages, which meant only the most fanatic Linux users would have wanted to buy them:
- they required users to buy the game separately for Linux even if they already had it for Windows
- the Linux port was usually much less widely avaialble (most retail stores did not want to waste shelf space on it when the Windows version obviously sold much better), and also more expensive. This was a major problem back then when online purchases and downloads were not common yet. An example comparison: where I live, the Loki port of Heretic 2 was only sold by one store (which was specialized in Linux software), and the Windows version could be bought elsewhere 4 times cheaper
- by the time the game was ported, it was already relatively old, and the Windows version often could be run with Wine anyway, especially if it supported OpenGL (such as the above mentioned Heretic 2)
- when forced to choose either the Linux version of the game, or the Windows one, the latter was likely to be the better choice for multiple reasons: performance, features (e.g. surround sound), longevity (backwards compatibility on Linux tends to be worse), and, as already noted, price. And the majority of Linux users probably had a dual boot configuration
Considering the above, it is no surprise at all that Loki failed, and it has nothing to do with Linux users being "cheap" compared to Windows users. At least with Steam the situation is better from the user's point of view, as it is not necessary to buy the same game more than once (although this is a disadvantage for companies doing the ports, it makes gaming on Linux overall more attractive), the game is automatically "owned" on all current and future supported platforms, and Linux users do not have to pay inflated prices.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[drinkypoo]

Also, linux users ARE cheap. Look at what happened to Loki Games - nothing has changed.

Nonsense. Everything has changed. Loki is an old story, the new story is Steam, where games go on sale and generate revenues that would otherwise have been lost to them completely; and the Humble Bundles, likewise. The new pay-what-you-want model has revitalized gaming on Linux.

Granted, this model doesn't produce AAA titles, but that's OK. It doesn't eliminate traditional models. It does move some of the money away from them, but that's OK too. We had too many AAA titles — many of them were garbage. We can lose a few franchises.

Also, I am a Linux user, and I will pay for games. But I won't pay twice (I won't buy a game for Linux which I already have for Windows) and I won't pay for a game that doesn't run right. I also won't overpay for a game. If it's not an AAA title, it's not worth sixty bucks. If it's a half-assed effort, it might not be worth five. You know who you are. Fix those fucking interfaces, developers.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[jlar]

"How much slower do you think it is okay to get work done in order to put it in a completely free software framework? How many people is it okay to have die from the additional time?"

By all means use the tool that provides the best value for you and your company. Personally I find Python much more productive than MatLab for scientific work in my field. But I guess it depends on which features you need and what kind of software you are developing.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Bengie]

The Linux Community's fragmentation is both it's strength and weakness. They need to find a happy medium,

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Bengie]

Those people aren't using "Linux", they're using whatever their flashy cellphone has on it. You could change Linux out from under them and they wouldn't notice a difference because it's all walled-garden. It sounds nice and all and even has some merit, but it's not the same. It's like saying all Netflix users are FreeBSD users. Technically they are "using" FreeBSD, but it would not matter to them if Netflix changed to some other hosting OS.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Ambassador Kosh]

This is the kind of reply I like.

There are so many different kinds of tasks in the world that sometimes you find a language or library just seems to fit one of them very well and other times while you could do it the fit is not as good. In the end what matters is getting the job done.

There are just a few things in the MATLAB global optimization toolbox and some of the pde/ode solving built into it that make my life much easier and faster to develop with. However for many other tasks I use python. Right now the toolchain is mixture of python, c++, matlab and excel and strangely enough it works very well and it allows scientists to setup simulations that can then run on clusters and bring data back in a way that they can analyze it and massively speed up development.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Ambassador Kosh]

I agree that MATLAB can be expensive and that in many ways it would be better if everyone used FOSS. However the reality is that right now my choices are between MATLAB and python and for many tasks MATLAB allows me to get the job done faster and since the job involves human lives it makes the choice fairly simple.

I would like better FOSS tools to replace MATLAB and especially better documentation and defaults and the sad thing is I have the skill to do a lot of that work but not the time. Choosing between making a drug available and making numpy better is a fairly simple choice for me.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[goruka]

Many complain that Godot lacks docs, but never ever mention what they lack. Not everyone learns the same way so it would be very appreciated if you explain what is lacking to the commnunity so they can document it for you.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

Looking a bit deeper, it runs on Windows and Mac as well. And since they started in 1988, you can be pretty sure that they weren't supporting linux then, since linux didn't even exist.

And yes, EagleCAD is cheap. I was paying more than that 20 years ago for a compiler.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Bonzoli]

I have a 130,000 linux desktops where I work here, I've also used it at home for almost 20 years now. The issues are tough to solve on Linux. It makes a good desktop but not for gaming, its an adventure or struggle depending on the person for gaming. Linux users are cheap, or demand value depending on how you look at it.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

First, when dell made a big thing of selling linux boxes, they were the same price as windows boxes. Why? Because of the higher support costs. It's why companies like WalMart got out of the linux market (remember their gPC?) - the returns were just too costly.

However, you had the option to refuse to activate Windows and get a refund. Why didn't you? Or you could have bought a box from a linux vendor (though you'd be paying more, since there are no economies of scale). Or you could have bought a Mac. if you wanted a real unix under the hood instead of linux (rememer - Linux Is Not UNix). My sisters Intel iMac is still working just fine - and it was discontinued in 2007. No support from anyone. It just works and works and works. I hate the UI, but that's me.

Printer support under linux is still a crapshoot. (Partially) supported under only RedHat 9 (warning - do not upgrade or switch distros or it won't work at all) is not supported. And yet all features (color laser w. scanner) still work like a charm under the latest Windows and had an updated driver this weekend.

But that doesn't take away from my original assertion - linux users are cheap. Not having to pay for licensed copies of software is a big selling point in both business and private use. And looking at jMonkeyWhatever, it absolutely sucks in comparison the the competition. Unless your time has less than zero worth, it's not a solution.

For web or database development and hosting, I'd stick with linux or freebsd - for pretty much everything else, the paid alternatives are much much better.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

Loki didn't have the original development and marketing costs of games like SimCity3000, so they could have made it on far less sales. I would have happily bought it (it actually came free on a Cover Disc), just like if Kylix had worked, I would have happily paid twice the price of the equivalent Delphi product.

Problem was, they were both wine-based crap, not native ports. The Kylix UI was so bad it was slower than Java.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[jsveiga]

"However, you had the option to refuse to activate Windows and get a refund. "

no, I hadn't.

"Or you could have bought a Mac."

or I could buy a Dell and dual-boot linux, since somethings at that time still required Windows (for example our home banking)

"Printer support under linux is still a crapshoot."

works perfectly with my networked, wireless HP

"Not having to pay for licensed copies of software is a big selling point in both business and private use."

Yes, and if the free alternative perfectly solves your problem, what's wrong with that? (besides not disliking what you dislike)

" the paid alternatives are much much better."

Good for you; "better" is a matter of opinion. Everyone is entitled to one. For me, "better" is something that does the job and gives me no headaches for the minimum cost in time&money. If that's being "cheap", there you have it.

enough food for you

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

Okay, so I downloaded both jMonkeyEngine and Unity 5.

Unity 5 was interesting enough that I spent a couple of hours playing with it. There's a lot there, probably will be a bit overwhelming for a while, but definitely polished, inspires confidence, and the tutorials I looked at are up to snuff.

jMonkeyEngine? Looking through the documentation, it has some potential, but it's nowhere near as intuitive as Unity. The UI is disappointing.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Creepy]

Irrlicht was never poised to destroy anything, had some terrible design decisions and the developer refused to incorporate some major fixes, preferring to do everything himself. This caused several developers to fork the project. I fixed errors in his BMP importer and rewrote his TIFF importer to properly work with the complete spec and he refused to include them, so I gave up on that project (and I already had patched it extensively from the forums). At that time Crystal Space was going through a complete rewrite and Ogre was known to be difficult to use, so I actually used Open Scene Graph in my own project for a while, but that was just to develop ideas. I wrote my own engine (that basically set things up good enough to play around with shaders, nothing serious) before getting too busy with work to devote time to it.

That said, all of the mentioned were graphics engines, not game engines, at least at the time. I know jMonkeyEngine is marketed as a game engine, but I haven't tried it (didn't even know about it until last week). I've played around a bit with Unity and Unreal and they are game engines with full asset management and IDEs. I haven't had extensive time to work with either one, but I have run their demos, modified terrain and other resources and added assets I made to a scene. I still haven't tried to start my own project in either one or write any code.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[serviscope_minor]

Seriously WTF are you talking about?

Your claim was basically that Linux people are "cheap" and therefore won't pay for software and therefore it's not worth commercially suppporting Linux.

The fact that EagleCAD commercially supports Linux is proof against that.

Just because you've paid more for software (guess what? I have too and I have to keep an XP VM around to run the compiler---IAR as it happens) doesn't mean it's cheap. It's a business cost so I'm on the commercial license, not the personal one.

And why do you bring 1988 up? They probably supported DOS then and I'll bet they don't now.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

Look around. Almost the entire world disagrees with you. Maybe there's a reason?

Free/open software works for some use cases. However, most people find that their time is worth something, and that commercial software does what they need done better. Why do you think so many linux fanatics still dual-boot?

Over the long term, the financial success of the open source model is simply not capable of providing the needed capital to compete as a stand-alone solution for the majority of users.

Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Creepy]

Torque was also one of the better engines I've tried, and so very much better than Gamebryo, which was supposedly great as NetImmerse, but years of aging and mismanagement left it a steaming pile of poo by the time I got to try it. I haven't used Torque in a long time though - I can imagine if they didn't rewrite it there'd be problems today. I remember hitting the same problem on an engine I was working on with Mac support when OpenGL 3.0 came out. 3.0 completely tossed out the state machine and you need to manually do everything yourself. That means large parts of OpenGL engine code needs to be rewritten (functionally it works much more like HLSL and Cg, so at least porting shaders is easier now).

I still haven't tried many of the newer commercial engines that aren't free like CryEngine or some that are like Source 2 and am curious what devs think of them. I'm not a huge fan of Unity or Unreal Engine so far, but that may be the curmudgeon in me that is used to other game engines.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

EagleCAD is a blip. Static. Noise. And I was referring to the commercial license, which is still less than what I paid 20 years ago for a real compiler (not counting inflation). The business you're talking about could not survive on only it's linux revenue - though it could survive only on it's windows and osx revenue.

So please get real. Much of open source is slowly dying, and a large part of that is due to the restrictions of the GPL on "free" software. The BSD license has, every year, put more new unix operating systems on people's desktops and laptops than there are linux-only desktop and laptop users in the entire world.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[serviscope_minor]

EagleCAD is a blip. Static. Noise. And I was referring to the commercial license, which is still less than what I paid 20 years ago for a real compiler (not counting inflation). The business you're talking about could not survive on only it's linux revenue - though it could survive only on it's windows and osx revenue.

You're still intentionally ignoring the point. If Linux is commercially worthless, then why do they support it at all? The fact that the OSX and Windows markets are larger is beside the point, because your claim is that Linux users are cheap.

So I ask again, if they're so cheap, why do Eagle CAD support Linux commercially?

And please stop going on about the compiler. So what? unix compilers 20 years ago were insanely expensive. No one can charge that much any more except for niche applications. That has no bearing on whether people are prepared to pay for other software.

Much of open source is slowly dying, and a large part of that is due to the restrictions of the GPL on "free" software.

Please dine on red herrings on your own time.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[jsveiga]

Look around. Almost the entire world disagrees with you. Maybe there's a reason?

Sure there is: Almost the entire world doesn't have a clue about computers or information security. I'm quite proud that they disagree with me in almost every aspect.

Why do you think so many linux fanatics still dual-boot?

Because Windows can't do somethings right, of course. Isn't it nice to have options?

Look, if you suddently realized you are not able to cope with maintaining your Linux desktop anymore, so you had to ditch it after so many years, it's your decision. Relationships eventually go sour, but you don't need to spill bitterness on every opportunity to make sure everybody sides with you. Move along and be happy. Forget and forgive. Nobody you blame you for switching to the "easier", "prettier" side. You have the right to.

Yes, it is not for the average dummy (and that's why it's not for "almost the entire world", which is the same thing). But there are some who see better value on Linux, and DO NOT chose Linux JUST because Windows costs money. And yes, there are nice things which come out of Open Source.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

Your anecdote doesn't prove anything. Must really burn you that Apple adds more unix consumer users every year than all the linux consumer users worldwide, despite linux having almost a decade head start.

There's an advantage that both Microsoft and Apple have over linux - their users know what they're getting - a consistent user experience. Remember the KDE 3.5 to 4.0 shift, and how OpenSuse made 4.0 the default despite it being totally unusable? Or the Gnome 3 fiasco? Or Ubuntu Unity? Or gcc (either 2.95 or 2.96) not even able to do a "Hello world!" program because printf() was broken?

The simple fact is that if you want to sell your program repeatedly, you have to avoid the GPL. The whole "make money off support" game is BS in the consumer market - if it's that hard to use, they'll just buy elsewhere.

jMonkeyEngine will never be able to compete with their commercial competitors - I downloaded both jMonkeyEngine and Unity 5, and Unity 5 is, if anything, underpriced, and beats the pants off of jMonkeyEngine.

In the end it's about getting the job done - and in many areas, open source lags. Games, graphical tools (the GIMP will never be a photoshop replacement), whatever ... money is the tool that makes better products, and GPL'd software is crippled in that respect because of the license.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

I probably know more about computers than you. That doesn't make my arguments any more or less valid. What DOES make them valid is empirical evidence. As for information security linux is now less secure than windows

It's not a question of "coping with maintaining a linux box" - it's that nowadays, I'm not going to be bothered if I'm not getting paid to do it. There's just too much busywork.

After switching from Windows 9x to linux, I got used to the problems. However, after dumping linux and buying a Windows laptop last spring, I've been pleasantly surprised. Everything about the OS just works. And works. And works.

What doesn't work properly are Firefox and Chrome. Got FF to work properly again, but Chrome is dead. Oh well, don't need it, and now that IE supports adblock+, who cares? I now only use FF because of habit.

Before switching, I tried Adriane (Knoppix for the visually disabled). A total piece of crap that is only "friendly" if you're a masochist and like stuff most of which doesn't even work, and those parts that actually work are depressingly bad.

Sure, use linux (or freebsd) in the back - it's what I did - but after a couple of decades of doing it "the linux way" on the desktop, I'm not interested - it's crap in comparison, and probably always will be, since most of the corporate funding is devoted to back-end operations, and none of the "user-friendly" distros has enough market or a viable way of generating the money to really improve the product consistently over the long haul.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[Anonymous Coward]

I probably know more about computers than you.

Really? And this shows you probably are used to throw statements about things you don't know about, based on an overly inflated ego.

I stopped reading at this. I had long before stopped posting here not to feed trolls, but I see things went really south lately... (it's jsveiga; too lazy to login)

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

You should have read further, because this is what I wrote:

I probably know more about computers than you. That doesn't make my arguments any more or less valid. What DOES make them valid is empirical evidence.

This was after your attempt at intellectual superiority:

Sure there is: Almost the entire world doesn't have a clue about computers or information security. I'm quite proud that they disagree with me in almost every aspect.

My point was simple - argument from perceived authority isn't valid - I want evidence. And the evidence shows that (1) The GPL has been in decline for years, being replaced by more friendly and permissive licenses that don't curtail freedom, and (2) the percentage of linux users has steadily declined from its peak.

And of course you read the whole thing. That link showing that linux is now less secure than windows must burn.

Ask anyone with a Playstation 4 if they like their FreeBSD-9 -based game console.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[hairyfeet]

The "so" is if you take out Chromebooks? Linux doesn't even have 1 lousy percentage point...do you know what category that puts Linux? In "other" right next to Haiku, ReactOS, and the BeOS clones.

That means 1.- You can kiss mainstream driver support buh bye, nobody is gonna bother if they aren't supporting enterprises that want the little checkbox, 2.- that means the drivers you DO have will be half ass and short of features compared to the Windows and OSX versions because most of them are hacked together reversed engineered where if it works AT ALL its considered a "success". I could wallpaper the page with drivers that don't give you half the features of the hardware,are broken for several releases because some dev doesn't have one lying around, or both. 3.- You won't be getting most of the software people actually buy computers FOR, at best you'll usually get an "ersatz", and like the origin of that word will mean inferior. See Gimp which doesn't match up to even Corel Draw of 5 years ago, Libre Office which craps all over spreadsheets made in anything else because some dev decided the entire free world was "doin it wrong" and which frankly runs like ass, hell I could go on all day.

Hey if you enjoy spending your weekends trying to get shit to work like its still 1985? That is YOUR business, but don't be surprised when your scanner won't scan, your webcam only does 240x80, or the laptop gives you a black screen of death just because you updated the thing because with numbers THAT dismal? Nobody is gonna support you. And if you think things are bad now? Like I said just you wait, looks like the proprietary world is going for a "get it on the back end" model which kills "free as in beer" like Raid kills bugs....dead. If that becomes the norm? Yeah try having a half or even as low as a quarter of 1%, which as another pointed out is a DECLINE by almost 75% from its high of nearly 2%. That means not only are you not going forward? You are regressing FAST.

That is not a good place to be friend, not a good place at all.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[serviscope_minor]

Your anecdote doesn't prove anything. Must really burn you that Apple adds more unix consumer users every year than all the linux consumer users worldwide, despite linux having almost a decade head start.

It proves that Cadsoft believe it's worth their while commercially to support their not cheap paid for product on Linux: something which you keep asserting isn't the case. As for Apple, I don't really care. Why should I?

There's an advantage that both Microsoft and Apple have over linux - their users know what they're getting - a consistent user experience. Remember the KDE 3.5 to 4.0 shift, and how OpenSuse made 4.0 the default despite it being totally unusable? Or the Gnome 3 fiasco? Or Ubuntu Unity?

Nope, they foist whatever UI they want on the users, and the users suck it, ribbon and all. As for all those other shennanigans, I barely remember them since I rode them out using the same FVWM config file I've been hacking on since the 90s. Now *THAT* is a consistent user interface: unchanged in 20 years :D

The simple fact is that if you want to sell your program repeatedly, you have to avoid the GPL.

Sure, and so? Everyone knows by now that selling GPL licensed software is hard. Selling support contracts and services however, plenty of people make money off. My web hosting service makes plenty of money off me selling a chunk of a Linux machine running all GPL software. Amazon makes a mint from their elastic cloud which more often runs Linux and other GPL software than anything else. Redhat make billions selling support and services using GPL software.

Hell, I personally have done well paid consulting work using in part GPL software. Why would the commissioner care? He just wanted some code to do a specific task and it was running on his servers. Oh and guess what OS they ran? Guess what compiler they used?

If you're trying to persuade me that the GPL is "bad" because I can make and sell shrink-wrap software, you're free to try, but I have no desire to do such a thing, you're going to have a hard job making me hate the GPL, especially when so much of my business has been done on GPL software.

jMonkeyEngine will never be able to compete with their commercial competitors - I downloaded both jMonkeyEngine and Unity 5, and Unity 5 is, if anything, underpriced, and beats the pants off of jMonkeyEngine.

I strongly suspect not, but so? who cares? I guess if you want to write in Java, then JMonkeyEngin will be a much more natural choice than Unity. And besides, Unity is not like it's free from massive gaping holes in the documentation or anything, or other weird obtusenesses...

In the end it's about getting the job done - and in many areas, open source lags.

And in many areas OSS is far out ahead. What's your point?

Games, graphical tools (the GIMP will never be a photoshop replacement),

Will GIMP ever beat Photoshop in the commercial space? Does GIMP already do most of what people want from photoshop? Yep. Most people aren't professionals, remember, and most professionals are not good. If you want to get into a gimp versus photoshop debate, let me first tell you about all the awful quality signage I see around and about and you can explain how those professional (they're done for money for commercial purposes) signs complete with faded inks, pixelated images and JPEGging artefacts could not have been more than adequately produced in the GIMP. Photoshop may be a lot more capable, but that capability is often not required.

whatever ... money is the tool that makes better products, and GPL'd software is crippled in that respect because of the license.

Ah so that explains why Linux is the most poplar kernel, running the most popular server OS, the most popular supercomputer OS and one of the most popular embessed OSs and of course the most common smartphone OS. It also explains why GCC is the best compiler out there (it still

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

GCC was never "the best compiler out there". At one point it was SO bad that they had to switch to EGCS and rename that to GCC. You can also get compilers from Intel, Pathscale, etc., that perform better. Pick your poison :-)

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[serviscope_minor]

GCC was never "the best compiler out there".

Yes it was and is.

At one point it was SO bad that they had to switch to EGCS and rename that to GCC.

One version of GCC was bad once does not imply

. You can also get compilers from Intel, Pathscale, etc., that perform better. Pick your poison :-)

Yeah and GCC is beater in a number of measurable areas.

GCC supports more processors.

In terms of language support, GCC has them all beat to hell.

In terms of C++11 and C++14 support, GCC got there far before all of them (excpt LLVM/C++14).

GCC still has the best optimizer of all the compilers except for Intel on Intel processors (not even x64 since Intel hobbles performance on non intel compilers). GCC beats Pathscale http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

Oh and actually with recent GCC, it often outperforms the intel compiler too:
http://news.dice.com/2013/11/0...

It also seems emperically to be the most robust compiler with fewer ICEs than any of the others. So to sum up, GCC has:

More instruction sets
More languages
Better C++ support (LLVM beat it to C++14, GCC caught up)
A better optimizer
More robust

Than basically every other compiler.

About the only thing GCC doesn't yet do as well is optimize for size rather than performance, where IAR embedded workbench seems to be the winner though holy fuck that's otherwise a heap of shit). There also seem to be some specialist FORTRAN compilers which do a bit better on some FORTRAN benchmarks.

But nonetheless, I am 100% confident in stating that GCC is the single best compiler out there and nothing beats it in more than isolated categories. Or if you prefer, if you had to pick one compiler to work with to the exclusion of all others you'd be mad to chose anything other than GCC.

The GCC/ECGS thing is ancient history and totally meaningless to the performance of the recent compiler versions.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

You need to learn your history - gcc was so bad that it was scrapped. EGCS was renamed GCC and took it's place. What you call GCC today is actually EGCS.

And the source of the problems that led to the scrapping of GCC? RMS.

The GCC/EGGS thing is not ancient history, because we're still seeing that RMS is becoming more of a roadblock (and embarrassment) as time goes on.

BTW - After years of pushing games for linux users, steam only has 1% of their user base using linux. Linux isn't dying in the gaming world, simply because it was never really alive. And the hugely overpriced steambox isn't going to change that.

Playstation and Apple use FreeBSD for a reason - it makes financial sense. So there are literally orders of magnitude more gamers using FreeBSD than linux, and that's not going to change.

As for compilers - I don't use templates, I don't use the STL, I agree with linus that the programmers who depend on such are generally sub-par. What *I* want is a compiler that has all that crapola stripped out of it. It would be damned fast, both at compile time and at run time.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[serviscope_minor]

You need to learn your history - gcc was so bad that it was scrapped. EGCS was renamed GCC and took it's place. What you call GCC today is actually EGCS.

The logic is so tortured there that I don't even know where to begin! So basically GCC went down a bad path, then corrected itself. So yes gcc WAS a bad compiler. Macs USED to have no memory protection and no multitasking. The premiere version of Windows WAS Windows ME.

Do you see the common thing there? They're all in the past and have no bearing on what the current situation is now.

Arguing that GCC is bad because it adopted EGCS (which was actually a fork of GCC) is like arguing that Window 8.1 is bad because Windows ME sucked. That's a pointless and completely worthless argument and I chose those two because the timeframes are about the same.

The GCC/EGGS thing is not ancient history,

Um, yes it is. It finished in 1999.

RMS is becoming more of a roadblock (and embarrassment) as time goes on.

Except he's not because he doesn't control GCC, that's up to the steering committee of which he is a single member. He wanted to steer clear of modularity because of proprietary software risks. Ultimately the GCC people disagreed and are working towards making cleaner interfaces and more sensible modules:

https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Modul...

BTW - After years of pushing games for linux users, steam only has 1% of their user base using linux. Linux isn't dying in the gaming world, simply because it was never really alive. And the hugely overpriced steambox isn't going to change that.

Um, OK... And by "years" of course, steambox hasn't even been released in my country yet.

Playstation and Apple use FreeBSD for a reason. So there are literally orders of magnitude more gamers using FreeBSD than linux, and that's not going to change.

Yeah and there are more android phones out there than those two combined. So there's probably more games running on a Linux kernel than a BSD based one. Either way it's close.

I don't use templates, I don't use the STL

Shall we agree to keep this particluar line of arguing back over on the C++ thread where we're also dukeing it out? It makes much more sense there.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[BarbaraHudson]

No, gcc did not correct itself. Stallman was forced, kicking and screaming, to dump it in favor of EGCS.

And my comment about RMS being more and more of a roadblock is not about GCC - it's about software in general. The GPL is one of the less free licenses out there; he has said many times (I used to link to the comments on FSFE) that he would rather you pirate software than buy it; his misogynist comments have made him persona non gratia at public events; his remarks at Steve Jobs passing were the last straw for many.

He has made it clear that he's in favor of choice, but only HIS choice. To him, you're immoral if you develop closed-source software. I'll return the Steve Jobs remarks in kind - when RMS dies, on balance nothing of value will be lost.

Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine

[serviscope_minor]

No, gcc did not correct itself. Stallman was forced, kicking and screaming, to dump it in favor of EGCS.

So in magical fairy land, the GCC steering committee deciding to dump the official fork and use the better one is not being fixed becuase it made RMS cross? Okey dokey.

You're still failing utterly to back up your claim that there are better compilers than GCC, instead resorting to ad-hom attacks on RMS. I've given you plenty of opportunity and you do nothing but twist and squirm.

You are unable to back up your claim with any reasoned arguments. This raises the question: why do you hold such opinions?

unity 5 IS NOT FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

gee why do they keep trying to say unity 5 is free , it is NOT....

Re:unity 5 IS NOT FREE

[mark-t]

Other than what this article links to, who else has suggested that Unity 5 was free?

Re:unity 5 IS NOT FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, Unity Technologies themselves: http://unity3d.com/unity/personal-edition

A full-featured Unity 5 game engine is available for developers to build and release apps on multiple platforms for no cost, depending on your personal/company income. It's not open-source but it's free (as in beer, blah blah). There are no royalty payments associated with it either. It costs money for the professional tier but the engine has the same feature set.

Epic just went fairly damn free for Unreal 4 as well (with royalties kicking in above certain revenue levels) and you get access to the full source code.

Valve just announced their Source 2 is free (so long as you release on Steam which takes ~30% revenue).

Or if you want, you guys continue to debate around with the semantics of free amongst yourselves like the awesome neckbeards you are.

Re:unity 5 IS NOT FREE

[mark-t]

...There are no royalty payments associated with it either. It costs money for the professional tier but the engine has the same feature set.

No, the personal edition does not have the same feature set.

Re:unity 5 IS NOT FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the game engine DOES have the same feature set. Free and Pro are the same.

Compare the editions at: http://unity3d.com/get-unity
Personal and Professional: "Engine with all features - All the features in the Unity engine included"

The free version shows a Unity splash screen. Otherwise the features of the engine itself are the same. There's a dark skin for the editor, and cloud services and asset store features that are only part of the Professional version - they're not exactly part of the core game engine.

Are they making a game or a portfolio?

[Kjella]

I'm guessing most of these game developers are looking to get a contract with a big studio and in that case showing your understanding of a major commercial engine is almost as important as the game itself. Using an open source engine nobody's heard off is like making an application in Ruby to get a job as a C++ developer, sure it proves some talent but 9 out of 10 recruiters will go with the C++ guy.

Re:Are they making a game or a portfolio?

[Gr8Apes]

...sure it proves some talent but 9 out of 10 recruiters will go with the C++ guy.

Might as well make that 99 out of 100, and that 1 will generally be out of business pretty quickly.

Re:Are they making a game or a portfolio?

[Anonymous Coward]

9 out of 10 recruiters will go with the Indian guy who never wrote a line of code.

Re:Are they making a game or a portfolio?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are looking at it the wrong way. Most open source engines don't exist to be used so much as they exist due to the interest of the current maintainers / developers. I doubt non-funded developers working on some engine code out of enjoyment would stop if no one was using it or are diluted enough to think hobby work is going to make or break a job application.

Question

[ledow]

Ignoring the poorly-masked slashvertisement:

How many of those AAA engines were written in Java?

Re:Question

[ledow]

P.S. Love indie games, never heard of any of those in the "showcase" for this engine.

That's, of course, after I waited for MEGABYTES of unresized images to load on each page of that section, that didn't even do so to allow in-page zooming...

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno, but when looking at a toplist of most sold games of all time I see that a lot of them didn't use any of the engines listed.
If you want your game to be a super hit it has to be different enough for people to not disregard it as yet another Unity game.
It's a bit like when people ask how to be a successful Youtuber. Views on a specific video is not a limited resource so if you just base your concept on PewDiePie then people will just keep watching hi instead. You need to find something on you own.
If you are just pushing out the next iteration of CoD, Battlefield or whatever then sure, one of the pre-made engines are great.
If you have a unique concept then you probably need to modify the engine heavily. (Portal anyone?)

Re:Question

[JBMcB]

Depends on what your definition of AAA is, I guess. Minecraft is written in Java, and from what I can tell is one of the best selling games right now.

Re:Question

[Mashiki]

Minecraft isn't a AAA game though, it's indie. And one of the few indie success stories, much like DOOM and ID Software were indie. The difference between the two is that ID Software continued to innovate and evolve. Mojang simply cashed out.

Re:Question

[cheesybagel]

Carmack sold his share of ID Software as well. It just took him longer.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

He sold them for retirement after decades of hard work and innovation within iD. His work with VR and aerospace are mere hobby.

This doesn't compare to hyping a single game and sell it all to Microsoft at inflated value.

Re:Question

[Nemyst]

It's selling in spite of its shoddy engine written in Java, yes. Now, Java itself was sort of a boon, since it's fairly easy to reverse engineer JVM bytecode back into Java, which spawned a gigantic modding community, but the engine itself is pretty bloody bad.

Re:Question

[JBMcB]

Again, depends on your definition of AAA. If you think that only huge companies spending lots of money can generate AAA titles, then no. If your definition is it's simply a successful game, then yes.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

AAA is not about success, it's about target. Big budget titles targeted to a wider audience (Last of Us, Final Fantasy XIII, Super Mario Kart 8, TES: Skyrim...) are AAA. They might be good games as the ones I mentioned or they might be awful games like plenty of others, that's not what defines them as AAA. Top expenditure in development and promotion is what defines a AAA. They're expected to be good games because a lot of money went into development, and they're expected to sell well because a lot of money went into promotion, but that's all. Production and promotion money for Minecraft was practically non-existent, thus Minecraft is not a AAA.

Not really giving away

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not really giving it away: when you start selling your game, you will have to pay royalties for those engines.

Re:Not really giving away

[MikeJones8766]

Unity doesn't take royalties, it's a flat $1500 if you're making over $100k a year.

Re:Not really giving away

[Anonymous Coward]

That's $1500 per seat, not per game.

Re:Not really giving away

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can negotiate on Unreal Engine 4's pricing. The 5% is the standard thing, but large companies and successful indies usually pay flat licensing fees without royalties.

Free as in beer

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have pointed out none of those engines are truly free. Do some research next time. :P

Re:Free as in beer

[ArcadeMan]

But how far from free are each of those three AAA engines?

Re:Free as in beer

[Anonymous Coward]

Free as in open-source and zero cost, no. Unreal 4 gives full source access but has royalty payments depending on revenue. Unity does not give source code access for free or professional, but you can pay to get the engine source. But the engines are free (as in beer, blah blah) to develop and release applications with, depending on your income or revenue levels. Feel free to keep being smarmy about other people's hard work being stupidly accessible, though.

Heresy!

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

Glue a Stallman beard on me and call me an idealist, but I actually believe there’s no stopping open source (in game development) at this point.

Compare that to Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software, by The Bearded Charmer himself.

Sure, the ability to develop and play AAA games for free is all well and good. But exactly where and how is our freedom to develop and play these games protected?

(Posting this as AC since any satire of the holy cause of Free Software is tolerated here no better than ancient statues of extinct pagan gods are tolerated by ISIS.)

Well the gaming community just wants pixels

[goldcd]

on their screens - speaking for myself.
Extending that - I as a purchaser of games don't give a flying fig what engine was used - but I'll judge the devs I gave my money to on their decision.
I'm assuming the 'freeness' of commercial offerings is based upon trying to get devs to use their software and then taking a percentage if it ever takes off and sells.
So, what you're asking is a question to the devs - what to the commercial offerings that might skim from your future income offer, that OOS doesn't?
My guess would be a huge amount of support/tools, that OOS doesn't, and is only ever going to take a small percentage of your profit (if you make any).
Rah capitalism.

The simple end-all solution:

[Anonymous Coward]

ioquake3.

No need to pay to license this high quality SDL game engine. Accept no substitutes.

Re:The simple end-all solution:

[tepples]

No need to pay to license this high quality SDL game engine.

ioquake3 is copylefted. Copylefted engines are fine on PC-like platforms but won't work on a platform incompatible with copyleft. At last count, these platforms included Apple iOS, Orbis OS (for PlayStation 4), and whatever PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Wii U, and Nintendo 3DS run.

Re:The simple end-all solution:

[Anonymous Coward]

Then fix those platforms. It's not ioquake3's problem.

What's a "AAA" game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anal Asshole Annihilation?

Who makes up these shitty shitty acronyms?

Depends

[drolli]

I use matlab. I like matlab. It's not the matter if its expensive (which it is) or not.

The point is: There have been applicaitions (more than one) in my past, where octave (a free matlab clone) served me much better, plainly for the reason that i could actually recompile it or adapt it in a way that it ran exactly like i wanted it to run. usually these "unusual" circumstance involved running it on limited HW, automatically, with limited memory, many instances, or independent of a nework connection to the license activation.

Re:Depends

[fph il quozientatore]

Keep an eye on Julia, it's a very promising project.

Re:Depends

[drolli]

And this is an excellent sample of how FOSS people alienate other people.

a) Person a says "i like commercial SW a"

b) Person a says "but i figured out that ultra-mature (>20y) FOSS b (which is nearly compatible to a) is even better for some things"

c) Person b says "use project c" (which is immature and incompatible)

Re:Depends

[Ambassador Kosh]

I had someone recommend Julia to me over MATLAB and they did it for performance reasons. When I looked about a year ago the stiff ODE solver in Julia gave the wrong answer for the kinds of problems I do. I stopped looking at that point.

Julia will mature in time but right now having something run faster but wrong is not useful.

Octave on the other hand is pretty nice I just like MATLAB more due to the whole IDE that is part of it but I agree with the drolli that in some circumstances octave is a better choice.

Re:Depends

[fph il quozientatore]

If you look carefully, I didn't say "use it", I said "keep an eye on it" and "it's promising". I realize it's far from being production-ready.
I am not involved in the Julia development, and I wouldn't describe myself as "FOSS people".

Everyone? Don't think so.

[fyngyrz]

If this exciting new thing called “free” keeps going in the right direction, everyone still in the race gets a leg up.

Everyone but the people who wrote it, that is.

The problem with winning one's "15 minutes of fame" is that it won't pay the bills.

Which is why this exciting thing called "free", outside of an economy of plenty where it costs nothing to live, or where the author(s) operate(s) under essentially the same conditions, isn't always such a great deal for the author(s).

I have a free [donations accepted, but not nagged for] product out there with about 15k of regular users, and the income from it is as near zero as can be without quite being zero. To date, thirteen people have stirred themselves to donate. The product, however, tends to be used every day or two by those I call "regular users." I know because when it starts, it checks in with my website to see if there is an upgrade [always free], and when it does, I log a "start" to that IP, so I can generate some excellent stats on usage.

There are quite a few competing applications that perform the key functions mine does; but all do it a bit differently, and mine is one of the most feature-rich ones out there. So I have at least some reason to think that the users continue to use it because they find it at least adequate. The feedback I get tends to be quite kind, though that may just be a consequence of not wanting to annoy the author, I suppose. In any case, the considerable work I put in seems to have some value based on all this, and that value has not come back to me in any significant proportion. I can afford it -- don't get me wrong, I was not surprised by this, nor am I inconvenienced -- but that is because I produced pure commercial products for years first.

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[cheesybagel]

In my experience users can be quite generous if you explain why you need the money and what the money will get them.

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[fyngyrz]

Perhaps that's it. I don't need the money, and they get pretty much whatever they ask for anyway. :)

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

In any case, the considerable work I put in seems to have some value based on all this, and that value has not come back to me in any significant proportion.

Has it not?
It seems fairly clear that you didn't write that software for financial gain, so why did you write it? Was it recognition? Altruism? For whatever reason you created that software; has its use by others not provided you any satisfaction toward that motivation? Is the fulfilment of your original desires not valuable to you?

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[west]

The fact that the return is very likely to be zero is why I generally don't put a 'donate' button on software I release. If I'm not doing it for the money, I might as well make people not feel guilty about not donating by not even mentioning the possibility.

The funny thing is (albeit with an incredibly small sample size) I've found that I get a lot more feedback/nice things said about the no-donation software. My speculation is that many people who like it but didn't donate feel guilty about emailing the author with praise. In the end, the ego boost is worth more than the few bucks I might have made.

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[duck_rifted]

You're trying to analyze an entire microeconomy using only one product. If a gas station offers a free cup of coffee in the morning, does that guarantee that it goes out of business, that the coffee bean farmers don't get paid, and that the entire coffee industry implodes?

These companies can still pull revenue with support services, asset sales, and code sales. That broadens the economy by empowering hobbyists and freelancers to take on the role they're good at in game development and license the fruits of their labor for fun and profit. Developers who make game engines have an idea of which features should be used at what points in a project. So, they continue a paid license for very advanced features that few projects need right away. The industry as a whole gets more games, which means more revenue for indie devs and even more paid licenses and royalties for the engine developers.

Getting apoplexy at mention of the word "free" is Scrooge McDuck syndrome, and it's a wonder the ol' duck's vault wasn't empty of coin. Why cut yourself out of market? Game development isn't a fancy restaurant requiring reservations for only the most distinguished guests willing to shell out obscene licensing fees. Keeping it that way reserves a place in the industry for hacks who only make games because they have the coin; people who will be out of a job when they see competition that replaces their job with countless others. Well, that or they'll up their game (pun intended).

As for the primary topic, so long as new engines do new things or at least old things in new ways, they'll still be used. A huge, feature-rich engine can't compete with a small, basic little thing when what you need is something small and basic. Also, rapid prototyping will be the productivity race of tomorrow...

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[duck_rifted]

I'm posting here because I worry that if my other reply is seen as contentious (it's not meant that way) then it would also be seen as discouraging and that's the last thing I want to do to any developer.

As an independent game engine developer, you have the skills to provide a service nobody is yet doing well: training. API manuals for engines smell like code, and that can be daunting to a newcomer. Wading through an ocean of video tutorials is frustrating because the speaker may mumble or drag progress along at an excruciating pace. Have you ever seen those Youtube videos that last ten minutes despite demonstrating a two second task? It's a bit shit, right? Every second spent watching a video is a second not spent developing.

There's this huge cultural momentum toward teaching people to code, and aside from that entire debate's tenets, making learning easy makes sense for those who are self-motivated. So, imagine a game engine engineered to teach about game engines.

You're probably thinking, "Nobody has time for that!" But I'm just showing you where the market can go. The goal is to do what nobody else is doing, right?

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[duck_rifted]

Actually, a GAME that teaches about game engines would be better.

(in a console window) "We're going to make a window now! To do this, we'll use this code ... This piece of the code does this, that piece does that. Press Enter to make the window. Press Enter to close the window. We closed the window with this code ... This piece of code does this, that piece does that. Now go to your IDE and try it! Press any key to exit."

(next session) "Hi! Last time we learned how to make a window. This time, let's take listen for keystrokes..."

(much, much later) "And with this line of code, we can position Leisure Suit Larry by the bed..."

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[fyngyrz]

The fact that the return is very likely to be zero is why I generally don't put a 'donate' button on software I release. I

Yes, same here.

In the end, the ego boost is worth more than the few bucks I might have made.

I don't care about ego boost, but I do like the idea that my work is assisting someone in some way. For me, the more people I can see using it, the more I'm motivated to work on it.

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[fyngyrz]

It seems fairly clear that you didn't write that software for financial gain, so why did you write it?

That's right. I wrote it because none of the apps in this particular area did what I wanted to do. So I did it myself. I shared the results, and I got some additional value because the users made suggestions that were also useful in the context of my own use of the software. Plus, I'm cheered that others are getting some use out of it.

Is the fulfilment of your original desires not valuable to you?

Of course. But you're missing the point: most people can't afford to dedicate the kind of time I put into that thing; there are bills to pay, and where you might like to be coding GamerGoo for free, turns out the landlord isn't particularly impressed with your zillion "likes" on Facebook.

I only put my experience up there to show that free work is pretty much taken as free work. If you want money, you need to go commercial. That whole "support for money" thing? All that really means is you made bad documentation, or no documentation. Or a configuration file nightmare. I can't see charging people because the docs are poor or the program doesn't work easily and/or well. Really great apps work pretty much right away, and they are either intuitive to use, or are well explained so that they can be made intuitive to use. That takes time; time, for most people, is a net drain on cash reserves or worse, a way to go deeper into debt. I don't recommend the "free" path to anyone who isn't doing it without a concern for making a living from it.

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[fyngyrz]

You're trying to analyze an entire microeconomy using only one product.

No, actually, I'm not. This is just my most current effort. I produce quite a bit along these lines, and my experience has been pretty uniform. I mention this last one because it is the most current, and so relates to the extant circumstances best.

Getting apoplexy at mention of the word "free" is Scrooge McDuck syndrome

Good thing no one is doing that, then, eh? Well, except for the moderators, but hey, it's slashdot, the kids in the basement have to have something fun to do!

Re: Everyone? Don't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

thats an ego boost. it makes you feel important and you get a boost. nothing wrong with that

Re:Everyone? Don't think so.

[johncandale]

hahhaha, another foss sucker.

Opportunity knocks

[Cruciform]

Throw in the grant system that Epic is putting into place, and those who want to contribute to making Blender a better game dev tool have another potential source of income.
The FBX import/export system is improving all the time, but now you can show that work to Epic and if they see it as contributing to the community they'll fund you.

Something like this could really boost the productivity of the modeling and animation tools in the open source community.

What is your definition of AAA title?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is "A shitton of money was spent on it" then java or free engines are at a huge disadvantage because they have one huge nonexistent cost centre: a bespoke personal game engine.

MOST people would include "Sold a shitton of games" for AAA. And Minecraft hits that spot.

Re:What is your definition of AAA title?

[Your.Master]

In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Re:What is your definition of AAA title?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion.

So in that case, using a pre-made engine for AAA games is only an argument if it increases your development cost by importing legacy code a day zero.

Haha. You said "still."

[bsdasym]

For you to "still" be relevant, you would have to have been relevant before all this.

Um... they're not free

[rsilvergun]

All of them take 5%-10% of your base revenue if you're games a success. I'm not saying it's not worth it; and it's nice that if you're breaking into the industry you can work with professional grade tools. But I can certainly see people wanting a truly free solution.

Re:Um... they're not free

[Anonymous Coward]

They're free if you and your zero to five buddies flop. That's important because you're almost certainly going to flop on your first 1...n games before you get your first commercial success, if you ever get one at all.

If you want an enterprise grade, multi-seat license with support for specialized software like UnrealEd, they tend to cost $10M and up. Lots of business software costs that much, and game engines aren't unique in that fact. But $10M is an impossible number for a handful of devs to pony up.

The fact that the engine license allows you to take a hobbyist approach is great. You might even get mentioned in one of their little "make something unreal"-type contests, which provides free advertisement. These sorts of things allow new players into the field that otherwise couldn't get over the barrier to entry.

My own take

[gman003]

I have been developing a game based on the Cube 2 engine, specifically the Red Eclipse fork. The benefits, as I saw it, was that the engine was Zlib-licensed, and most of the game code was re-usable (both Red Eclipse and my game are first-person arena shooters). The downsides were the lack of experience - the code is unfamiliar and sparsely-documented (and in some places downright bad), not many people are familiar with the level editor, and the model import system is not the most artist-friendly.

Currently it's at a proof-of-concept state - it's playable, the core gameplay is there, but it's using Red Eclipse assets that are CC-licensed, not suitable for commercial release, and the few maps are blocky and spartan.

I am seriously considering a switch to Source 2, because I'm much, much more familiar with Hammer and SMDs than with the Cube 2 asset toolchain, and I'm sure some of my Source modding experience will carry over to Source 2. I'm waiting for more details, though, particularly regarding the toolchain. I'd have to redo pretty much everything, but it would likely make for a far better product. Particularly if it ends up being ported to consoles - Red Eclipse lacks gamepad support, and having seen the code, it's not an easy thing to add.

Re:My own take

[Howitzer86]

Cube 2 missed an opportunity, I think. I loved that octree-based map engine. Here was an accessible and powerful cube based engine from before Minecraft was a twinkle in Notch's eye. To this day, I don't know of any other engine that lets you collaborate with multiple people in real time as though it were part of the game - and with level editing so easy, it could have fostered the kind of mapping community not seen since the days of Doom, Quake, and Unreal (1/UT/2004).

Now everything is "model it in 3DSMax, Maya, or Blender." Complicated tools, meandering workflows, just a time consuming process in general. Even Unreal is like that now. Why use the shape editor when you can just import your model? Does the new engine even have that tool anymore? No it doesn't. Just import or use an existing mesh for your complex details. Want to make your own but don't know how? Time to learn this other tool over here.

I'm not complaining exactly. I'm pretty good with Max and Blender. I'm just reflecting (as an amateur) on what mapping felt like in the past, and how it compares to today. It was pretty straight forward back then. There was probably a lot of pent up creativity from people who didn't have the time to learn multiple tools. Minecraft quenched their thirst, but the Cube 2 engine could have been the thing to do that. If only it were better documented, and positioned better as an engine for hobbyists.

The farthest I got with it was map editing and compiling it from the source. So I know what you mean. It's been a while, but I doubt anything has changed. Sorry to hear about the state of your game.

Re:My own take

[Anonymous Coward]

it could have fostered the kind of mapping community not seen since the days of Doom, Quake, and Unreal (1/UT/2004).

Doubtful. The thing that made those mapping communities possible was that they were community driven.
It was possible for many communities to start and fail and it was possible to do so without anyone noticing.

These days the game companies wants to keep it tied up to them. If you want to get a mapping community going you have to do it through their servers and their system. Unfortunately they aren't willing to invest the thousands of hours in trying out projects that fail.
The companies are looking at projects like Dota, TeamFortress and CounterStrike, thinking that it would have been better if those had originated from them rather than starting as community projects. They forget that all the projects that didn't make it also are needed.
What would CS be without ActionQuake?

Re:My own take

[del_diablo]

The problem is that a map editor is basically a gimped level designer, usually with gimped scripting.

Once you go there, you realize that instead of using some 3D software, and then importing that to a engine, there is possible to make a in engine tool, that can make maps. The problems you then face are the fact material mapping and your material engine may be shit. Really shit. To the point where imported photoshop image files requires massive hacking to get mapped properly. Don't forget that UV mapping for large objects are its own special kind of painful.

Of course, what is the next problem? The editor for objects. Being able to create a level, does not equal you can create or make shapes. For something as complex as it is, i never found out how to make spheres, statues or anything cool in Cube. Once you can do that in engine, in a convenient way, you can go full retarded on making good levels. Mostly due being able to do it fast.

Next? Well, animations. Rigging and animating has always been the most painful of 3D editing. You need it if you want to make complex object interactions, or want a way to script them to work properly with the physic engine. You can give up on rigging something as complex as a human, but having hanging anchored platforms/objects without tons of weird scripting would be a plus.
If scripting integrates well, you can start rigging in armor pieces, hitboxes, and more. Without needing to pray that some half assed importer works properly.

Then the last issue is usually that your editor is gimped in scripting. Or your script language is weird or limited. Or the ability to interact with making map/level is gimped, so there is lots of busy work to get a lot of scripting working.
If you at some point just fire up nano/text edit or vi, just to make edits to scripts, the in game mapper tools are shit.

This is of course only touching the tip of the iceberg. To make a 3D game, you still need a way to write and edit shaders. You need a way to gauge performance. You need good importers/exporters for the things you can't do in engine. You need all interfaces and controls to be good and sane.
You need documentation to be good, accessible, and you need to create a community.
What most FLOSS engines fail at is that they want to be something like Quake or Doom, something you use a external tool to create cool stuff for PvP shooting. They succed at their purpose, but they fail to be game creation tools.

Re:My own take

[drinkypoo]

The problem with cube-based editing is that not everything wants to be based on a cube. It's not worthless, it's a cute trick, but it's not really all that wonderful for modeling things. It's OK for level geometry for the most part, but awful for everything else.

Re:unity 5 *IS* FREE (sort-of)

[blaizer]

http://unity3d.com/get-unity Kind of. It's free in that you can download it and make games with it. When you start getting into the "enterprisey" type features then you have to pay. Also if your company made $100,000 making games last year then you have to pay (or some number like that).

Re:unity 5 *IS* FREE (sort-of)

[murdocj]

In other words, to use it is free, if you sell products based on it the people who made it want a cut. How horribly unreasonable.

SFML

[Anonymous Coward]

I made a real nice game with SFML which I think is probably one of the best documented engines out there. It's free, but you need to build it first. It's available here: github.com/HSchmale16/NumberHunterGame

No.

[nedlohs]

So stop wasting time with stupid slashvertisements for your engine that no one wants.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to use the words crappy, greedy, asswipes.

Try again.

Re:No.

[rtb61]

Oh No, the shock, the horror, the pain and suffering of millions of slash dot users. 'ER' you know, you just could have skipped this story. I do it quite often myself, skip whole days even.

A developer of a free open source game engineer sought some feedback from the slash dot community and you take personal offence, hmm, do you have a vested interest in alternate products by any chance.

Personally the open source game engine market might do best by targeting a specific market that is not well served by 'AAA' game engines. Perhaps low violence networked board gaming simulations and taking them more in visually interactive directions. They do not take a huge amount of visual and audio development time and the focus is heavily on game play, gaming concepts and new ideas. A market that well suits indie development.

Re:No.

[gl4ss]

man, the TFA itself answers it's headline question as "we're friggin cool! we're relevant! please use us!" (in other words).

it misses though bigtime. jmonkeyengine is only relevant if you want to code your game in java.

and you know, what the friggin license is jmonkeyengine under anyways? you have to go to wikipedia to find out since their own site doesn't find it necessary to tell you..

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

targeting a specific market that is not well served by 'AAA' game engines.

Former soviet bloc countries?

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't find the docs either. I didn't try hard...but javadocs spits it all out in HTML format...it can't be that hard to add it to a site. Not seeing docs and a license is enough to make me turn away. Neither is difficult to provide, so perhaps the author of jmonkeyengine isn't really as great as they think they are.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same AC as above. Apparently their docs are in their wiki, and their wiki follows a typical shitty-wiki style. When I want to work with an API, I prefer to see a hierarchy that I can click through. Javadocs provide that hierarchy. I'm a non-conformist and all, but this is really one of those things that would go a long way to help jmonkeyengine to just conform to the standard way of doing things in Java. Wikis might work for other people and other languages, but Java has a standardized method that everyone can use for free. The only 'cost' is doing sane comments in your code...

It doesn't even need to be pretty. Just a button that says "Docs" or "Documentation" and the boilerplate information generated by javadocs.

permissible license

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that the permissible license of some of those engines will still make them attractive to some developers because you can modify the source code and create you own engine without paying royalties, there is not eula, i am more worried for some gpl engines but those are used by hobbyists.
I think engines like C4 engine and Unigine are the one who had to be worry about their future because free AAA engines offer more at not costs.

Re:unity 5 *IS* FREE (sort-of)

[mark-t]

If you even want to *make* products that are practical in any kind of general sense, it isn't free. In my experience, the personal edition is quite seriously feature limited from what you get with the professional edition, and isn't really practical for anything beyond introductory hobbyist level experimentation... to become at least familiar with its capabilities. I can't imagine any serious developer not outgrowing the personal edition and being frustrated by what the professional edition can do that the personal edition cannot within their first year of Unity development, if not a whole lot less time than that. And that might be long before you've ever made a dime of profit.

Democracy at the core of Unity culture??? Ha!

[mark-t]

FTA:

"Deep in Unity's culture is the principle of Democracy. "

I laughed out loud when I read that.

In the feature requests feedback forum, making the editor available for Linux is vastly more popular than any other feature request for Unity,. beating out the next most popular by about a factor of 4, and Unity Technologies has publicly stated that they have absolutely no plans on ever porting their editor tools to Linux.

If that's the business decision they are comfortable with, that's one thing, but considering that in the article where they are bragging about how they are promoting democracy by tying it in with how the product was being priced, rather than what people have actually said that they want, I'm pretty sure that I can safely conclude the developers at Unity do not have the foggiest idea what the word "democracy" actually means.

How bout mopup position?

[SuperKendall]

So all of these great engines are free, right, except when you have a game making a lot of money then the charges kick in.

So one could envision this plan - make games using the free engines, then wait until one really takes off.

Now that you have a known game, that is making tons of money - how to make 3% more? Switch it to an open source engine and the engine fee goes away.

Obviously this would probably be a huge pain in reality, but it does show one potential place an open source engine has in the industry, as revenue enhancer.

Re:unity 5 *IS* FREE (sort-of)

[Anonymous Coward]

There are NO limited features. If you're interested then take a look at their site for the differences between the Personal and Professional editions. If not then you'll continue to be misinformed.

If you have read the feature set then great, please reply saying what features you think you'll be frustrated by in the Personal edition that you could only get with the Professional edition. (It's a genuine request - not being snarky.) You might well be thinking of the previous Unity 3.x/4.x series where the free versions were indeed a bit limited compared to the Professional versions (no render textures, limited post effects, no sprite packing, limited draw call batching and occlusion culling from memory, no performance profiler... etc).

Re:Democracy at the core of Unity culture??? Ha!

[Xest]

You've made the mistake of assume that number of people whining on a forum is representative of a democratic value.

I've never used the Feedback forum but I have e-mailed them feedback. Perhaps the feedback forum just isn't representative of anything like a democratic mandate?

Re:Democracy at the core of Unity culture??? Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's like (pretty much) all democracies of today? A representative democracy, where people vote who gets to vote on their behalf on issues? So, gather up behind some unity representatives and show your support!

Re:unity 5 *IS* FREE (sort-of)

[Anonymous Coward]

Unity 4 and Unity 5 have different policies regarding features in Personal and Pro licenses. What you say is true about Unity 4 but not Unity 5.

I use jMonkeyEngine

[Simon Brooke]

And prefer it to Unity, which I also use a little. The reasons I like it are:

• It's platform agnostic.
• It plays nice with Java and other JVM languages, including Clojure in which my AI is written
• It's open source, and since if I ever get to a place where I've a releasable game I'll want to release open source that matters.

What do you need from your community? Is it feedback? Is it actual engagement (like, do you want people to take responsibility for particular bits of functionality?) It is money? Frankly I'd be happy to subscribe maybe US$100/year to help fund the development of jMonkeyEngine, provided it keeps developing and stays open source.

MATLAB plots

[Anonymous Coward]

MATLAB plots are horrible (look at those colormaps!) and although they got a tiny facelift in 2014b I vastly prefer the Python plotting options such as Mayavi.

Anyway, weak slashvertisement here. UE4 is fully open-source and it's quickly apparent from looking at the codebase that it is made by a team that takes documentation seriously. From the their ranty blogpost I doubt that these "JMonkey"ers have ever actually looked at the UE4 source.

Give it time

[Karmashock]

Right now you might not see the value of your open source project.

But any moment the company could change policy or stop developing it. And when that happens you'll be there.

Re:Give it time

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I think that the movement is just temporal to damage the growing free and open source that in this last years has improve his tools and capabilities.

Re:Give it time

[Karmashock]

Another point is that without an open source engine the AAA engines might not be offering themselves for free.

They're clearly trying to compete with the cheaper/free open source engines.

And one has to wonder why they're doing it? Can they sustain FREE forever? I question that. They might be thinking that they'll kill the open source community by dropping their price and then jack it up once it starts to fall apart.

I'd suggest keeping it active because sooner or later the AAAs will want to get paid.

Recoup production cost

[tepples]

Then fix those platforms.

Video game software developers who do not manufacture their own console lack the authority to "fix those platforms".

And even on PC-like platforms, how would one recoup the cost of developing a game for ioquake3? The most obvious model for the past three centuries is to distribute copies for a fee and restrict others from doing the same. But that doesn't work with copylefted software because the public has the right to make and distribute copies of any derivative of ioquake3.

Re:Democracy at the core of Unity culture??? Ha!

[mark-t]

Of course, but then why bother tallying "votes" for an issue at all?

Re:unity 5 *IS* FREE (sort-of)

[mark-t]

You and several others have been pointing this out to me... so it appears that some things have changed. I will have to check it out in more detail later.

Looks like trying to do any team development, even for a very tiny team of two or three people might still not be possible, however.... it looks like the personal edition might still be a headache for sharing of assets even between just two people.

Re:Democracy at the core of Unity culture??? Ha!

[Xest]

It's still useful feedback for them, it's just not necessarily overriding or representative of total feedback (although the opposite is also possible, that it is representative and the are full of shit- just playing devil's advocate and suggesting their may be a good reason for their claims!).

Sheesh

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot used to have a great community and great discussion.

You people are a bunch of fucking retards.

What the hell happened.

Re:Sheesh

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep asking that myself every time I come here lately. At some point this stopped being a site for informed intelligent discussion and turned into the same pile of excrement that the rest of the internet now hosts.

Half the stories are late, repeats, slashvertisement or crappy clickbait designed to cause argument like "which coding language should I choose"? I'm surprised they're not posting stories like "Should I Switch From Emacs to Vi?"

Re:Democracy at the core of Unity culture??? Ha!

[mark-t]

Honestly, if it weren't *THAT* much higher than any of the other feature requests, I might even buy that as plausible.... but when it has more votes than the next six most popularly voted for issues combined??? With that kind of gap, it is almost certain that they are getting more direct requests for that feature than they are for any other feature as well.

I mean it's POSSIBLE that the feature requests forum is entirely orthogonal to any unbiased random sampling of unity users, but there's no particular reason to suppose that were true. Given that their entire comment itself which said that they cared about democracy actually only tied it in with the notion of keeping costs down to increase the number of people that could utilize it, I am inclined to think that the folks at Unity Technologies just don't actually know what the word "democracy" means.

Re:unity 5 *IS* FREE (sort-of)

[rochrist]

If you sell enough products to make over $100,000.

A better question is...

[kuzb]

...was it ever relevant? Open source game engines are great if you're a hobbiest and want to try your hand at game development, but the reality is that professionals won't use them for real commercial development. The move to "free" for things like unreal engine is not surprising, and it's smart from a business perspective. They want to license to people who are actually making money while reaping the benefits of a large community that will create all kinds of tools and libraries for the platform. One only has to look at the ridiculously long list of unreal tournament mods to know people will eat it up.

More people learning your engine for free means more people employable to work on projects that use it which means more corporate licenses. Everyone wins, but none more so than the person who might not even have tried if he had to invest his own money in to a license.

Game developer perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll consider your engine if it's performant enough for my game, provides the technical and visual capabilities I need for my game, supports the platforms I need, has a modern component-based UI that's easy to navigate, and is fully documented with simple examples. The first two requirements can vary greatly by game, but the latter three are very much in your hands as an engine creator.

My art and design teams don't really care about the technical things you probably focus on; they just want the ability to build their ideas without code by putting together components, assets, and behavior trees. If you want to compete with the other engines, focus on the non-programmer developer experience.

What about Scilab?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not compatible with Matlab but it seems to be a more complete solution than Octave