Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion special)

Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion special)

Postby Duion » 22 Mar 2017, 13:21

Soon we will have more "FOSS game engines" than games. FOSS game development if it exists at all is stalling, developing new engines will not help that, as almost all of them fail or take years until they can be used for something.
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Re: The Development of the Libre-Engine

Postby onpon4 » 22 Mar 2017, 15:06

You know, it's funny. I was concerned a few years ago that all the easy to use game engines seemed to be proprietary, and that was why I made the SGE Game Engine. Now it seems like everyone and their grandma is making a new libre game engine. What the heck happened?

But hey, that's a good thing. The one thing I would suggest: you should develop some of your own games with it, if only to prove its capabilities. No one wants to use an unproven engine.
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Re: The Development of the Libre-Engine

Postby Lyberta » 22 Mar 2017, 21:24

As a person who is also making their own game engine, I'd say: "Damn it, if I'd known how hard is it to do it I'd never started this thing". But now I have this project and I don't want to give up.
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Re: The Development of the Libre-Engine

Postby Duion » 22 Mar 2017, 23:13

5 Years ago there may have been the need for a libre game engine, but not now anymore.
With available ready to use tools you can finish a game prototype within a few months now, if you develop the engine first, this process is probably delayed by years.
The only reason to make a new engine is, if there is something totally revolutionary or some kind of niche or special case that no other available tool covers.
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Re: The Development of the Libre-Engine

Postby charlie » 23 Mar 2017, 10:54

Duion {l Wrote}:5 Years ago there may have been the need for a libre game engine, but not now anymore.
With available ready to use tools you can finish a game prototype within a few months now, if you develop the engine first, this process is probably delayed by years.
The only reason to make a new engine is, if there is something totally revolutionary or some kind of niche or special case that no other available tool covers.

Duion... this is becoming a habit.

If you have nothing constructive to say then don't bloody well say it. Otherwise we'll have to take some kind of measure on it. You want a debate on the need for free game engines? Start it in another thread, don't hijack somebody's showcase/collaboration thread to constantly rain on people's parades. It's getting repetitive dealing with you on this.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby charlie » 23 Mar 2017, 11:02

Duion {l Wrote}:Soon we will have more "FOSS game engines" than games. FOSS game development if it exists at all is stalling, developing new engines will not help that, as almost all of them fail or take years until they can be used for something.

That's an exaggeration at best, and total tripe anyway. There's many more games than engines.

FOSS game development is driven by personal interest. If that person is interested in developing an engine then that's their route into it. I know that several prominent engines are frankly giant things to wrap your head around, and in many cases overkill for simpler games (e.g. Ogre3D).
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby Duion » 23 Mar 2017, 12:09

To me it sounds very constructive to give people advice to not waste years of their lifetime with pointless work.
Just the statistics of started projects vs projects that lead somewhere proves my case, since you will get something around 90% failure rate.

And then there is a nice quote:
“Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).”
―Eric S. Raymond

So from what I can see is that most people to not want to be great.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby Akien » 23 Mar 2017, 13:06

Well, most people who start writing their own engine is not because they think that the world needs it, and that existing solutions are not usable.

It's because they want to write an engine. They find it fun, rewarding, a great learning process, and so they do it. Many of the developers who contribute to Godot Engine actually already worked on their own engine projects in the past, at much smaller scales. They learned a lot in the process, and eventually they found that Godot Engine was a better alternative to give their time to. But I don't think they regret having learned so much about C++, OpenGL, image and sound, etc.

So yes, this new "Libre Engine" project might be doomed in your book and not something you'd want to spend time on, or make game with. But as long as the people actually contributing to this project find it rewarding and learn something from it, it's great. And this constant "reinvention of the wheel" is also a trigger for innovation, that helps bring new brilliant ideas forward. Maybe the Libre Engine guys will focus a lot on a specific feature and do something very innovative, that could then also be implemented in proven engines such as Godot or Torque.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby Duion » 23 Mar 2017, 14:09

Sure you can do all that nice and pseudoidealistic talking, but it will not help anything, since as soon as you try to compete on the regular market with your products, you will get utterly crushed by people hating on you.

For example there are some other open engines, that are pretty far developed, but they still stand almost no chance on the regular market. Maybe you have a chance, if you make a commercial product and spend lots of money into it, but the commercial people will not use open engines, so you are left with indies and FOSS activist people. So those people who end up using those engines do have small budgets, so you end up making a bad game with a bad engine, which results in an even worse end-product, which then will get destroyed by negative reviews.

I quickly searched for games released with Blender Game Engine and ended up here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_zZGKexpE0 that game used BGE and is probably open source or so, but it still gets crushed.
There are many examples like this game, just look through those channels that do review negative games, they collect them all.

So your only chance to be successfull with such a game project is to make it so bad that it escapes every comparability and/or is so bad that it is funny again, but even that is hard, as the market is very saturated with those "intentionally" bad games that are supposed to be funny, because they are so bad.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby Akien » 23 Mar 2017, 14:24

Duion {l Wrote}:Sure you can do all that nice and pseudoidealistic talking, but it will not help anything, since as soon as you try to compete on the regular market with your products, you will get utterly crushed by people hating on you.

Who is telling you that people who start their own game engine project mean to compete on the regular market?

Who are you to tell people that what they're working on "will not help anything"? At the very least it's helping *them*. If it doesn't help *you*, just ignore it and go your way.

This is not pseudoidealistic talking, whatever that would be. People who start new free software projects just for the sake of giving it a go themselves don't do it to become the new Minecraft or Unity3D. They do it to scratch their itch, and here's the big news for you: that doesn't take anything away from you. Maybe they're wasting their time (but as I pointed out, for many it's first and foremost an opportunity to develop their skills on a real project), but they're not wasting yours. You don't have to use their engine, you don't have to play their game, and you can keep being condescending in your head - but we don't particularly need it expressed here so often. Yes, your game is the best and the rest of us are just wasting our time working on games nobody cares about, thanks for the tip. But we're all having a hell lot of fun, so we'll likely pass on your wise advice and continue developing stuff.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby Duion » 23 Mar 2017, 14:31

So all people here never intend to succeed with anything and because of that it is fine if their projects never make it anywhere?
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby onpon4 » 23 Mar 2017, 15:47

Yes, it is absolutely fine if a project fails. Failure is cheap for us. It's not something to worry about. What matters is that every new project is a potential success, and that potential for success is more significant than the potential for failure.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby charlie » 23 Mar 2017, 17:23

Duion {l Wrote}:So all people here never intend to succeed with anything and because of that it is fine if their projects never make it anywhere?

You confuse giving advise with putting people down. You are very good at putting people down. You are terrible at giving advise.

Advise is friendly and constructive. You interact with people to find out their reasoning, you make constructive suggestions of alternatives. You don't just put down their efforts.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby Duion » 23 Mar 2017, 18:36

So I give terrible advice because I base my reasoning in reality?
If I do not put people down before, those people in reality will do later and until that there is much more work and time invested and the damage is even bigger.
The only chance to not be put down is to never go out into reality then.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby farrer » 23 Mar 2017, 19:12

Duion {l Wrote}:So I give terrible advice because I base my reasoning in reality?


No. It's because you take your perception of the "reality" and take it as immutable and certain for all other people in probably a lot different context than yours. When trying to give advice to someone, the first thing to do is try to understand someone reasons to do what they do.

Duion {l Wrote}:If I do not put people down before, those people in reality will do later and until that there is much more work and time invested and the damage is even bigger.


What damage? To who? Really, you should read again what Akien said, which I fully agree:

Akien {l Wrote}:It's because they want to write an engine. They find it fun, rewarding, a great learning process, and so they do it.


Some people start a FLOSS project for fun, some other for learning, some other for both, some other to create something that he/she thinks is missing, some other just for the sake of the process involved in creating (speaking for myself, I have more fun programming a game than playing another), some other for reasons I can't even think about by myself (for they being so different from my own world perception), and some for making money and "compete in the industry".

Your advices should only be somewhat related to those last ones.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby Lyberta » 23 Mar 2017, 22:17

Well, I have written a dozen of libraries and there are better libre alternatives out there for most of them but I don't regret doing it because I learned a lot. I don't think everyone is a genius that can understand everything without writing a single line of code.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby charlie » 23 Mar 2017, 23:16

You don't have to directly insult somebody to put them down.

Telling people they are wasting their time, without making any effort to understand what they are doing, is putting them down. It is putting down their aspirations, their decision making, their thoughts and effort.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby Duion » 23 Mar 2017, 23:28

You are probably the one putting others down by parenting them as if they are children and not giving them a chance to explain and defend themselves like adults.
I'm not insulting anyone, to say that someone is wasting his time with something is my opinion and I can say that.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby charlie » 23 Mar 2017, 23:40

You have a chance to defend yourself. How am I not giving you a chance? Am I speaking over you? I'm directly answering your questions.

You just lump into threads where somebody is sharing their work and dicate to them they are wrong to be doing what they are doing. It's not helpful, not inspiring, and quite rude to be honest.

Now because I'm telling you things as they are you think I'm patronising you? Grow up buddy.

Duion {l Wrote}:something is my opinion and I can say that.


Yes, you are entitled to it, but the place to share a negative opinion is not in a place called "Showcase & Collaboration" you .... ugh.... stupid clever person!! (Somebody so clever they don't question their own actions, which is a stupid way to conduct oneself!)
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby Duion » 24 Mar 2017, 00:20

Not me, but other people you are constantly protecting through your censorship, so they do not have to defend themselves.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby eugeneloza » 24 Mar 2017, 06:05

Skipping all emotional stuff :)

Well, any game IS a game engine. Just the problem is whether this game engine has a usable (and understandable) API outside the main game.
You might have a Tetris game engine. A Jump-n-run game engine. Yes, we're rather calling those programs "constructors".
If the author takes time to make a normal API, even without writing a game engine his game can be rewritten into a mod (often a truly new game). AFAIR popular Dota game started as a Warcraft mod.
The more "diverse" the API is the more right it has to be called a Game Engine. Actually, it'd be a good practice if FOSS developers would do their best to make their games codes understandable and engine-like.
E.g. Somebody makes a match-3 game. Well... he/she can write the code in a way that graphic (+Android/iOS support) is separable, that "anybody" can take his/her game and make a new match-3 game with different images and different set of rules. But won't have to bother about how to implement slides, explosions, animated score addition and testing on multiple mobile platforms.

So, my opinion is:
1. If you need something simple, don't use an engine.
2. If you need something complex, or don't want to waste you time on understanding the engine - write your own engine suitable for your goals. Maybe, you'll be the only one using it eventually.
3. If you think of the future, best use someone's else game engine which fits your goals. Yes, you will save hundreds and thousands of hours of testing and bug-hunting. And eventually you can contribute to that FOSS engine. However, trying to understand someone else's code is much less fun than writing you own :)

P.s. I'm spending ~50% of programming time on commenting the code thoroughly and polishing the API of my current project plus writing a WYSIWYG game data editor. Yes, I'm aiming at making my game engine-like (while I myself use Castle Game Engine), so that anybody (even without knowledge of programming) can change the game scenario and many aspects of the game or (with some programming knowledge) to write a brand-new game which follows the basic concepts.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby farrer » 24 Mar 2017, 12:59

Duion {l Wrote}:Not me, but other people you are constantly protecting through your censorship, so they do not have to defend themselves.

I'll show you an example, which happened lot of years ago, to you understand what could be a different approach on suggesting something different than the current way-of-develop people take on their projects.

Back on the time of the first (2005) or second (2006) DNT pre-alpha release, on a time where this community didn't even exist and most of the Linux game community was around the Linux Game Tome (happypenguin), I received an email from charlieg, back than just a user of the LGT asking why we are reinventing the wheel creating a custom house engine/renderer and not using some existing alternative, as it could make our work easer on achieving a playable state to the game (I'm saying by memory, didn't have the email anymore).

We answered that we had a bad time with Crystal Space (At the time, Ogre3D was just on an early stage and the two main C++ Libre engines where Crystal Space and Irrlich), and, as we were back than a group of CS students, using DNT for our learning (and even class) purposes, we believe the best would to write down directly from SDL/OpenGL (not sure about the words, and I even believe we were a bit more rude on the answer - if it was the case, sorry charlie, relieve it to some early student mind).

After that, DNT development continues, I've learned a lot both about programming in general and low-level computer with it (and I believe every other people envolved too, both from our university back than, and from the community who helped and contributed a lot to DNT), which I did not regret. Charlie understand (although I believe he didn't fully agree with) our reasons, and life go on, both for us and for him. As far as I understand, no one was hurt for discordance with each other, nothing bad happened: it was just a suggestion that the other side could or not agree and follow.

Ok, if I would start a DNT-like project now, I should use an existing engine. But that's only because I already made my own and learned a lot with it.

Please Duion, note the difference in the approach charlie had from yours: he didn't use the game page at LGT (avoiding at the worst case creating a flame war on the project's showcase), but sent a personal email; he didn't try to discourage us, but just asked why we not use an alternative to the work we were doing (I do believe he even mentioned some of the alternatives), and he didn't continue to say we were wrong and should never be doing what we were on DNT after we told him the reasons of our choices: he just understand and respected our freedom.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby Duion » 24 Mar 2017, 13:08

Chances are close to a 100% that nobody will ever your "well documented" FOSS code or "engine" anyway.

Even with the best AAA engines and tools chances are still very high that nobody will ever use it, look at Unreal Engine and their pseudo open source Unreal Tournament. Even though they have the best and most popular game engine and the biggest and most experienced community contributions to their project are pretty weak and until recently they had hardly any players. Sure it has good content, but it is the content that has been made by Epic itself with professionals, most of the user contributions cannot compete in any way with that.

It's pretty delusional to think that what a 26 year old 120 people strong company has problems with, you with no experience, no manpower and no budget can somehow magically solve instantly.

Most FOSS games or engines never develop technologically or game mechanic wise.
Some time ago in a forum of real game developers I read a discussion about FOSS game development and they just laughed and someone said "FOSS game development my ass. All that happened in FOSS game development is that ID software dumped the sourcecode of their game and the community modded it, that's all."

So people outside there in reality just laugh at you "FOSS game developers" and do not take you seriously at all and you do not even try to improve that.
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby charlie » 24 Mar 2017, 13:44

Duion, You make good points against somebody who is creating an engine to directly compete with Unreal/Crytek etc.

I don't know anybody other than perhaps Ogre3D/Torque (well established projects with many contributors and used by many commercial games) that have those aspirations. The vast majority are learning or project-specific or task-specific projects, many of which go on to be very successful (OpenMW is a very respected project, which in turn uses OpenSceneGraph which is an excellent task-specifc engine used by many projects).

Your criticism projects your own narrow aspriations onto a very broad topic, and hence is misplaced. You don't understand this, which is what makes the whole interaction with you so frustrating, because you are obviously a very intelligent guy. I'm not even the first person explaining this to you in this thread!

Duion {l Wrote}:Not me, but other people you are constantly protecting through your censorship, so they do not have to defend themselves.

Who am I "protecting" with my censorship? (Funny censorship, since you seem able to voice your opinion here quite completely - I just don't let you do it in direct response to somebody who came here in good faith to show/discuss/collaborate on their FOSS project.)
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Re: Debating the need for new FOSS game engines (a Duion spe

Postby themightyglider » 24 Mar 2017, 16:15

So people outside there in reality just laugh at you "FOSS game developers" and do not take you seriously at all and you do not even try to improve that.


The people out there in the reality do game development as a business while the most people who share their projects on this forum are hobbyists. I can't see any need for a competition at all.

If I got you right, your main argument is that it is a waste of time to work on something that won't have any impact on the real world market.

Now let me be your advocatus diaboli:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}
GNU/Linux on the desktop has no impact on the market as well, so everybody who develops desktop applications for it is wasting his/her time and should concentrate on server side programing where GNU/Linux has a fair market share. Or if he/she really wants to make a desktop application he/she has to focus on MS Windows and Mac OSX.


I'm sure that can't be a solution unless you love to be bound to a system that doesn't respects your freedom as user, spies on you and make profit out of your personal data.
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