Unreal Engine 4 Being Brought Natively To FreeBSD By Independent Developer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Unreal Engine 4 Being Brought Natively To FreeBSD By Independent Developer

While FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility/emulation layer that allows it to run some Linux games, an independent community developer has been working on porting Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 to FreeBSD...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Unreal-Engine-4-FreeBSD

[kneekoo]

Sweet!

[brrrrttttt]

Why don't they port something not written by the demographic targeted by their CoC? Oh, because they're all about technical merit when it suits.

[microcode]

Isn't there already a bit of a FreeBSD (9.x) port as a result of Orbis/PS4?

[eydee]

Sounds pretty dangerous. You can easily animate virtual hugs in UE4, which are not allowed on FreeBSD.

[makam]

Sounds pretty dangerous. You can easily animate virtual hugs in UE4, which are not allowed on FreeBSD.

They outlawed hugs? Tyranny.

But TBH I am glad the *BSDs are not left out even though I never used them.

[SXX⁣]

Isn't there already a bit of a FreeBSD (9.x) port as a result of Orbis/PS4?

While it's true that overall UE codebase is more cross-platform any bits that might expose any console-only codepaths likely removed from public codebase. Basically all console APIs and specifics are under NDA even if they 100% identical to one you can use on FreeBSD.

[pabloski]

While it's true that overall UE codebase is more cross-platform any bits that might expose any console-only codepaths likely removed from public codebase. Basically all console APIs and specifics are under NDA even if they 100% identical to one you can use on FreeBSD.

I know my comment will be hugely unpopular, but...

Here is the BSD license at work. They copy-paste your code and give back nothing to the community. The same goes with the Radeon driver for the PS4. Not one byte has leached into FreeBSD.

[makam]

I know my comment will be hugely unpopular, but...

Here is the BSD license at work. They copy-paste your code and give back nothing to the community. The same goes with the Radeon driver for the PS4. Not one byte has leached into FreeBSD.

Honestly, this is why I will always prefer copyleft licenses like the GPL.

[kpedersen]

Regardless of license, I personally think this is a great example of what source access can achieve. Epic would have never done this port themselves (it doesn't make business sense) and yet because they allowed the source to be accessed an independent developer has simply done it allowing for greater platform coverage. This kind of stuff is exactly what keeps software alive for ever.

It is also the reason why UE4 is going to have a greater life-span than closed-source, DRM bullshit like Unity.

I hope that Epic will benefit from this (for publishing the source in the first place) but also the independent developer gets potential consultancy work for doing the initial port. It is a win win.

I think the game industry needs to grow up a bit and realize that source code doesn't mean "give away for free". It simply means that software can be maintained. If only the kids making the games realized this we could end the Wintel monopoly, replace all the crap in the app-stores with *actual* games ported and still play our favourite Windows 95 era games.