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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

> Godot's limitations are fascinating in part because, as the pair stressed multiple times in our conversation, they're something technically savvy developers can solve themselves. Because Godot is open source, developers who want to add key features can fork the engine and modify it for themselves free of cost. That isn't possible with Unity or Unreal Engine.

You can modify unreal. It’s source available.

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Yes, but can you redistribute those modifications? Under what terms? Having access to the source code is, like, 10% of the battle.

Why do you need to redistribute them if your goal is merely to solve your own problem? (That's the specific context of the quote in the parent comment.)

>Why do you need to redistribute them if your goal is merely to solve your own problem?

Because "you" in this case is typically a game studio. "Solving your own problem" means shipping your game.

Gotcha!

Huh. I have no idea what point you're trying to make.

Virtually everyone modifies Unreal C++ code. Some indie projects are blueprint only. But modifying the engine C++ source code is practically an expectation.

Can those source code modifications be easily shared with other developers? Well they can't be publicly dumped on GitHub. Can they be shipped to consume in a compiled binary? Absolutely.

Do you think it would make any sense for epic to forbid studios from shipping games that contain a modified engine?

> Yes, but can you redistribute those modifications? Under what terms?

They have a marketplace for selling or sharing stuff like that. If it's a huge chunk of code that's mostly original Unreal code, there are probably some license issues (I have no idea) with just sticking it in your github, but I actually have seen stuff like that on github, so, maybe not.

Yes you can redistribute modified versions of the engine to other parties. Public offerings need to be done through an epic marketplace but that can be for free. The modified engine is still beholden to the original license terms.

As I understand it the sanctioned way of sharing code added to UE is to fork it on github and publish changes to your fork.

Being a fork it will only be available to other people in the Epic Games github org which is only people who have agreed to Epic's licensing terms, and your modified engine remains under that same license.

That's not really true. You can't modify it free of cost; you still have to pay the royalties to use it. You also can't modify it in any way you like, there are numerous restrictions in the EULA on how exactly you can modify/distribute snippets of code. Not only that, but you also aren't allowed to integrate it with any sort of software with a copyleft license, making it useless for any gamedevs who want to license their game with one. Even people wanting to use copyleft libraries or code with their fork are completely restricted.

Why did all these migrating game developers pick unity in the first place if they wanted to release a copyleft game?

My reply had nothing to do with Unity. It was directed at the statement that Unreal being source-available is somehow equivalent to being able to freely fork and modify Godot to add specific features.

Furthermore, many of these devs have been on Unity for many years, not because it was the best, but because it was pretty much the only accessible and modern choice for smaller projects before Godot and other open-source engines were mature enough to release games with.

This is not (entirely) correct:

> Free

> Game developers (royalties apply after $1 million USD gross product revenue)

> Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue)

> For educators and schools (no revenue limits)

Yes, royalties apply after $1 million, hence, not free. Plenty of small/medium studios use Unreal.

Free for educational purposes means it is not free, since the royalties still apply if the game is released.

Last time I checked, free means free.

free means whatever the reader wants it to mean, including free as in beer, free as in speech, or free as in puppies. In this case, free until you have $1,000,000 in revenue is free enough outside of pedantic online arguments about the definition of free. If you made a million dollars from something, having to pay the thing that helped you get to that place doesn't seem unreasonable, but maybe I'd I had a million dollars I'd feel differently.

It's pedantic to say it isn't free when...it isn't? Plenty of smaller games make over $1 million. It's news to me that the concept of free is whatever the reader wants it to be. Free as in beer or free as in freedom, Unreal is neither.

Freedom in licensing definitely requires context and specification; an absolute view of freedom has little practical use. Game engines released, for example, under a GPL license may align with an absolute view of freedom, but they are useless for the vast majority of commercial games.

What needs to be below 1m? Revenue of the whole shop? Or just that game? If you have two games how is it calculated? Can you create legal entity per app to manage limit? Is it annual revenue? Can you set publishing legal entity in front that takes most revenue as publishing cost and pays peanuts to dev shop legal entity that holds license?

Per game, lifetime revenue.

Thank you. But that’s very blurry, no? Is my Mario 2 new game? Mario 3D? What about Mario vs Donkey Kong? Smash Bros with Mario? If all are new games what about Mario v1.3? etc. Wonder how they formalised it with legal language.

No that’s not very blurry at all. Mario 2 is clearly a different game than Mario 1.

Epic is not claiming any rights on your IP.

Mario v1.3 typically means Mario 1 with some patches unless you’re kingdom hearts, so yes that is still the same game. I believe dlc is bundled into the parent game.

$1M per product. So if you’re talking about releasing engine mods for free, there is no cost.

Does unreal expose an interface like GDCLASS for new types?

Probably UObject or AActor, depending on what you need it for.

There are macros-as-descriptors like in Godot but they don’t really work in the same way. But if you’re asking whether you have access to base level objects so that you can extend them, yea you can.

So is Firefox, and we all know where the community contributions there end up

I don’t know anything about this. Does Firefox reject contributions?

This article is pretty clearly LLM generated, or at least heavily padded out by an llm

I would have guessed it was written by an actual journalist who used to work for a newspaper. It's mixing story reporting, interview summarization, and quotes from independent sources in a way that's very familiar to me and seems like the work of a human. Although few places can afford that journalist touch any more, so maybe you're right!

What? You read the articles?

Oh my God, it's clearly a reported story by a journalist.

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