A New Open-Source Game Engine Being Released

[Ancurio]

With his lead engine, the Godot Engine, it's been revised several times and has been powering "dozens of games published for PC, consoles, and mobile."

"Dozens" appears to actually be exactly one dozen: http://okamstudio.com/portfolio/

[scionicspectre]

I've been working with WebGL from scratch, so a project like this that targets the web as well as traditional native platforms is certainly intriguing. That is, if it supports 3D within the browser.

[stiiixy]

That's certainly very interesting and encouraging. Kudo's to the feller who released this for general consumption!

[Kristian Joensen]

Great news that we are getting one more open source engine

Never heard about the games though. Anyone here tried any of the games?

I would love to see a full feature list of in particular the renderer.

[peppercats]

One of Unity's strengths is its huge community and many readily available assets(asset store) and tutorials for beginners.
There's a lot of good material already available, just no communities for them.

[MaxToTheMax]

This is great news! I especially want to commend the choice of a permissive license rather than a copyleft one. It's a brave choice, but it's the right one.

[GreatEmerald]

I especially want to commend the choice of a permissive license rather than a copyleft one. It's a brave choice, but it's the right one.

I don't agree. It is better for wider adoption and ease of use, but it is also put in needless danger of being closed down.

[elanthis]

I don't agree. It is better for wider adoption and ease of use, but it is also put in needless danger of being closed down.

BSD doesn't make being shut down any more likely. Assuming you meant "closed up," one might note the trajectory of certain permissively-licensed projects recently compared to their GPL'd contemporaries, and how certain others are still light years behind the "closed" alternatives.


That said, I wouldn't get your hopes up about consoles. The old owner would be sued into oblivion if he released any code integrating with certain platforms. The SDKs often come with very strict (and rather silly, IMO) non-disclosure agreements that bar releasing _any_ information (including source code that calls into the SDK APIs). That would also mean needing to do a strong (and potentially costly) scrub of the code before releasing it if the author has any sense.

[MaxToTheMax]

I don't agree. It is better for wider adoption and ease of use, but it is also put in needless danger of being closed down.

The engine has been "closed down" for many years and is only being open-sourced now. A closed-source fork with console support already exists. Clearly the author does not find this idea too offensive.

If we believe that open-source is the most rational way to develop software, then we must also believe that rational programmers will not want to close codebases down. Using copyleft instead of relying on people to serve their own best interests voluntarily betrays a lack of confidence in the open-source model.

The engine is being open-sourced because the authors want people to use it. Adding 12 pages of terms and conditions is a great way to make software less usable.

[GreatEmerald]

If we believe that open-source is the most rational way to develop software, then we must also believe that rational programmers will not want to close codebases down. Using copyleft instead of relying on people to serve their own best interests voluntarily betrays a lack of confidence in the open-source model.

Blind faith is neither rational nor pragmatical. You can hope that everyone else plays fair, or you can ensure they do.