Unreal Engine 4 Being Brought Natively To FreeBSD By Independent Developer

[aht0]

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.

GPL.. dictatorship. Oddly restrictive for a supposedly "free" license.

And if Sony had outsourced their Radeon implementation, it would have not gotten into FreeBSD anyway. PS4 is only notionally "x86"

[137ben]

Malavon,
I personally am not interested in game development, and I very rarely use my desktop for gaming. But I do appreciate seeing the work you are doing porting UE4 to FreeBSD. Also, I have to admit I'm impressed by the patience you've shown in explaining to forumites what you are doing and why you are doing it.

[malavon]

As a starter I would really like to point out that there's a post on the FreeBSD forum which was linked in the original story where many of the points and questions in this thread have already been addressed. Quick links have been provided for the time-lacking forum members.

so this is exactly times when bsd is not ok

Don't get carried away by your preference for a certain license. Neither GPL nor BSD is applicable to Epic's Unreal Engine source code. Not all open source is released under a permissive (like BSD and MIT) or a strict license (GPL, GPL Lesser). Please go ahead and read Unreal® Engine End User License Agreement if you want to discuss this a little more knowledgeable.
You should be able to come to the conclusion that there is no possibility for me to release this code to the general public under any license at all. Nor do I want to.
While the entire license is a must-read for anyone even contemplating working on UE4's internal code, I don't want to keep this small snippet of the license from the hastier readers:
Code or content under the following licenses, for example, are prohibited: GNU General Public License (GPL), Lesser GPL (LGPL) (unless you are merely dynamically linking a shared library), or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Code or content under the following licenses, for example, are allowed: BSD License, MIT License, Microsoft Public License, or Apache License
I can only suggest to think carefully about why Epic needed to add this clause. It renders any discussion about licenses useless and could thus be assumed ridiculous in its own right.

usecase (run ue4 demos on freebsd) is ridiculous

Let me kindly refer to Post #15 in this very thread where I've already given my thoughts about this statement.

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.

Please note that games in general are not created open-source. I've played many more proprietary games than open source ones. The binaries I've provided are actually an exception to this since it is possible to go and compile them yourself, although it's a pretty lengthy process. That is, if you agree to Epic's license terms of course
Besides, I'm not an unknown source nor anonymous. I leave the reason for that statement as an exercise to the reader.

Not everyone has requested access to the UE4 source on GitHub so that is where the demos come in. By compiling the demos, he is saving many others time and effort from not only requesting source access from Epic but also the 3 hours or so compile time needed to compile the Editor before they can then track down the demo source code and compile demos themselves.

Thank you for explaining this, I'll add a little more. The (tech and game) demo's are not on Github, they can only be downloaded through Epic's launcher. As you might guess, there's no launcher for FreeBSD nor Linux, so you're required to set up a dual boot or a VM.
Again, let me refer to Post #15 and the FreeBSD forum. Testing the engine requires code, most notably code which is known to work on other platforms. Once compiled & cooked, it's a small step to make this available to a larger public.

In case you'd still like to create your own binaries: there is no how to, but the steps needed
1. compile all third party libraries applicable, for most of which I have foreseen a nice FreeBSD-compatible shell script. Not all of them yet, you're on your own there.
2. compile the engine, editor and relevant tools; includes cooking a ton of shaders
3. compile/cook the demo itself

A decent computer combined with a moderately-skilled developer will do this in one to two fortnights for the InfiltratorDemo.

I will try to answer questions you have about the actual port either here or on the FreeBSD forum, but for anything already answered on the FreeBSD forum I will refer to it directly like I did in this post. I will however not answer questions that I consider time-inefficient or insulting. Contrary to the believe of pal666, I don't exactly have too much time at hand but simply chose to use it to give something back to the open source community I've enjoyed for many years. That does however mean that I carefully have to manage the time I spend on forums.

[kpedersen]

usecase (run ue4 demos on freebsd) is ridiculous

You kinda miss the point. In the FreeBSD forums, malavon has also shared a link to his GitHub account. From there if you have access to the official UE4 source repo (which is under a proprietary license, not ultimate freedom unlike MIT or BSD) you can also access his fork with all changes to compile UE4 and UE4Editor on FreeBSD. Otherwise his code repo will also appear private to you.

Not everyone has requested access to the UE4 source on GitHub so that is where the demos come in. By compiling the demos, he is saving many others time and effort from not only requesting source access from Epic but also the 3 hours or so compile time needed to compile the Editor before they can then track down the demo source code and compile demos themselves.

I mean... you surely know why distros provide procompiled binaries from their package manager right?

[pal666]

You know this how?

usecase (run ue4 demos on freebsd) is ridiculous

[k1e0x]

.....

[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.

[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]

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.

[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