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