Parts of the Unreal Engine to be Opened

Posted by Hemos on Tuesday November 23, 1999 @11:56PM from the brining-in-the-sheaves dept.

Mr.Pantz writes "Epic's GreenMarine updated his .plans with some news on Linux support (and such) and UT. Here's the goods: I have permission from Tim to open source certain parts of the engine for the purposes of improving Linux support. What I would like to do is make available the code I have written for Glide, Mesa, input, and audio. I would appreciate Linux programmers taking the time to submit improvements to me at brandon@epicgames.com. I will look into putting up a webpage for this and perhaps a discussion forum. Please email me your input or ideas. I'm leaving to go home for Thanksgiving tomorrow, so I may not be able to start on this until I get back on Friday. Right now I'm working on the Mesa renderer, because I would like to release that soon, if possible. The code that I open source will not allow you to really dig very deep into the engine, but it will let you do a lot of stuff to the renderer and X windows interface. Since my time is split between non-Linux related projects, the Linux port could no doubt be improved if it gets some attention from experienced Linux programmers. "

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That's nice but by schporto · 1999-11-23 19:42 · Score: 3

Yeah its great that its gonna be open. Except it looks kinda like they're just looking for help. The comment about the open code won't allow you to dig deep into the engine, we just want a better interface kinda sounds wrong. I mean really having games run better on linux is great. Having an GPL/BSD/xPL game engine would be even better. But these are just my thoughts.
-cpd
It's a good start by jd · 1999-11-23 19:51 · Score: 4

It's easy to be cynical, and say "hey, they just want a better interface for Linux", but think of it this way. If the Open Source code produced is of exceptional quality, and doesn't hurt the commercial value of Unreal, then they might be tempted to take another step, and release part (or all) of the engine.
If a baby is taking it's first steps, you don't scream at them for not winning marathons, but you might offer encouragement for what they can do. The same is true here.

--
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
1. Re:It's a good start by kijiki · 1999-11-23 21:05 · Score: 3
  
  They plan to license the engine to other game compnaies. They simply will not open source it, because then their potential liscensees would simply download the source, develop their own game, and then release their own open sourced game with copyrighted graphics/story/etc. And Epic loses out on that revenue.