Mozilla has been a force for good here, working closely with the game engine teams for a couple of years on Emscripten porting to ASM.js, and sharing our open source experience.<p>Mozilla is bringing AAA gaming to the most widely deployed, free and open platform the world has ever known, the Internet. If you're looking for leverage and opportunity for further opening up the gaming industry, Mozilla should be on your short list of partners/friends/projects.<p>And no other project out there has more experience doing open source. (Mozilla was much of the inspiration for the creation of open source model as an alternative to the commercially-challenging free software model that came before.) <a href="http://opensource.org/history" rel="nofollow">http://opensource.org/history</a><p>So yes, "Get cozy with Xiph.org/Mozilla."
The post mentions OpenGEX as a game engine data exchange format. If you're interested in 3d data formats and specifically good runtime formats, you might be interested in glTF too, which is a JSON+binary asset format specifically targeted at storing runtime-optimized data (as opposed to COLLADA which is more a editing-oriented format). It's backed by the Khronos group --the people behind OpenGL / Vulkan / WebGL-- and they have a COLLADA-to-glTF converter: <a href="https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF</a>.<p>Having spent some time working with the format, I hope it takes off and we see native support for it in most tools at some point. I've had great success using glTF to export models + skeletal animations from Blender and then import them for use with WebGL: <a href="https://twitter.com/elisee/status/558238454962978816" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/elisee/status/558238454962978816</a>. This is a little test project made with Superpowers, a soon-to-be open source HTML5 2D+3D game maker I've been designing with a couple of friends: <a href="https://sparklinlabs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://sparklinlabs.com/</a>
"Games must never stop being weird"<p>Reading this kind of stuff heartens me and gives me hope for the games industry.
I still spend a ton of time on gaming, and except for a rare gem, indie games are one of the only places you can see original thought, even if sometimes it is poorly executed.
Let me tell you about a little game called American McGee's Grimm. This was a short and sweet, episodic little game with a lot of quirky-fun visuals and gameplay dynamics. You played a little gnome going around spreading darkness and mayhem inside a fairytale world and once you've covered the world in enough darkness and grossness, the fairytale ending would play out in a much more violent and gruesome way than how it began. OK, so far, so good. Nice casual game, would even be a decent mobile game.<p>The problem is that American McGee has an ego so huge it interferes with his ability to properly market and position his ideas, and for some reason thought this was AAA title material or it should be worthy of a AAA development process. So step one was "license the Unreal Engine". Except the Unreal Engine, with its support for shaders and all that crap, made the game run intolerably slow even on PCs with on-mobo NVIDIA parts, let alone the shitty Intel graphics parts many PCs had at the time. Porting to Wii would have been fucking impossible; arguably, the game would have thrived on Wii as an interesting counterpoint to Hannah Montana's Wiggle-Your-Stick Concert Bash and the usual Wii fare.<p>So yes, there's room in this business for all sorts of game engines. And if you don't know how to write an engine that fits your game, or at least choose a fit from a wide market, maybe you don't know enough about the kind of game you're making and who would be playing it.
There is a lack of free open source state of the art game engines. The best one are based on the open sourced Quake 3 engine and Cube2, though they are 10-15 years old. Additionally such an engines needs a good WYSIWYG editor with an inbuilt shader editor like UnrealEd, CryEngine-Editor. The Quake3/Source-Engine editors are very basic and outdated. Game engines are written in C++, with game logic in a scripting language like Lua or JavaScript.<p>There is also a lack of web 3D engines that ate not based on ThreeJS. Every demo and tutorial is using ThreeJS, instead of WebGL. ThreeJS is an abstraction layer that made sense some years ago when WebGL wasn't around. ThreeJS is slow. One can compile C++ code via emscripten to ams.js, that's great - the downside is the JS filesize.
"Still relevant"? Not to be a dick, uh, but who or what in that article was <i>ever</i> relevant? The author? jMonkeyEngine? Open source (for games)? Pretty sure the answer is a resounding no to all three.<p>That said game devs are pretty open when it comes to open source, kinda. Were it not for fear of patent lawsuits you'd see a <i>lot</i> more source code released. However our careers and livelihoods rely on copyright so you'd probably also see assets under lock and key like all the Doom/Quake releases.
It's worth nothing Unreal Engine 4's source is available for free (before, you had to be on the $20/month plan). You can modify it as you please, and you can share your modifications as well. You can even sell plugins made by customizing the UE4 source code.<p>Sure, it's not GPL/MIT and doesn't meet the full definition of "open source," but this is a good middleground: a sustainable business model for the company, source code access for anyone.
I think it's worth noting that Unreal Engine's source code is available free of charge, and they actively engage with the developer community on GitHub. It's an interesting cousin of Open Source, but nobody talks about this sort of business model.
This page is alarmingly unreadable. Light gray doesn't show up well on white.<p>And while I'm nitpicking, associating Stallman with "Open Source" always gets a chuckle out of me.
The article makes it sound as if UE4 was closed source or at least unwilling to take pull requests, which is not the case. Also, as far as I can tell from skimming, the UE4 source is really comprehensible and you <i>can</i> fiddle around with it, add custom shaders and objects and learn from it.<p>Though I do agree that an absolute beginner should start with a less powerful engine. I learned a lot tinkering with Cocos2D-X that helped me grasp basic concepts of OpenGL.
i do genuinely worry that the big guys going free will help tech development to stagnate.<p>i don't see open source as an answer, because the philosophy attached to these projects usually insulates them from the bulk of the market. they exist in their own bubble, where linux is something more than a platform that a mere 1.5% of customers uses, and those customers refuse to pay for anything. where real world strategies for sales and marketing are ignored under the premise that 'if you make it they will come' type philosophies...<p>i think there is a lot of genuine improvement to be had in terms of cross-platform architecture, performance, visual quality and tools UX without better hardware, programming environments or gigantic teams. the same was true about 5 years ago too. i just can't see it coming from the open source community unless these sorts of ideals are suitably cast to the wind...<p>most importantly if you can't make money to pay salaries then intentionally growing the team behind a product is difficult. that shouldn't need explaining... it should be obvious.