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: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.