Unreal Engine 4 Being Brought Natively To FreeBSD By Independent Developer

[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

[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 .

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[eydee]

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