In the Age of Free AAA Game Engines, Where Does Our Open Source Engine Stand? 184
New submitter erlend_sh writes The game development industry just got hit by a tidalwave of free: Unity 5, Unreal Engine 4 and Source 2 all give away their flagship product for free now. They're all different brands of 'free,' but who cares? The average game developer certainly won't. Which left us wondering: Are hobbyist-run open source game engines like jMonkeyEngine still relevant?
From the linked article: This just in: Physically Based Rendering isn’t dark magic, cross platform publishing is not the thing of fairy tales, and a solid asset pipeline is not exclusive to a million dollar budget. They’re not easy; faaar from it. But as long as we can show that these things can be accomplished by a part-time hobbyist just for the heck of it, the end user gets a fair price (i.e. free!), and our fellow hardcore misfits will continue trying to solve the most difficult problems the industry has to offer. ... If this exciting new thing called “free” keeps going in the right direction, everyone still in the race gets a leg up.
what problem is your product trying to solve? (Score:5, Insightful)
the Pro products have support departments and support for assets and other additions to their products. when a game has a 2-3 year dev time your product stands out by making it easy for devs to cut their time to market and save money
no one cares if it's open source or hobbyist made, they care about having their devs who cost $200,000 or more per year EACH spend less time making games
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Well that's easy, they want 18 competing engines and standards. Queueueueueueue up xkcd joke here.
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In my experience users can be quite generous if you explain why you need the money and what the money will get them.
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Perhaps that's it. I don't need the money, and they get pretty much whatever they ask for anyway. :)
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The fact that the return is very likely to be zero is why I generally don't put a 'donate' button on software I release. If I'm not doing it for the money, I might as well make people not feel guilty about not donating by not even mentioning the possibility.
The funny thing is (albeit with an incredibly small sample size) I've found that I get a lot more feedback/nice things said about the no-donation software. My speculation is that many people who like it but didn't donate feel guilty about emailing the
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Yes, same here.
I don't care about ego boost, but I do like the idea that my work is assisting someone in some way. For me, the more people I can see using it, the more I'm motivated to work on it.
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As an independent game engine developer, you have the skills to provide a service nobody is yet doing well: training. API manuals for engines smell like code, and that can be daunting to a newcomer. Wading through an ocean of video tutorials is frustrating because the speaker may mumble or drag progres
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(in a console window) "We're going to make a window now! To do this, we'll use this code
(next session) "Hi! Last time we learned how to make a window. This tim
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These companies can still pull revenue with support services, asset sales, and code sales. That broadens the economy by empowering hobbyists and freelancers to take on the role they're good at in game development and license the fruit
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what do game devs make? a few years back, friends of mine at EA were making around $80K/yr although they were working 60+ hrs/wk.
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$80K/yr? With presumably the elite skills and technological flexibility you need along with incredibly bad hours?
With that level (none) of job security?
Boy, am I glad I never got suckered into the game industry. Scary!
(Unless that's what they're paying right out of school.)
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I got ~$35k (in Minnesota, making straight to Wal-Mart cheapie games) at one employer while still in school and $45k (in California making A list games) at another in 1996 straight out of school. $45000 is about $65000 today, adjusted for inflation. Pay in the industry has gone up way faster than inflation, so it would not surprise me if $80k/year was starting in California.
And yeah, crappy hours doesn't even begin to address it - we literally lived off of pizza and cola in the office during crunch. I went
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Well, $80K right out of school for a grueling job (and presumably top students) isn't insanely bad, although a choice I'd personally have avoided.
I was thinking $80K for 10+ years experience, which is insanely bad. (Although with those hours, perhaps after 10 years, there's only a a burned out husk left :-))
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Well, $80K right out of school for a grueling job (and presumably top students) isn't insanely bad
It's actually insanely good. $80K/yr would be WELL above average for just out of school.
These were people around 30 yrs old with 5-7 yrs of experience and MS degrees.
They weren't top students/coders, but they were competent enough to get hired by EA.
When thinking about salaries, I think people need to separate out what top hires make in Silicon Valley from most people who are more average and not living in SF.
$60K/yr out of school would be pretty solid/good for an average university CS grad in a random town
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It's actually insanely good. $80K/yr would be WELL above average for just out of school.
I'll admit that's a really good income (out of school) for a general CS job, but for a job that's 80 hours/week? That's like oil-rig platform hours (except the oil rig sends you home every so often), in which case oil-rig platform pay would be expected.
You are absolutely right about where you live making a *huge* difference in what's reasonable. I imagine there are parts of the country in which $80K/year would allow yo
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Supply >>> Demand.
That's generally considered good pay, too, because they know if you quit, there are 10 people waiting by the door for your spot.
Video games are a terrible business - you're spending years on a product that has n
Are they making a game or a portfolio? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing most of these game developers are looking to get a contract with a big studio and in that case showing your understanding of a major commercial engine is almost as important as the game itself. Using an open source engine nobody's heard off is like making an application in Ruby to get a job as a C++ developer, sure it proves some talent but 9 out of 10 recruiters will go with the C++ guy.
Question (Score:2)
Ignoring the poorly-masked slashvertisement:
How many of those AAA engines were written in Java?
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P.S. Love indie games, never heard of any of those in the "showcase" for this engine.
That's, of course, after I waited for MEGABYTES of unresized images to load on each page of that section, that didn't even do so to allow in-page zooming...
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Depends on what your definition of AAA is, I guess. Minecraft is written in Java, and from what I can tell is one of the best selling games right now.
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Minecraft isn't a AAA game though, it's indie. And one of the few indie success stories, much like DOOM and ID Software were indie. The difference between the two is that ID Software continued to innovate and evolve. Mojang simply cashed out.
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Again, depends on your definition of AAA. If you think that only huge companies spending lots of money can generate AAA titles, then no. If your definition is it's simply a successful game, then yes.
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In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
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Depends (Score:4, Interesting)
I use matlab. I like matlab. It's not the matter if its expensive (which it is) or not.
The point is: There have been applicaitions (more than one) in my past, where octave (a free matlab clone) served me much better, plainly for the reason that i could actually recompile it or adapt it in a way that it ran exactly like i wanted it to run. usually these "unusual" circumstance involved running it on limited HW, automatically, with limited memory, many instances, or independent of a nework connection to the license activation.
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And this is an excellent sample of how FOSS people alienate other people.
a) Person a says "i like commercial SW a"
b) Person a says "but i figured out that ultra-mature (>20y) FOSS b (which is nearly compatible to a) is even better for some things"
c) Person b says "use project c" (which is immature and incompatible)
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I had someone recommend Julia to me over MATLAB and they did it for performance reasons. When I looked about a year ago the stiff ODE solver in Julia gave the wrong answer for the kinds of problems I do. I stopped looking at that point.
Julia will mature in time but right now having something run faster but wrong is not useful.
Octave on the other hand is pretty nice I just like MATLAB more due to the whole IDE that is part of it but I agree with the drolli that in some circumstances octave is a better choice
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I am not involved in the Julia development, and I wouldn't describe myself as "FOSS people".
Opportunity knocks (Score:2)
Throw in the grant system that Epic is putting into place, and those who want to contribute to making Blender a better game dev tool have another potential source of income.
The FBX import/export system is improving all the time, but now you can show that work to Epic and if they see it as contributing to the community they'll fund you.
Something like this could really boost the productivity of the modeling and animation tools in the open source community.
Haha. You said "still." (Score:2)
Um... they're not free (Score:2)
My own take (Score:5, Informative)
I have been developing a game based on the Cube 2 engine, specifically the Red Eclipse fork. The benefits, as I saw it, was that the engine was Zlib-licensed, and most of the game code was re-usable (both Red Eclipse and my game are first-person arena shooters). The downsides were the lack of experience - the code is unfamiliar and sparsely-documented (and in some places downright bad), not many people are familiar with the level editor, and the model import system is not the most artist-friendly.
Currently it's at a proof-of-concept state - it's playable, the core gameplay is there, but it's using Red Eclipse assets that are CC-licensed, not suitable for commercial release, and the few maps are blocky and spartan.
I am seriously considering a switch to Source 2, because I'm much, much more familiar with Hammer and SMDs than with the Cube 2 asset toolchain, and I'm sure some of my Source modding experience will carry over to Source 2. I'm waiting for more details, though, particularly regarding the toolchain. I'd have to redo pretty much everything, but it would likely make for a far better product. Particularly if it ends up being ported to consoles - Red Eclipse lacks gamepad support, and having seen the code, it's not an easy thing to add.
Re:My own take (Score:5, Informative)
Cube 2 missed an opportunity, I think. I loved that octree-based map engine. Here was an accessible and powerful cube based engine from before Minecraft was a twinkle in Notch's eye. To this day, I don't know of any other engine that lets you collaborate with multiple people in real time as though it were part of the game - and with level editing so easy, it could have fostered the kind of mapping community not seen since the days of Doom, Quake, and Unreal (1/UT/2004).
Now everything is "model it in 3DSMax, Maya, or Blender." Complicated tools, meandering workflows, just a time consuming process in general. Even Unreal is like that now. Why use the shape editor when you can just import your model? Does the new engine even have that tool anymore? No it doesn't [beyondunreal.com]. Just import or use an existing mesh for your complex details. Want to make your own but don't know how? Time to learn this other tool over here.
I'm not complaining exactly. I'm pretty good with Max and Blender. I'm just reflecting (as an amateur) on what mapping felt like in the past, and how it compares to today. It was pretty straight forward back then. There was probably a lot of pent up creativity from people who didn't have the time to learn multiple tools. Minecraft quenched their thirst, but the Cube 2 engine could have been the thing to do that. If only it were better documented, and positioned better as an engine for hobbyists.
The farthest I got with it was map editing and compiling it from the source. So I know what you mean. It's been a while, but I doubt anything has changed. Sorry to hear about the state of your game.
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The problem is that a map editor is basically a gimped level designer, usually with gimped scripting.
Once you go there, you realize that instead of using some 3D software, and then importing that to a engine, there is possible to make a in engine tool, that can make maps. The problems you then face are the fact material mapping and your material engine may be shit. Really shit. To the point where imported photoshop image files requires massive hacking to get mapped properly. Don't forget that UV mapping for
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The problem with cube-based editing is that not everything wants to be based on a cube. It's not worthless, it's a cute trick, but it's not really all that wonderful for modeling things. It's OK for level geometry for the most part, but awful for everything else.
Democracy at the core of Unity culture??? Ha! (Score:3)
I laughed out loud when I read that.
In the feature requests feedback forum, making the editor available for Linux is vastly more popular than any other feature request for Unity,. beating out the next most popular by about a factor of 4, and Unity Technologies has publicly stated that they have absolutely no plans on ever porting their editor tools to Linux.
If that's the business decision they are comfortable with, that's one thing, but considering that in the article where they are bragging about how they are promoting democracy by tying it in with how the product was being priced, rather than what people have actually said that they want, I'm pretty sure that I can safely conclude the developers at Unity do not have the foggiest idea what the word "democracy" actually means.
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You've made the mistake of assume that number of people whining on a forum is representative of a democratic value.
I've never used the Feedback forum but I have e-mailed them feedback. Perhaps the feedback forum just isn't representative of anything like a democratic mandate?
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It's still useful feedback for them, it's just not necessarily overriding or representative of total feedback (although the opposite is also possible, that it is representative and the are full of shit- just playing devil's advocate and suggesting their may be a good reason for their claims!).
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Honestly, if it weren't *THAT* much higher than any of the other feature requests, I might even buy that as plausible.... but when it has more votes than the next six most popularly voted for issues combined??? With that kind of gap, it is almost certain that they are getting more direct requests for that feature than they are for any other feature as well.
I mean it's POSSIBLE that the feature requests forum is entirely orthogonal to any unbiased random sampling of unity users, but there's no particular
I use jMonkeyEngine (Score:2)
And prefer it to Unity, which I also use a little. The reasons I like it are:
What do you need from your community? Is it feedback? Is it actual engagement (like, do you want people to take responsibility for particular bits of functionality?) It is money? Frankly I'd
Give it time (Score:3)
Right now you might not see the value of your open source project.
But any moment the company could change policy or stop developing it. And when that happens you'll be there.
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Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine (Score:5, Informative)
Your post says "I don't know anything about game development, but I've got this sweet anti-F/OSS rant I've been waiting to post for a while"
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and that Crystal Space thing.
There is Godot and Darkplaces at least. The issue with them all are all documentation-related, and perhaps no-killer-app for any of them. And then there's the issue of open source game designers that believe switching engines and deprecating APIs will make a game modern and better than ever.
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Torque was also one of the better engines I've tried, and so very much better than Gamebryo, which was supposedly great as NetImmerse, but years of aging and mismanagement left it a steaming pile of poo by the time I got to try it. I haven't used Torque in a long time though - I can imagine if they didn't rewrite it there'd be problems today. I remember hitting the same problem on an engine I was working on with Mac support when OpenGL 3.0 came out. 3.0 completely tossed out the state machine and you need t
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Irrlicht was never poised to destroy anything, had some terrible design decisions and the developer refused to incorporate some major fixes, preferring to do everything himself. This caused several developers to fork the project. I fixed errors in his BMP importer and rewrote his TIFF importer to properly work with the complete spec and he refused to include them, so I gave up on that project (and I already had patched it extensively from the forums). At that time Crystal Space was going through a complete
Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine (Score:5, Informative)
It's a slashvertisement submitted by the guy doing the jMonkeyEngine. The focus seems to be on price. "The price of everything and the value of nothing" comes to mind.
If you don't want to go the subscription route, you can download Unit5 5 Personal for free, and then buy the Pro version for a single payment of $1,500.00 once you exceed $100,000 per year of revenue. Future upgrades are half price. Sounds like a very fair offer.
Anyway, I'm downloading Unity to give it a look-see. Just 'cuz.
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Okay, so I downloaded both jMonkeyEngine and Unity 5.
Unity 5 was interesting enough that I spent a couple of hours playing with it. There's a lot there, probably will be a bit overwhelming for a while, but definitely polished, inspires confidence, and the tutorials I looked at are up to snuff.
jMonkeyEngine? Looking through the documentation, it has some potential, but it's nowhere near as intuitive as Unity. The UI is disappointing.
Re:never heard of this jMonkeyEngine (Score:5, Insightful)
Some things are free and done very well like OpenMP and MPI however for many other tools the free version is just not as good.
I have been a professional python developer for about 10 years now but when writing matrix based simulations and doing data visualization numpy, scipy and matplotlib are not viable competition to MATLAB.
Most free software projects have HORRIBLE documentation and epicly horribly defaults. The problem is that the people that know how to change these things are also too busy doing other work. Yes I do have the skills to fix many parts of matplotlib and numpy but I can also just use MATLAB and get my work done.
Since the work I do is on writing computing simulations for drug manufacturing the more time it takes me to solve a problem the more people DIE. I like free software a lot and have used it for a very long time but I am passed the point of caring much about the license or the cost of the software.
Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine (Score:4, Interesting)
What about open source software from a reproducible research point of view? Don't you think it's important that everyone can look under the hood of the scientist tools you're using?
About MATLAB: I know a world renowned statistician who ones wrote a statistics toolbox for MATLAB that was way better than the one you could buy from MathWorks. This is around 2000. He submitted it to their site for third party toolboxes. It was very popular. It was taken down because it was competing too well with their toolbox (don't know what the official reason was). Now he's a master contributor to R. I jumped the ship for similar reasons (unaware of this story at the time).
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I don't do much in the way of statistics and R just does not seem like a good fit for what I do at all. MATLAB has better PDE solvers, better non-linear optimization and stiff ODE solvers.
Most scientists I have seen publish their MATLAB code however I am more concerned about industry than open research.
How much slower do you think it is okay to get work done in order to put it in a completely free software framework? How many people is it okay to have die from the additional time?
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"How much slower do you think it is okay to get work done in order to put it in a completely free software framework? How many people is it okay to have die from the additional time?"
By all means use the tool that provides the best value for you and your company. Personally I find Python much more productive than MatLab for scientific work in my field. But I guess it depends on which features you need and what kind of software you are developing.
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This is the kind of reply I like.
There are so many different kinds of tasks in the world that sometimes you find a language or library just seems to fit one of them very well and other times while you could do it the fit is not as good. In the end what matters is getting the job done.
There are just a few things in the MATLAB global optimization toolbox and some of the pde/ode solving built into it that make my life much easier and faster to develop with. However for many other tasks I use python. Right now
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Well duh. You are comparing numerical libraries for Python to what's basically an IDE with its own language. Try R instead.
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How is R a comparison to MATLAB for engineering work? From what I have looked at it does not have a development environment to compare to MATLAB, it also lacks all the solving and non-linear optimization methods that MATLAB has built in. R may be very nice but solving systems of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of coupled ODEs, PDEs and doing non-linear optimization just does not look like something it is very good at.
I am doing very little statistics and mostly writing simulations.
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I agree that MATLAB can be expensive and that in many ways it would be better if everyone used FOSS. However the reality is that right now my choices are between MATLAB and python and for many tasks MATLAB allows me to get the job done faster and since the job involves human lives it makes the choice fairly simple.
I would like better FOSS tools to replace MATLAB and especially better documentation and defaults and the sad thing is I have the skill to do a lot of that work but not the time. Choosing between
Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine (Score:3)
Even on the desktop I doubt that lots of people choose Linux because of the price of the OS.
It's security, flexibility, stability, availability of free tools, etc.
Most hardware come with Windows preinstalled, yet some people choose to wipe it out or dual-boot Linux although their Windows is already paid for.
My (not computer person) wifehas been using Linux for more than 10 years at home, and she is amused when relatives complain about their troubles with ad/malware, bsods, forced upgrades that render the co
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That "some people" is down to less than 1%. The only way it gets to even 1.34% is because of chromebooks. This is down from a peak of about 2% "way back when" - when everyone, including myself, still believed in the possibility of a "year of the linux desktop."
Many of us have just given up due to distro-hopping fatigue.
Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine (Score:2)
So?
I was answering to "I mean who is gonna care about jumping through the hoops and dealing with the bullshit of a Linux desktop if they can get the latest Windows for $20 or even free?", meaning that most people who "jump through the hoops" do not do it because Linux is free and Windows is not, which the comment implied. If it is 1% or 90% was not the point. The reason for doing it was.
Yes, Linux fares better in servers - I have 5 of them at work, and my wife would never have switched, nor have been able t
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nor have been able to keep Linux up and running if she hadn't married a Unix sysadmin
And this is why there will can't have nice things from open source. Seriously, after wasting a few decades trying to get people to use linux, it's not worth it. Too darned fragmented, too many "home user" tools that are poor clones of the real thing, etc.
Also, linux users ARE cheap. Look at what happened to Loki Games - nothing has changed.
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Also, linux users ARE cheap. Look at what happened to Loki Games - nothing has changed.
EagleCAD make their not very cheap EDA tools for Linux. I knwo this because I have a copy, and it's native, not Wine or anything. Apparently it's worth their while to do so.
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Looking a bit deeper, it runs on Windows and Mac as well. And since they started in 1988, you can be pretty sure that they weren't supporting linux then, since linux didn't even exist.
And yes, EagleCAD is cheap. I was paying more than that 20 years ago for a compiler.
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Seriously WTF are you talking about?
Your claim was basically that Linux people are "cheap" and therefore won't pay for software and therefore it's not worth commercially suppporting Linux.
The fact that EagleCAD commercially supports Linux is proof against that.
Just because you've paid more for software (guess what? I have too and I have to keep an XP VM around to run the compiler---IAR as it happens) doesn't mean it's cheap. It's a business cost so I'm on the commercial license, not the personal one.
And why
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So please get real. Much of open source is slowly dying, and a large part of that is due to the restrictions of the GPL on "free" software. The BSD license has, every year, put more new uni
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EagleCAD is a blip. Static. Noise. And I was referring to the commercial license, which is still less than what I paid 20 years ago for a real compiler (not counting inflation). The business you're talking about could not survive on only it's linux revenue - though it could survive only on it's windows and osx revenue.
You're still intentionally ignoring the point. If Linux is commercially worthless, then why do they support it at all? The fact that the OSX and Windows markets are larger is beside the point,
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Your anecdote doesn't prove anything. Must really burn you that Apple adds more unix consumer users every year than all the linux consumer users worldwide, despite linux having almost a decade head start.
There's an advantage that both Microsoft and Apple have over linux - their users know what they're getting - a consistent user experience. Remember the KDE 3.5 to 4.0 shift, and how OpenSuse made 4.0 the default despite it being totally unusable? Or the Gnome 3 fiasco? Or Ubuntu Unity? Or gcc (either 2.95
Re: never heard of this jMonkeyEngine (Score:2)
Dang, just realized I originally replied to a Troll.
Ok, you won. All Linux users are cheap. I only keep using Linux not because it is safer, easier to maintain (for me), needs less hardware power to run, does not turn the GUI upside down on every release, nor because it does everything my wife needs done. It's because I don't want to pay for Windows (no, wait, it came with Windows from Dell, no option to refuse it - darn, I didn't NEED Linux!)
Few home users would be able to maintain Windows sane for almost
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First, when dell made a big thing of selling linux boxes, they were the same price as windows boxes. Why? Because of the higher support costs. It's why companies like WalMart got out of the linux market (remember their gPC?) - the returns were just too costly.
However, you had the option to refuse to activate Windows and get a refund. Why didn't you? Or you could have bought a box from a linux vendor (though you'd be paying more, since there are no economies of scale). Or you could have bought a Mac. if yo
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"However, you had the option to refuse to activate Windows and get a refund. "
no, I hadn't.
"Or you could have bought a Mac."
or I could buy a Dell and dual-boot linux, since somethings at that time still required Windows (for example our home banking)
"Printer support under linux is still a crapshoot."
works perfectly with my networked, wireless HP
"Not having to pay for licensed copies of software is a big selling point in both business and private use."
Yes, and if the free alternative perfectly solves your problem, what's wrong with that? (besides not disliking what you dislike)
" the paid alternatives are much much better."
Good for you; "better" is a matter of opinion. Everyone is entitled to one. For me, "better" is something that does the job and gives me no headaches for the minimum cost in time&money. If that's
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Look around. Almost the entire world disagrees with you. Maybe there's a reason?
Free/open software works for some use cases. However, most people find that their time is worth something, and that commercial software does what they need done better. Why do you think so many linux fanatics still dual-boot?
Over the long term, the financial success of the open source model is simply not capable of providing the needed capital to compete as a stand-alone solution for the majority of users.
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Look around. Almost the entire world disagrees with you. Maybe there's a reason?
Sure there is: Almost the entire world doesn't have a clue about computers or information security. I'm quite proud that they disagree with me in almost every aspect.
Why do you think so many linux fanatics still dual-boot?
Because Windows can't do somethings right, of course. Isn't it nice to have options?
Look, if you suddently realized you are not able to cope with maintaining your Linux desktop anymore, so you had to ditch it after so many years, it's your decision. Relationships eventually go sour, but you don't need to spill bitterness on every opportunity to
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Also, linux users ARE cheap. Look at what happened to Loki Games - nothing has changed.
Nonsense. Everything has changed. Loki is an old story, the new story is Steam, where games go on sale and generate revenues that would otherwise have been lost to them completely; and the Humble Bundles, likewise. The new pay-what-you-want model has revitalized gaming on Linux.
Granted, this model doesn't produce AAA titles, but that's OK. It doesn't eliminate traditional models. It does move some of the money away from them, but that's OK too. We had too many AAA titles — many of them were garbage. W
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Problem was, they were both wine-based crap, not native ports. The Kylix UI was so bad it was slower than Java.
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Web surfers dont agree with your 1% goal. They leave the desktop computers and use mobile computers today.
Windows is down to 55% of the net surfers. The winner is Linux.
20% of the webpages on Internet are today served to client computers running the Linux kernel.
Thats mostly because of Android. Another 20% are using an Apple operating system.
In 5 years, client computors running a Linux kernel will surf on more web pages then Windows machines.
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So this is the year of Linux on the desktop?
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Also, because of the fragmentation and other issues (systemd, etc), people are taking another look at FreeBSD. Linux is just too much of a hassle. I'll probably stick it on a USB key sometime in the future to run on an older laptop, because linux is now just too much politics / hassle / whatever.
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Linux is not Andriod. Users do not know what a kernel is or care.
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Thats mostly because of Android.
And this is why, yet again, that after years of pissing and whining from the internet, RMS was right again.
The reason he calls it GNU/Linux, not Linux is not out o some jealousy (as people complained), but because without that qualifier this confusion happens. Android is not GNU/Linux and is nothing like what people actually mean when they talk about "Linux". When referred to as an OS, "Linux" really means GNU/Linux.
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I think software by nerds is for nerds.
Not Joes. Apache, linux, freebsd, samba, cordova, openssl, and others are invaluable but are for developers.
Ceos make stuff for people in the private sector. A nerd won't get the colors or calibration right for the gimp as he is not a ceos who speaks with customers or a photographer. Many startups for from those specialized in a field who know a little programing and a guy from work who does code as a partner. Jobs did with Wazchniak. The Open SourceCPU is no Apple
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I think software by nerds is for nerds.
Not Joes. Apache, linux, freebsd, samba, cordova, openssl, and others are invaluable but are for developers.
Exactly. And the people who write games are necessarily nerds. So the fact the jMonkeyEngine is build by and used by nerds is just fine - non-nerds do not have the skills to create games.
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Well the gaming community just wants pixels (Score:4, Insightful)
Extending that - I as a purchaser of games don't give a flying fig what engine was used - but I'll judge the devs I gave my money to on their decision.
I'm assuming the 'freeness' of commercial offerings is based upon trying to get devs to use their software and then taking a percentage if it ever takes off and sells.
So, what you're asking is a question to the devs - what to the commercial offerings that might skim from your future income offer, that OOS doesn't?
My guess would be a huge amount of support/tools, that OOS doesn't, and is only ever going to take a small percentage of your profit (if you make any).
Rah capitalism.
Re:Not really giving away (Score:4, Informative)
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But how far from free are each of those three AAA engines?
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No, the personal edition does not have the same feature set.
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In other words, to use it is free, if you sell products based on it the people who made it want a cut. How horribly unreasonable.
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You and several others have been pointing this out to me... so it appears that some things have changed. I will have to check it out in more detail later.
Looks like trying to do any team development, even for a very tiny team of two or three people might still not be possible, however.... it looks like the personal edition might still be a headache for sharing of assets even between just two people.
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No need to pay to license this high quality SDL game engine.
ioquake3 is copylefted. Copylefted engines are fine on PC-like platforms but won't work on a platform incompatible with copyleft. At last count, these platforms included Apple iOS, Orbis OS (for PlayStation 4), and whatever PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Wii U, and Nintendo 3DS run.
Recoup production cost (Score:2)
Then fix those platforms.
Video game software developers who do not manufacture their own console lack the authority to "fix those platforms".
And even on PC-like platforms, how would one recoup the cost of developing a game for ioquake3? The most obvious model for the past three centuries is to distribute copies for a fee and restrict others from doing the same. But that doesn't work with copylefted software because the public has the right to make and distribute copies of any derivative of ioquake3.
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh No, the shock, the horror, the pain and suffering of millions of slash dot users. 'ER' you know, you just could have skipped this story. I do it quite often myself, skip whole days even.
A developer of a free open source game engineer sought some feedback from the slash dot community and you take personal offence, hmm, do you have a vested interest in alternate products by any chance.
Personally the open source game engine market might do best by targeting a specific market that is not well served by 'AAA' game engines. Perhaps low violence networked board gaming simulations and taking them more in visually interactive directions. They do not take a huge amount of visual and audio development time and the focus is heavily on game play, gaming concepts and new ideas. A market that well suits indie development.