Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine
github.com
github.com
It has an impressive feature list, including: "Cross-platform support using SDL 2.0 (currently runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, Raspberry Piv1.3 including other generic ARM boardsv1.6, and Webv1.4 with Emscripten toolchain)"
Just check Unreal's 2017 roadmap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC6Xx_jLXmg
Edit: BTW there's a very insightful feature comparison from UE developer here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/5wouuw/2017_featur...
Good luck with your project.
Tooling cannot be understated and most of our goal was to be a force multiplier on the majority of the team who actually do the creative work. That's what these engines bring and while hobby engines are nifty they're not going to be making strides into that space until they have a compelling tooling story.
Self imposed constraints can (and has in many cases) achieved the same thing.
From a technical perspective unity's tools are nothing special, however they work well for non technical users. In the same way UI/UxD for Linux has been a disaster understanding production needs is a complete different space that few engines get right.
> From a technical perspective unity's tools are nothing special, however they work well for non technical users.
They are nothing special even from non-technical perspective. I'm not saying they are complete crap or that they do not work reasonably, in fact I think they are so successful because they are so simple/average. Of course constantly crashing tool is not boosting your productivity. But simple tools are.
Look at old Unity UI - it was even worse than most open source UI. The new UI is a bit better but still there are open source projects at least equally good. Or animation graphs in Unity. They are quite simple and they have many issues, yet they enable users to do more creative stuff than UE.
Maybe you are thinking boosting creativity to work within the limits of the hardware? That's a different topic.
In my experience, vanilla Unity has better tools for creative out-of-the-box then many engines before it.
And as you say, UE and Unity seem to be optimized for artist-driven projects rather than coder-driven projects. Which, realistically, are always going to be the majority of commercial efforts, but coders often prefer code. I've written a (basic) 3D object modeller app, and I still can't work out how to use Blender.
I wanted to create a simple 2D game once, aiming for lot of platforms, including mobile and web. Most engines (I looked into Unity and Godot) produced just too heavy results for web. I ended up using Haxe/Flixel.
Anyway, I do not agree with all the stuff in the linked article. He was just used as an example for need of programmer-focused engines.
Personally, I think there are more important advantages of C++ over C, and operator overloading can get ugly FAST if you're not careful.
I created my engine for myself, I guess a lot of open source projects start with one person solving his problem/having fun. I open source it because:
* money is not everything, it might bring value to some people, but I doubt people would be willing to pay for it * even if it's open source it does not prevent me to earn money with it * I benefit from people using it - submitting patches, reporting problems, testing on different hardware * it can bring money in different ways * if I share my property (e.g. car, flat, computer) with somebody else, it limits my use "rights", if I share software, it limits me in no way
What is more thare are not really FOSS tools for game industry. There is GIMP or Blender, but most artists prefer commercial alternatives because they are arguably better. Tiled editor is pretty popular for 2D. But other than there is almost nothing. I would love to avoid implementing an editor/debugger for my behaviour trees, or visual editor for shaders, but there is simply no good FOSS for that.
Has the graphic design industry moved off Photoshop and Illustrator? Has video editing moved off Avid, Premiere, et. al.? Have Windows devs abandoned Visual Studio?
Many of the tools I use daily on our customer projects are proprietary.
And as for Unreal...
I mean... just look at the screenshot of the OP. That needs some pretty serious work. :-/
In general I agree with you - but saying that "you should use Unreal/Unity" on every project is not the right answer in my opinion.
It looks nice.
Does any of the engines mentioned in this thread come close to feature set in Unreal? What's the value here other than creating basic 2D/3D games?
It's nice that "open source" is now so commonplace that people think it's a natural term to use, but if you think about it, it really isn't (something like "source available" would be more normal).
* UE may have it's source code publicly available, but it's definitely not free (as freedom to do anything with it)
* UE is very resource heavy
* You can not use it to create gambling or military stuff
* 2D possible, but not very nice
* Complicated code
None of the open source engines come very close to UE, but you pay the price for it. Even Unity (without any 3rd party plugins) is not close, but I argue Unity is still very useful.
Epic has made great strides in so many areas that if you haven't tried it in a few releases(6ish months?), there is quite a bit of stuff that is better (both in cleanliness/precision but also in performance and overhead)
I can recompile my whole engine in 20 seconds (and I am not using precompiled headers), editor launches in ~1 second, basic scene load ~1 second. Small change in source code - compile & link in 3 seconds. Intellisense brokes from time to time when using FBX SDK, but it's fine otherwise and without FBX SDK there is no problem. Engine size with some necessary data - a few tens of MB.
When I am doing something in my game and I have to change something, turn off engine + make change + compile it + start engine + load the scene = few seconds. It's so fast I did not even bother to implement hotreload for native code.
When I'm working on my UE plugin - the same cycle is several minutes.
I thought you were talking about it being resource heavy relative to unity, not to your own home grown one, which is likely (and obviously) much lighter. I have no doubt in that comparison all the larger game engines have quite resource heavy editor. But the tradeoff is supposed to be that few extra seconds loading it up and few GB downloading it, saves you potentially months of work you don't need to do yourself in a more custom engine.
the 2 minute plugin change also seems really off. I can tweak my plugins and recompile in a few seconds.
Intellisense is much better than it used to, at least on my own machine, but I will admit it was finicky for me for a while. Its usually instant for me nowadays, though I will admit at one point it was ridiculously slow(5-10 seconds). I have no idea what I've changed and I am on the same computer.
no getting around UE4 being quite big, several GB, to download.
When your game engine is done, how do you get assets into the game? How will your artists test out things, how will you get models you bought on the internet into your game?
For any game engine I'd check out I would first see how well it deals with game assets. It's more important than fancy rendering features or even clean API's and developer tools.
Look awesome! Always good to have diversity in 3D engine.
Only partially true on the PS3 (GL ES 1.0 with Cg), which was largely ignored.
But that is a technicality, because most developers that are making an engine (especially indie or hobby developers) don't have access to development hardware and SDK's.
So it's valid to say that OpenGL runs on all other platforms (that the developer is targeting).
I've not tried Linux for a long time, so it's possible there are some issues. But it's definitely compilable and it used to run few months ago.
MacOS port should be easy, there once was a branch with a lot of stuff already ported, but it was done by other programmer and he did not finish it.
> Yes, you can sell your game without any constraints as long as you use the binary version distributed on the website. If you modify and recompile the engine yourself, you can still sell your product, but you have to open the source code of your game and the modifications made to Xenko as stated in the GPL license.
Wouldn't that be trap though in practice? Everytime a new Unity version comes around you would have to patch/test your changes back in.
* submit a patch
* find out that it's specific behaviour causing the bug and avoid it
* now how to optimized your code
* know how things work - Unity's docs misses a lot of details.
A question. Please don't get it wrong.
How you going to maintain that? Recently more than anything I'm more afraid of investing my time in some tool will go away in the near future. While UE and Unity 3D are not perfect, neither free (or even cheap). But those teams have all the money to support next releases, and I have some guarantee that they will exist next year.
If someone is not prevented by something (personal preference, license issue, features) there is no reason to use Lumix Engine rather than UE/Unity. UE/Unity should be the right option for 95% of developers.
But if you think this is something ready to use in commercial projects, ask for money. I usually feel personally better to if I can pay for things, also paying for things opens a window for to have quality requirements.
Seems like the only benefit would be short lived, whilst I would take on a lot of the disadvantages of not going to a more commercial offering immediately. I'm genuinely interested. I can imagine this putting a lot of people off "committing".
Just so sick of this mentality that single-contributor projects aren't worth spending time on. This is how we get the problem of "open source" send to only happen if it's big companies like Google, Mozilla, or Facebook doing it. It's not like they haven't killed many a project just because it wasn't the gigantic, multi-million dollar success they needed it to be to justify spending their effort.
Xamarin have a C# wrapper for it, UrhoSharp (https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/urho/). I'm working with it now and I like it a lot better than Unity so far; but I strongly prefer to work in code rather than doing everything in Unity's IDE.
What happened to FieldsGame? Sounds interesting, but the link on readme page doesn't have any information except it's a physics sandbox of some sort.
FieldsGame is made by 3rd party developer, so I do not know in what stage it is. It is possible it's abandoned.
> The goal of Armory is to bring real-time rendering to artists. Everything is fully integrated into Blender, turning it into a complete authoring tool for real-time content.
and
> Everything is bundled to provide the ultimate game development tool.
That's two quite different goals.