Hacker News Reader

> though maybe the plentiful comments in regards to ease of use also had something to deal with that.

It's an engine with almost no community that's based on an engine that's notoriously difficult to use.

It would not surprise me if O3DE was more capable than Godot but choosing an engine is more about matching your team to the engine, and it feels like most indie groups will have a hard time with O3DE.

Important to note I'm only relaying what I've read, I haven't looked too closely at it myself. Also, development looks pretty active so there's definitely potential for things to change.

I really, really want O3DE to be successful. I have looked into it some. Right now it just isn't something your average small Unity team could pick up and use. A larger studio with a good established dev team could maybe use it.

The documentation and tooling for O3DE needs a lot of work compared to Godot. The community needs to grow, but in order to do that, they need to improve the documentation and the tooling.

In the end, I want to see both Godot and O3DE succeed, I support both projects, and I have tried to bring O3DE into these discussions. But if I had the time to start a game today, as an indie dev, I would probably choose Godot. But both engines have a lot to offer!

Finally- I really think the O3DE devs (mostly Amazon, and folks complain about Amazon not contributing to Open Source....) are aware of its weaknesses and are trying their best to refactor the code and make improvements to tooling and documentation to make it easier to use. I think it is going to take some time, and I hope they get the support from the community and continued support from Amazon to see it bare fruit. I want to thank Amazon for their many contributions to Open Source, I don't agree with everything the company does, but I disagree strongly with the idea that they aren't contributing anything back.

The Apache 2 license is incompatible with GPL2, you cannot have code under those two licenses in the same project. So they dual licenses it under MIT, which is compatible with GPL2.

The Rust project has the same problem, it's also dual-licensed under Apache2 + MIT.

You want Apache 2 because of the explicit patent grant, but at the same time you also want to allow GPL2 projects to use your code.

MPL2 is great for something like this. It's not Apache 2 or MIT, but is compatible with them (if that's how you wished to license your stuff, for example, or if you wished to use libraries that are)—as well as being compatible with GPLv2 by default.

In practice, the fact that MPL2 is not as permissive as Apache 2 or MIT and has copyleft-like reciprocal terms is not a problem, because it's a file-based license, and few (if any) developers tend to be interested in changing the source files for the upstream project, and those who are are usually people doing so because they're in the process of trying to submit a fix upstream, anyway. For the fraction of a fraction of a minority of folks for whom it still would be a problem, it's as simple as the upstream project either declaring Apache 2 as a compatible Secondary License or just saying that they won't enforce MPL2's reciprocal clauses against downstream folks who are using the project in a way that is permitted by Apache 2.

MPL2 is an extremely underused and underappreciated license.

In my experience, people do hack game engines all the time for game specific optimizations, fixes and special features. At least in the bigger AA/AAA games I've seen. We tried to sell our plugin as binary only (C++), but basically everybody wanted the source code to hack and extend it. So people wouldn't be happy with MPL.

I agree for other things, e.g. webdev, I never had to hack Django or Vue.js.

The game industry is notorious for using, but not contributing back to open source. I don't want to know how often the same bug in recast/detour has been fix in different games, and never upstreamed.

> people wouldn't be happy with MPL.

Only if you ignore, like, everything that I wrote.

I agree with this mostly. I would love to see the MPL2 used more often instead of the GPLs. I think it is a superior license in almost every way. I also love the Apache and MIT licenses for their own reasons, I don't really see MPL as a replacement for Apache/MIT, more as a replacement for the GPL.

Not exactly what I was going for with my initial remarks.

> I don't really see MPL as a replacement for Apache/MIT, more as a replacement for the GPL

That doesn't really make sense. GPL is a hard copyleft license, and MPL2 is not. The latter can be seen as a replacement for the former perhaps in the sense that a person who is being charged $20+/mo for streaming video might like to see their provider to offer a $0 "replacement" instead—i.e. a change clearly to the benefit of one party with regard to narrowly delivering something it sees as desirable, to the detriment of the other party (or more accurately: without regard to the benefit or detriment to the other).

MPL2 is a great alternative for the use cases I described—where the constraints/conditions of the license are agreeable to both upstream and downstream due to the way it matches how they already interact in practice (and expect to continue interacting).

> I would love to see the MPL2 used more often instead of the GPLs

I don't see GPL as overused at all in 2023. If anything, it, too, is underused.

MPL2 and GPLv2/GPLv3/LGPL/AGPL are underused relative to the fairly new tendency to reflexively reach for e.g. the MIT License and then get stung by the consequences of doing so, resulting in formerly libre codebases getting locked down in future revisions under a regressive, non-FOSS, shared source license (or fully proprietary), when the reality is that e.g. GPL would have better suited the project from the beginning and wouldn't have led to the circumstances that ended with the owner pulling back from FOSS entirely.

The reason I avoided O3DE is because its based on Amazon Lumberyard which itself was based on CryEngine which are notoriously rigid with the shipped tools. If you look at the development struggles even Amazon's own internal teams had using Lumberyard it doesn't really inspire confidence.

I think open sourcing it was the right decision though, and I hope it will only improve from here.

No one wants to use O3DE because the installation process is a pain. Isn't simple as Unity or Unreal. Plus the installation process takes a lot of times. Outside of that the asset pipeline is another pain, not sure if they improved that. O3DE is lumberyard engine from amazon that is a fork of cryengine.

   but pretty much nobody mentioned or cared for something like O3DE

Because it's a project started by Amazon.

It takes up a ton of space, and takes forever to install, which would be fine if it were as polished as Unity or Unreal, but in practice the engine seems to have problems out of the box.

O3DE seems to live in its own bubble. GameFromScratch covers it from time to time and has always had trouble getting the advertised features to work, not to mention they completely blew the first impression because when it was announced there was no installer and that took many many months to be done (just to leave a half-functional engine until they fixed it later on).

Also it just fails every vibe check: AI art in the homepage and they had some drama by publishing a quote saying that they were "the only real open source game engine"[1] (which has been retracted since)

1. https://youtu.be/5PAuR-pEz1w?t=128

Both Godot and Unreal run on MacOS. O3DE does not.

At first glance, it does not appear to have support for game consoles. I'd wager that the kind of teams that are looking at making heavier or advanced 3D games are more likely to also need to take that into consideration.

It does. But like every other middleware that supports consoles, you need to be under NDA to get the code.

I praise O3DE and Godot for being open source. My experience of Godot is that it has been consistently very stable, while O3DE was not.

I fully expect O3DE to improve and maybe it is more usable now. Alternatives are good.

Godot has wonderful 2D support, like, true 2D. Most other engines do 3D but with the third axis as a Z value, i.e. height.

Godot has heigh/Z value, but positions etc. are x + y.

There’s a very real reason why everyone overlooked O3DE. One that I will not go into here.

Thanks for the contribution, I guess?

Other folks said what I wouldn’t. I probably shouldn’t have even said anything but mornings are hard.