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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

It would actually be really cool if games officially adopted this kind of engine-based model that we see in some of the examples, where the "engine" would be FOSS (meaning it can be ported, modded, improved, etc.), and the "game" that is sold is the compiled binary blob graphics, assets, scripts, etc.

In short, I guess it would basically be like selling RPG Maker games or DOOM wad's, but without the engine itself being proprietary.

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KeeperRL is a game being developed and sold in that model! It's both on Steam (where I bought it), and on Itch.io (which seems to be the thing, for indie games now..?) and on Github -- same thing, full open source. If you buy it, you're essentially buying the build/bundle/autoupdate conveniences, and I think some assets; if you build it from source, you've got the same essential product.

  - http://keeperrl.com/
  - http://store.steampowered.com/app/329970
  - https://miki151.itch.io/keeperrl
  - https://github.com/miki151/keeperrl

Not a shill or by any means a sockpuppet; just a pleased owner/supporter, and I like and want to support this model!

Mind, this is a game, not an "engine". And I'm okay with that; building an "engine" rather than building an actual game is something that we OSS nerds are already prone to self-nerdsniping on, and the resulting engine-with-no-game doesn't really help anyone (including, typically, other game makers, because without a single trial-by-fire, that "engine" code tends to be pretty useless). It's good that it's OSS, even if (and especially if?) it's not an "engine".

I've heard a couple of good things about Godot [0]. However, I couldn't tell you any titles that use it without looking it up.

Perhaps there is no standard engine in the FOSS world because the engines are not advertised as strongly as the most popular commercial ones. Unity, after all, will gladly let you know it's being used whenever the game starts.

[0] https://godotengine.org/

I had been hacking the open source quake 3 engine while in the community of Urban Terror, a closed source game on top of it. I believe a problem that studios would face with what you are suggesting is that there is still a lot you can control at the low level, ranging from cheats to game behavior.

PS. Of course one could claim you can never be certain of those (hacking disassembled code is always an option) but in any way you look at it, if you do have the resources to have your own engine you retain more control.

Isn't UE reasonably close to that already for most practical, if not ideological purposes?

But that only works if Unity open sources the engine. A ubiquitous engine is not the same as an open engine. The fact that we now have jDoom, Doomsday, and other enhancements to the engine that let us play Doom, Doom2, Hexen, Heretic, etc. only work because id software released the source code. Otherwise, it would be like any other proprietary engine, and we'd have to reverse-engineer it if we want to be able to play those games again.

I'm sure you could argue that Unity is currently more cross-platform than engines were 10-20 years ago and already works on Mac/Win/Linux/Android/whatever, but we can't guarantee it will be around in 20 years.

UE is Unreal Engine, not Unity. Presumably Unreal Engine 4, which gives full source access to anyone who agrees to their EULA and takes patches through GitHub.

Oh I meant Unreal, not Unity, should have spelled it out. Unreal source is available.

This is why acronyms should be avoided on the internet, unless they are unambiguously unique or presumably understood by any reader.

ZOMG, no, IMHO. More seriously, 'UE' is a pretty standard abbreviation in the context. But yes, typing it out would have been better. lol.

I think he meant Unreal Engine, which isn't strictly open source but you get access with a monthly fee

There is no monthly fee, they take a % of revenue of whatever game you sell.

Considering that ideology often comes from practical considerations and that the practical consideration in UE's licensing is that you are still bound to Epic and unable take the code and run with it, then i'd say that no, it isn't reasonably close.

unable take the code and run with it

There are really very few practical limits there. You can distribute a game with a modified engine. But what the poster was talking about was a common engine with source that will be around for a long time. UE sounds like a fairly close match. Maybe they had something else in mind but 'the ideological is the practical and vice versa so this ain't nothing' seems more like some sort of odd logical (ideological?) contortion than an argument.

There is the very practical limit of having to pay Epic if what you make with it happens to make you money above some arbitrary point. This introduces additional overhead to your finances - you may think it is justified, but it is still a limit.

Another very practical limit is that you can only distribute changes to the engine through either Epic's marketplace or a fork of their GitHub (so you cannot distribute changes through your own website, for example).

Also you cannot make a modification to the engine itself (even through the "allowed" means) and distribute it yourself as an alternative version/fork of the engine.

Finally, yet another very practical limit, is that you cannot take source code out of the engine for use in other engines and products - no matter what.

All these are practical - not ideological - issues that proper open source projects do not have. Unreal Engine is not open source, you just have access to the engine's source code for minor and project-specific modifications and even that comes with several limitations as i already mentioned above (and there are others tool, just read the engine's EULA).

Don't people usually end making changes to the Unreal Engine executable and tie their game to it? As far as I know, it's not possible for me to take the Unreal Engine source code, compile it possibly with modifications, and play arbitrary Unreal Engine games with it (like say Gears of War 4).

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