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?

[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.

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: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:Not really giving away

[MikeJones8766]

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

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"

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.

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: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.

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: 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: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: 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.

Haha. You said "still."

[bsdasym]

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

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

[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: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

[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: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.

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.

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: 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

[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: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.