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Comment by fzeroracer | Hacker News Reader

This sounds more like an excuse rather than any sort of rational argument as to why game engines can't be open sourced. The reality is that there are plenty of projects out there helmed by incredibly talented engineers with extremely high level knowledge that exist in the open source realm; one only has to look at the geospatial community to see this.

Unity fucked up hard here and I hope that their planetary-level screw up will lead to game developers pushing for open source engines to avoid the control of their games being stolen.

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>This sounds more like an excuse rather than any sort of rational argument as to why game engines can't be open sourced. The reality is that there are plenty of projects out there helmed by incredibly talented engineers with extremely high level knowledge that exist in the open source realm; one only has to look at the geospatial community to see this.

I'm not saying there aren't talented developers working in open source. But the sheer breadth of expertise required is unimaginable. You need top-of-their-field engineers from practically every conceivable discipline within CS to build a AAA game engine. Physics, lighting, rendering, networking, audio, UI, and that's just the tip of what I can think of. Engines like Rockstar's RAGE are easily on par with the Linux kernel for complexity.

I was about to bring out Linux as a thing that according to your argument just isn't possible with open source.

But you've mentioned it yourself, so you presumably don't see that as a contradiction.

What do you think makes the complexity of Linux achievable with FOSS while the comparable complexity of a AAA engine not?

>What do you think makes the complexity of Linux achievable with FOSS while the comparable complexity of a AAA engine not?

It just comes down to incentives. Practically every living human being stood to gain from the existence of a high quality general purpose FOSS operating system, and so Linux naturally came about.

The people who would benefit from a AAA open source game engine are... closed source AAA game development studios. As such there's really no incentive for some physics whiz to spend their extremely valuable time toiling away on something that is only going to be used for someone else's profit. The intersection of people who build game engines, and people who make games with those engines, is extremely small.

There's really no such thing as open-source game development except for hobbyists, because that would be literally giving your product away. Games are a hit based, one-and-done type product much more akin to movies than other software.

Which doesn't mean movies can't be made using open source tools.

They give out Academy Awards for those, so there's a large prestige element. Also, not commonly known, but many FX tools are research-based so there's a strong research component driving many FX developments.

>What do you think makes the complexity of Linux achievable with FOSS while the comparable complexity of a AAA engine not?

Clearly there's something because it hasn't been done. Why do you think there are no high-quality FOSS engines?

I haven't the faintest idea, which is why I asked aphextron. Indeed, until today I thought the Unreal Engine was FOSS, but seems to be just source-available. That said, didn't id Software / John Carmack release a bunch of engines under FLOSS licenses in the past?

There are many more or less serious potential explanations: not enough people care, it wasn't (or still isn't) financially feasible, the people able to develop AAA engines are actively against sharing source or ideas, there's an engine development cartel actively pushing against it to keep their revenue.

Or it might just be a social or historical accident -- we may just have been extremely lucky with Linux and projects on that scale will never come again.

Or maybe everyone thought it would be a great idea but they also thought it would never work and so no one seriously ever started an open source engine. Maybe Godot will be a true AAA engine that will surpass them all in a few years.

I don't know.

id Software released their old deprecated engines as open source, when they had new engines they were pushing instead. It was a nice friendly gesture, but the engines typically weren’t competing anymore.

There's also Blender. 3D modelling is arguably a fairly complex and large field (lighting, rendering, physics, simulations etc). Yet, the team behind Blender are doing an amazing job and the gap between commercial software (e.g. Maya, 3ds Max) and Blender are closing with every release.

> I'm not saying there aren't talented developers working in open source. But the sheer breadth of expertise required is unimaginable.

In my opinion, the problem rather is that the skills that are helpful/necessary to build "typical" open source software are really different from the skills for a good game engine.

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