Hacker News Reader

Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

It's kinda weird seeing all the pull requests in the bugfix list.

Like, it's good to share progress, but it's sad to see it on a proprietary platform.

It is weird, though it beats traditional closed source by a long shot.

At least this way developers can fix low-priority issues that are critical to their specific situation without having to wait, making the fix available to everyone else in the process.

A change pulled into the main codebase is a change that you don't have to merge every time you upgrade. Given the speed and scale of these releases the time saved adds up quick.

As long as the people submitting those pull requests understood the ramifications of contributing code gratis to a proprietary platform, there's nothing sad about it.

you probably sign a license agreement: there's no "As long as you understand"

Correct. I think people do this when they need new features/fixes now. In some cases you gain the future benefit of the maintainers being more open to your issues/feature requests.

Yes, to gain access to the GitHub repo you need to sign up for an Unreal Engine license which involves accepting this eula:

https://www.unrealengine.com/eula

Those that pay for UE benefit from it, even though they pay for it.

Theres no reason they should not want to contribute unless they are a competitor.

Just a small correction: I don't think anyone pays for UE nowadays. Epic used to charge a monthly fee, but they've done away with that. Now you only pay royalties if your game is commercially successful. Which is different from paying for the engine itself.

Additionally, they mention that you can still negotiate paying an out right fee to license the engine if you'd like to do that rather than pay royalties (though I suspect it's mostly AAA studios that are interested in this)

It's for AAA studios because for past versions of engine cost was something like 1 mio per project. There was several more like indie developers that has won license on contests, but it's just exceptions.

I agree with this sentiment, it's why I personally choose not to contribute to UE4.

I want to see a profit sharing or bug/feature bounties either from Epic with Unreal Engine, or from a competitor.

A side note: I thought it would make for a cool platform, where a website "hosted" products/projects and users put up bounties for things they want fixed or features they want. Alternatively, a platform for small companies/projects that sell software licenses but are otherwise open source, where it's open about what the company/project is making, and a share of the profits can be split among the community contributors.

[Edit] I just posed the question here: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/332100/can-epic-g...

> A side note: I thought it would make for a cool platform, where a website "hosted" products/projects and users put up bounties for things they want fixed or features they want.

Sounds like Bountysource (https://www.bountysource.com/).

How is it sad? Everyone is learning how to build a better game engine. Are you suggesting that the same pull requests should have been made against an open source game engine? No open source game engine comes close to UE4 in feature set.

That people are contributing free work for someone else (Epic) to make money off of. Yes, I think they're suggesting to put that effort towards an open source engine, or towards a company that will reward you in some way for doing said work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com