Unreal Engine 4 Being Brought Natively To FreeBSD By Independent Developer

[makam]

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.

But then we would see the code monstrosities that game engines are in broad daylight. Like Call of Duties engine which is literally a tower of duct tape with the quake 1/2/3 engine somewhere at the bottom.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Quake_-_family_tree.svg

And I hate to say this but... if people could hack on a games source code, how could game creators monetize annual releases of games? Like Fifa, Nfl and such. Their games would become even more like yearly content packs and they would have to lower the price.

JK, Release all the source code!

[TheLexMachine]

At this point, I think many of us just want UE 1 to be ported. Epic promised to bring it out on their forum years ago and hasn't done anything to make it happen as far as I know. They said much of the old code needing clean-up for modern hardware and OS and left it at that. Unreal Engine 1 is the perfect gaming engine for making small Linux games, despite it not being the most advanced.

[kpedersen]

Unreal Engine 1 is the perfect gaming engine for making small Linux games, despite it not being the most advanced.

I agree this would be nice. Especially since UE4 is quite a resource hog, it makes it quite hard to develop games for fun on my laptop. UE1 would also be possible to get running on open-source drivers i.e for radeon, intel etc. Making it possible to run on OpenBSD etc.

Engines of that era use a lot of middleware that cannot be open-sourced (mainly because the owner of the middleware has long since gone bankrupt .

[pal666]

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

are not left out of compiling ue4 demos? this is useless undertaking, someone just has too much free time

[malavon]

are not left out of compiling ue4 demos? this is useless undertaking, someone just has too much free time

I disagree about its uselessness, but then again I'm pretty biased.
There's a reason these demos exist: they're meant to showcase what the engine can do. When porting to a new platform, they can thus showcase that the engine works on said platform. Besides, it's a great way to attract some attention and see if there's actually an interest in gaming on FreeBSD beyond myself.

Compiling the tech demo's didn't take that much time, relatively speaking. Porting the engine did. Porting/patching/compiling (old) modified third party libraries did. Debugging every piece of code that causes crashes certainly did. In fact, that's exactly what I'm doing right now and it's not looking good due to lack of debugging options. I discovered that (memory-corruption) issue by testing one of the demos in fact.

I am however completely open to any suggestions about how to port UE4 and get all kinks ironed out without touch the demos. Anything that could speed things up is greatly appreciated, it's not like I have too much time at hand

[Mercyful Fate]

are not left out of compiling ue4 demos? this is useless undertaking, someone just has too much free time

But isn't that the point? Someone (ie: not you/me/etc) made the decision to spend their own free time doing what he or she wants. And if the end result is that more people can use that creation/enhancement on more than just some proprietary platform then doesn't everyone win?

Personally, I too prefer/agree with GPL ideals but sometimes BSD license is OK.

[pal666]

But isn't that the point? Someone (ie: not you/me/etc) made the decision to spend their own free time doing what he or she wants. And if the end result is that more people can use that creation/enhancement on more than just some proprietary platform then doesn't everyone win?

there are no users for subj

Personally, I too prefer/agree with GPL ideals but sometimes BSD license is OK.

in this case some anonymous from internet is distributing some binaries(he didn't release source code)
so this is exactly times when bsd is not ok

[Mercyful Fate]

there are no users for subj

You know this how?

in this case some anonymous from internet is distributing some binaries(he didn't release source code)
so this is exactly times when bsd is not ok

I agree that random binary blobs from unknown sources are bad and that, although BSD license permits it, distribution without source would seem to violate the ethics/spirit of open source. It is certainly not a nice business model to start out with nor will s/he win friends or influence within the community.

[k1e0x]

.....

[pal666]

You know this how?

usecase (run ue4 demos on freebsd) is ridiculous