Linux Unreal Tournament Status Update

slothdog writes "Brandon Reinhart of Epic Games has updated his .plan with some more info about the open-sourcing of Unreal Tournament for Linux. Specifically, it will be available under the Artistic License and coordinated through SourceForge. A little snoop-work will lead you to the project's page. Yummy. "

Comments

A couple notes.

[GreenMarine]

Anything Epic releases to open source becomes free software. We won't "sell" the Linux port just as you are not allowed to "sell" a derivative.

Once I get everything together (tomorrow probably, Tim is here but I'm pretty tired) I'll upload a simple tarball release so people can start playing around. Then I'll work on learning rcs and get that set up.

I can foresee companies developing games entirely opensource, but still selling a game...the code is freely obtainable, but the content (maps, textures, models) must be purchased.

I think there is room for open source in commercial software development. I just think that its going to be a while before you see the games industry take up that particular mode of operation.

Finally, a clarification on what we will be releasing.

XDrv.so - This handles window creation, viewport creation, keyboard and mouse input, and all the X windows related stuff.

Audio.so - This is the simple audio library I wrote to mix the sound effects in Unreal Tournament for Linux.

XMesaGLDrv.so - This is the Mesa render device. It implements the engine's render calls and uses the Mesa graphics lib to draw the 3d world.

GlideDrv.so - Same as the XMesaGLDrv.so, but it uses glide.

XLaunch - This executable loads and inits the engine, then starts the main loop. You can actually do quite a lot with this.

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The bottom line is this: I like to play kick ass games. The Linux port of UT is not kick ass. I don't have the time to make it better, so instead of having it languish on my harddrive I'll give it out to anyone who wants it. You don't have to do anything with it. You could take it and write cool stuff and if you want you could contribute it to me. Its all voluntary.

Yes, it'd be great to improve the Linux port of UT. It really needs work! At the same time, I've been working my ass off to support the mod community. Check unreal.epicgames.com for a fast growing new document on writing mods for Unreal Tournament. I've been working with mod authors and mod teams to get them understanding the Unreal Tournament scripting language. This is another facet of that support.

There is nothing ever wrong with giving people more stuff to play with. Most of these guys making mods aren't trying to make money! They don't want to sell their mods. They just want to make cool addons for people to play and maybe to get noticed. This gives another way for a programmer to do that.

Tim responded to an email discussion between Corinne Yu and me. He says that he likes open source because of the power it gives the community to do new things with the engine. He does not, however, like the idea of merging other peoples code back into the engine. I don't mind the latter as long as its on a small scale.