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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.
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
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen