[SAS]Solid Snake;2192604 said:
If you're going to call out Epic on not releasing the source code, then neither have 99% of the other game developers out there.
Well, the obvious first comparison with Sweeney's UnrealEngine is going to be Carmack's id engines (especially since, beyond being engines competing with eachother, they also have often had competing first-party games). Of course most
commercial game devs haven't open sourced their games, but the #1 competition in this case has.
[SAS]Solid Snake;2192604 said:
One possible thing that Epic could do, is to release a compiled version Unreal Engine 1 for free use. I don't see that impacting their business model. Possibly a branch of the Unreal Engine is maintained and upgraded by a set of people for the community. That would probably be a really good thing.
Well, for that there's always the runtime, in fact there's the UE2.0 one out there, although no UE3 yet right? And it's only for non-entertainment and non-commercial uses.
But here's the thing. Binary files...well, firstly it's a lot harder for the community to contribute, so you almost might as well not bother to a large degree.
Secondly, there's a reason I have at least one of the first three Quake games (and definitely Doom) installed on nearly every computer-like device I have, from my netbook to my original Xbox and my roommate's Wii up to my most recently-built computer, and trust me, it isn't because I like them more than Unreal or Unreal Tournament...I really don't, not at all. To have a community maintained branch you really need the source code to be open, otherwise it's just hacks and in some cases can't ever work (kindof hard to recompile UT for PPC if it can't be recompiled, no? although you could probably try something crazy).
hal's point earlier, though, is a good one, although I don't think from what I recall that it's entirely from scratch but Carmack does tend to wipe much of the slate clean with each new tech iteration, so to a degree Epic would be "giving up" (if one wants to think of it that way...obviously I don't, but
I'm a dirty hippy 
haha) quite a bit more than id does. It's their choice, I don't actually hold it against them that much, but that being said I'm still desperate to play UT1Wii yaknow? Even trying to get the linux version to work on my netbook has been a serious hassle, and the ancient nature of the core of the original Unreal Tournament often creates a lot of hoops one must jump through to make it run on modern systems. This is something that the community would undoubtably improve if UnrealEngine 1 was open sourced (judging by past success with
Doom right through Quake III, and other stuff like
Duke3D and
Freespace2, both of which have boxed-product level polish in their upgraded ports).
But it's up to Epic, I just really really really wish they would
especially since, as far as mod capability goes, the Unreal engine is definitely among the easiest (and all the more so with UnrealEngine1 where the barrier for entry was a fair bit lower), so the productivity of OpenUnreal-based games would probably be nearly unparalleled (Freespace2 has similarly powerful mod tools, and it shows).
....sorry, it's been boiling in the back of my head for ages how amazing some kind of
OpenUnrealEngine could be, it all just came bursting out
I solemnly swear, if Epic were ever to open source even the oldest of builds of the UnrealEngine I would love them forever and defend them to the death, no exaggeration. As it stands though, I think CliffyB's (yeah, I'm oldskool) comments are a bit ironic considering the kind of venom some of the community has, but on the other hand that venom doesn't seem deserved. Although, that might be the nearness of the UT3 Linux port talking
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