A New Open-Source Game Engine Being Released

[doom_Oo7]

Two questions :
* What is the language used ? From the a quick blink on the screens it looks like C# (hence Mono) but it might be a custom scripting language ?
* Does it support / plan to support Oculus Rift ?

[Ancurio]

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.

Some developers spend a lot of their time and money into developing open source code. I think it would be only fair for them to demand others that build upon their hard work release their changes granting the same rights.

[Juan Linietsky]

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

There's more games, but either they are not very nice, or really old, so not shown in the page. Also, before Okam, we owned a tech consulting company and licensed the engine to other local companies in Buenos Aires.

[Juan Linietsky]

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.

The current 3D renderer is not exactly "high end" (we're a small company), it's GLES2 based and very optimized to look good on mobile devices, It's has a few different codepaths for different mobile GPUs to ensure it runs fast.
has a simplified shader language (and several material presets), forward rendering using addition, shadow maps with PCF, special effects such as screen sampling (for water and heat effects) and the usual post processing like hdr, linear tonemap, glow, bloom, dof blur, fog, color correction, etc.

During the year we'll probably add a GLES3 based renderer that adds more stuff and more interesting techniques such as LPV, SSAO, etc, but the engine is modular to the core, so anyone is welcome to add a new more powerful renderer, as we don't simply because we don't have the business case.

[Juan Linietsky]

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.

Yeah, the Unity community is amazing. I hope that if this game engine catches on, a community will be formed like with other OSS software (such as Blender).

[Juan Linietsky]

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.

Yes, that's exactly the case and the reason we didn't release the engine source code yet, as it needs to be properly cleaned up of all proprietary stuff.

The choice for MIT license wasn't about being brave, It's pretty much the only license it could be opened as.

GPL or LGPL would make matters difficult for developers trying to distribute games for iOS or Windows 8. Even BSD forces to credit the author. I personally don't want anyone using it to have that those extra hassles.

Designing this type of software is difficult, the engine has about one million lines of code. We've been working on it for years and had to go through many designs until we settled for this one, that has worked well for a few years now.

But for a small company, developing it takes really long, so the idea is to give it to the community with the hope that other developers will contribute improvements and make it improve faster. Blender development improved several orders of magnitude when it became open source. For this goal, the entire game engine is very modular, almost anything can be added or replaced without breaking things.

And of course, we will keep the console backends closed because we can't open them, but if another company is licensed and wants to use them we'll still be glad to share.

[Juan Linietsky]

Two questions :
* What is the language used ? From the a quick blink on the screens it looks like C# (hence Mono) but it might be a custom scripting language ?
* Does it support / plan to support Oculus Rift ?

The engine is programmed in a custom scripting language called GDScript, which is about 80% Python-like. (We tried several scripting languages over the years, but always had problems, so we decided to make an inhouse one, there's an article in the docs explaining all the problems we had with each of them).

GDScript is really, really simple and can be learned in a day, as it tries to be as familiar as possible, so far all the programmers that worked with it get comfortable with it in 2 or 3 days.

Still, the engine is modular and allows adding other languages (squirrel is still in the codebase but disabled). Mono (C#) was always a good candidate, but the license is not open enough.

And of course, It's friendly to programming in C++ too.

[mrugiero]

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.

I don't think so. If the authors had portability in mind since the begining, they already wrote abstractions, and cleaning the console related code is just deleting a folder and taking some options out of the build system. And having support for so many platforms makes me think they did.

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

My guess is they intended to do so since moment zero, and for some reason didn't; mostly because looking for the engine I found a lot of empty sites from years ago, all of them related to free software projects.

[Juan Linietsky]

Two questions :
* Does it support / plan to support Oculus Rift ?

Sorry, forgot to answer this one.. it doesn't, but nothing against adding support for it. I've never used it myself.

[Braffe]

Looks promising!
Do you plan to add support for .blend files?
Also I have 2 questions about animation: does it support IK and does editor for 3D animation looks similar to 2D or is it for example node-based like mecanim in Unity?