Dagor Engine and Tools source code from Gaijin Games KFT

Yeah, I specifically editorialized the title because few people on HN possibly know Gajin Entertainment and no one know what "Dagor Engine" is. I pretty certain that even people who play the game have no clue how their internal tech was called.

A lot of people know War Thunder itself though.

We get to compete on editorializing it for votes here in the comments!

> LLVM-8.0.1

The benchmark must be 2019-2020, but thats still very interesting.

Their possible motivation for releasing code as open source is to allow some other Russian companies like VK Group to build their IP on it without having any deals with them directly. Just now VK Group announced their in-home game engine will be based on this code.

I can guess that Gaijin Entertainment had some contracts with companies in Russia, but after moving their business out of Russia it's now easiest way to fulfill the terms of some IP licensing deal.

Yandex is doing the same thing, but other way around by releasing more and more of their code as open source. It let them to cleanly trasfer IP from Russia-poisoned company to their Israel company.

> has native linux support

It does, a game or two of Warthunder are my guilty pleasure while waiting for some CI pipelines to finish.

I would take from the commit messages that this is up to date as of Sunday.

Russia is self-isolating right now. They are trying to standardize on one engine that does not have ties with West. E.g. they do not want to be at mercy of Unity or Epic.

This is a bid for that piece of government sponsorship.

Isn't linux support mandatory / a given if they want to run on the Deck or is that a clever emulation layer?

A lot of black magic is done in game engines to get that level of performance with that level of quality.

Carmack always (ab)used the hardware to the highest level in its code to get that performance/quality ratio and this is why he always kept the latest engine closed.

Unreal engine also had tricks up on its sleeve since Unreal Tournament days, however I don’t know the exact details. IIRC, it was about lighting and shadows mostly.

I had two friends who wrote their own engines. One built a company around that. Other one did visual simulations. Former one told me about the war stories which he battled against NVIDIA drivers, how driver behave the way it wanted, and how he had to abuse it to get the performance it wants. Also both AMD and NVIDIA drivers sometimes implement alternate paths to fix some engines’ performance and artifacts.

He also told how some big studios’ developers abused the driver in a way which can be only defined as “hacking”. I don’t remember the details, but they modified some data in place to bypass the graphics APIs to gain performance. Of course that is pretty brittle.

Latter friend told me how he had to optimize calculations, do great yet cheap approximations and abuse the strong parts of a GPU to get the performance he wanted.

So, a lot. All of these are considered black art and trade secret. Crytek should have some patents about some of the rendering methods they have developed even. They stopped sharing tech demos to prevent being copied, too.

If you’ve made your own engine or significant unique pieces of technology that’s part of your companies IP which is inherently part of the value of the company. Further to that open sourcing software takes effort and the more complex the software the more effort it takes. Game engines are very complex. Then for most companies they are trying to make and ship games which is also pretty hard. So open sourcing seems like a lot of work for little return. That’s often why engines that become open source are general at their end of life from a commercial perspective.

Games with modding in mind often do open source relevant bits to make modding easier.

Clones with more marketing budget / scummy promotion behind it. Not supplying the assets isn't a deterrent, because one they can be lifted from your game anyway, and two, there's factories producing assets production line style.

While, if you have a successful game, there will undoubtedly be clones, you don't have to make it easy for them.

One reason: third-party libraries and tools that aren't compatible with the FOSS license you want to use.

Another reason: you are now much more vulnerable to patent trolls.

The obvious problems that might occur are:

- Hackers finding exploits easier when they have the source and can run a debugger on real variable names - Companies from countries with less respect of copyright can create clones of your game and might outearn you

As a developer I'm welcoming this move though

Its an interesting question, there are many game dev that just don't even think about it and are too busy to dedicate even a minute to it,

and there there is the problem of engine using many midllewares : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3186440

Well a simplistic answer would be that if you have a better codebase than your direct competition then the opportunity to crib large parts of your code might end up making their game attractive enough that some customers end up buying it instead of yours.

Cheap, dirty clones.

You can't even necessarily fight it legally if the clone is "distinct."

That being said, I think there's less risk once your game "takes off" like WarThunder. Barotrauma is another good example where a clone is unlikely now.

What's the economic benefit for the company?

It cost a metric shit ton of time and manpower to create the game engine. What benefit would they have giving it away for free?

Game engine creator studios, like unity or unreal, have vastly different objectives than a game company. Releasing and being required to maintain a public game engine costs resources. Where game devs are always crunching.

Even then, look at the state of Unity, hardly profitable. Unreal was cruising on Fortnite cash so they don't care too much. More interested in setting themselves up to be the top dog first. This isn't exactly a money making situation.

They fill two different niches, daScript is statically typed, AoT compiled and attempting to outperform LuaJIT, Quirrel is dynamically typed and better for writing game logic.

Note that Quirrel is a fork of Squirrel (in early 2019), which is a language very heavily inspired by Lua (you could say Lua-done-over) with a very similar embedding API, but much more like a typical OO language rather than quirky (which makes it very similar to Javascript). Squirrel was most famous used by many Valve games like Portal 2 and L4D2, and I recommend it. Quirrel attempts to make Squirrel more Python-like, easier, add tooling like static analysis and tests, and to continue development, as Squirrel has only received the odd bugfix for years and been neglected. I've been watching Quirrel for years, and development has been picking up. They seem to have about 1.5-2 people working on it fulltime. The language is diverging more and more from Squirrel (and further towards Python) and getting bigger.

Quirrel is, as far as I've been able to tell, a fork of Squirrel. daScript is all their work though.

I would guess a combination of tech evolution, legacy code and disagreements between design departments. I once worked at a gamedev company that had an in-house scripting system and a purchased system from an engine fire-sale (not a fire-engine sale). The in-house one was better for complicated situations, but was relatively a lot of work for large volumes of simple situations.

I'd say this is far from useless. Especially when building your own engine, you can look at other implementations and reuse elements that you need. The company I work for specializes in video game ports. Getting only the source code, without documentation, or a back-channel to ask questions on a regular basis is standard for us. Still, we manage to get by just fine.

I am thankful for every piece of code that is opened up, especially when it's published under a permissive license.

The devs likely don't have any intentions to build / support a community around this release, which is perfectly fine. No one is stopping you from building your project / community around it either.

Think about it like Doom / Quake engines, they are pretty popular as well, but didn't come with a lot of documentation or support from id software.

I don't see anything in /prog/3rdPartyLibs that isn't open source of some variety though?

Sure. Yandex is Cyprus. JetBrains is Czechia. Eastern European gamedev circles had been joking about surprising resurgence of studios in Armenia, Cyprus and others over the last year.

ITAR is an American law restricting the export of military technology... this is a Hungarian, formerly Russian, company. Why in the world would they need an American export licence?

unrelated but it would be cool if someone opensources, say, rocket flight control software and get that part of ITAR deemed unconstitutional

There do appear to be some docs embedded in the source.

https://github.com/GaijinEntertainment/DagorEngine/tree/main...

I haven't built them/don't know how complete they are. At a glance I would guess not very.

That’s 4 days ago…