The article attributes all these free engines to Unity but I think they've missed 20+ years of videogame history.<p>First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine.<p>HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has also contributed greatly by open sourcing their old engines.<p>The Torque Game Engine (Tribes) was opened up to low cost licensing by GarageGames in the early 2000s.<p>Unreal has long made their tools available for free, though licensing wasn't quite favorable to the indie developer until more recently.<p>Blender made an attempt at including a game engine but it never really took off from my point of view, although they're still including and improving it.<p>Even Blizzard's inclusion of map tools with Warcraft 3 spawned one of the biggest gaming trends of the past 10 years, DOTA / MOBA games. Though these have all been recreated with other engines (including Valve's Source), the inclusion of modding tools with games is part of the story and some of the competition that the current crop of free tools must face.<p>Open source deserves a mention as well. Ogre 3D, the above mentioned Blender, and other engines and especially tools have sprung up in a variety of games and often fill missing gaps in asset creation.<p>Unity certainly deserves some credit, however. Their simple tooling, relatively early start on mobile, and aggressively lowering the barriers from side project to published game has definitely moved the goalposts for game tooling. The Unity Asset Store is also a great thing.<p>I've really only scratched the surface though. XBox DNLA deserves a mention, the role of the iPhone and mobile in general has been huge, Minecraft's until recently ambiguous quasi-open source nature, and there's many more. We're in a golden age of game creation and I hope to play some amazing new game ideas. I realize there's also going to be an abundance of mediocre imitations from creators like me but its all part of the fun.
The thing that boggles my mind is how there seems to be concern about this concept of charging 5% (like Unreal 4 does).<p>In my mind (not a game developer - tell me if I'm way off here), the framework gives you about 90% of the work up front (10s of thousands of man hours). Then, once you finish your game and it's a success (sales-wise), you pay only 5% of your revenue. This seems like a wonderful deal, right?
In addition to the business model, another key question: source available or not?<p>For reference: the Half-Life (GoldSrc) and Source Engine SDKs, long free to download for modders, are on GitHub these days, but don't contain the complete engine source code.<p>Note: The above space previously claimed the full GoldSrc code was available, because that is what I read somewhere and is repeated at least at [1], but this appears to be incorrect. Sorry :|<p>[1] <a href="https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Goldsource" rel="nofollow">https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Goldsource</a>
Based on the context of the "free for content developers," it sounds to me like they mean it will be free for people developing add-on content for existing games, not that it will be free for people making their own games.
And to top that, not exactly an engine - but a level editor used by several Sony Studios, it also uses a framework that Sony released months ago:<p><a href="https://github.com/SonyWWS/LevelEditor" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SonyWWS/LevelEditor</a><p><a href="https://github.com/SonyWWS/ATF" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SonyWWS/ATF</a> (the framework)<p><a href="https://github.com/SonyWWS/SLED" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SonyWWS/SLED</a> (Debugger? for lua?)
From a purely gamedev perspective, examining the Source engine taught me a lot about engine development, so it's exciting to hear about the next version.<p>Valve's articles on how they implemented networking in Source are particularly useful and interesting[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking" rel="nofollow">https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_...</a>
Odd that idTech, known historically as a corss platform engine that was unique for being opened after its profit was done, is now seemingly one of the more closed engines on the market.
Check out Project Reality for a great example of a very engaging game that will benefit from game engine licensing like this.
Current version is BF2 based and some of the best squad based gameplay I have experienced.
How does Source and Steam fit together? Would it make sense to lower a potential fee for Steam exclusive games built on Source? Would it be "risky" trusting the same company with both the game engine and distribution?<p>It's really great seeing Source 2, Unreal Engine and Unity lowering the bar for game developers to deliver their products.
Can Source 2 really compete with UR4 and Unity5? HL2 was amazing for it's time, but the reason that Portal looks so good is because most of the animations and lighting effects are pre-rendered.
Can any developer comment on Source, Unity, and Unreal and how well they handle mods after the fact?<p>Modding in PC gaming adds such an incredible level of value and creativeness that it being a constant afterthought is bordering on criminal. Steam Workshop is an interesting mechanic, but it would be nice if an engine set out a baseline in advance that didn't require using additional services.
Speaking of open source games, I hope openage becomes playable soon. I loved/still love Age of empires. Although, I have been playing 0ad and it's pretty good but has to cover a lot of ground in performance region.
Honestly I'm hoping Source 2 is everything I dream it can be. I've been focused on asset creation instead of game logic so that I have leeway in deciding on engine (which right now for me is UE4).
I'm interested in knowing if Source 2 will only be targeting PC and Steam Machines, or if Valve has plans for Xbox/PlayStation/Wii and iOS/Android/Windows Phone.
I can't find any information on steam, thought thats where the news would be.<p>anyways, not sure what source 2 will look like, but if it means that we can use the existing source code for games like counterstrike or any of the valve's fps series, then for fps indie developers this is a welcome news.<p>we should see an explosion of new types of fps games with the availability of such base to build new games from, add new content, new modes of play etc.