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Comment by LarsDu88 | Hacker News Reader

Wait, so they have an ECS game engine with a AAA renderer and nanite-like tech along with a lua based scripting engine and Hollywood level facial animation?

They should release the engine. It's a solid competitor to Unreal (more scalable due to ECS, easier to write with Luau)

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Epic Games funded the development of Alan Wake 2 and the game is also an Epic Games Store exclusive (which I painfully found out wanting to buy the game but being on Linux), so I assume competing with Unreal would burn some bridges there

Epic Games-compatible launchers exist for Linux, so you can still buy and play the game (it seems to work fine with Proton).

Epic Store works on Linux too. Tried it with steam deck.

Lots of studios do. Turning internal software into a product for others is a different thing.

Yeah, even Valve have (maybe surprisingly) chosen not to license the Source 2 engine.

That's technically not true – they've licensed it out to Facepunch to create a sequel to Garry's Mod (which was one of the most popular Source 1 games): https://sbox.facepunch.com/about/. It is the only one we are aware of though.

Probably because it's still incredibly buggy? That's my impression watching some of the videos posted to the counterstrike subreddit.

I don't think the engine itself is buggy, or at least not all parts. Source 2 has been used in Dota 2 since 2015 and they also shipped Half-Life Alyx using it in 2020; neither is consider particularly buggy.

True yes - but Source 2 is now eight years old (and has been in development for probably 14 years) and has only been licensed once.

I won't be surprised if there are some other licensees eventually but it seems like Valve isn't overly interested in making the engine usable in the same way that Unreal, CryEngine, Frostbite etc are.

I feel like calling it nanite-like is going to far. They have adopted the meshlet pipeline but that's mainstream for bleeding edge rendering. I haven't seen any mention of using compute shaders to actually render small triangles like nanite does but maybe I missed something?

When I got my 3090 back when it was first released, I was excited to finally play Control with ray tracing on, no luck. Now with Alan Wake 2 it barely runs High with ray tracing off.

It's a visually stunning engine but it's just too demanding IMO.

I was playing on a 3080 and i second this. It was way too demanding for my card, at least with any ray tracing on.

I just upgraded to a 4080 and it runs flawlessly though, I guess they were targeting 40-series cards for anything raytraced.

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