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Comment by progbits | Hacker News Reader

Given the leaks, the fact it's been over 10 years since last major game released using Source 1, and the fact most of the rendering code (probably the most valuable bits, aside from physics) in Source2 must have been rewritten given the new developments in game graphics; makes me wonder if there is any reason for them to keep it closed source.

Do you think they will release it at any point? Maybe there are licensing issues where they don't have the rights to all of it and couldn't easily opensource it. Or maybe there is in fact still too much secret sauce left there?

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There's always "too much secret sauce". I remember a time when CryTek published papers about how they implemented things, now they don't.

There's always in-house ways to deal with graphics drivers and certain effects. Remember how Source 1 was the only engine which was able to render HDR with measly ATI 9600XT, without a performance penalty most of the time?

You carry this know how in evolved form for generations, and it gets buried under as the foundation of the new things you're building on top of it.

This is what I remember from a friend who implemented his own game engine and created a company for it, and half the woes were making the graphics drivers and processors behave as they said in their manuals.

There's quite a lot of information given out on engine programming and 'tricks' at GDC every year. Some great talks by Unreal, Bungie, Guerrilla Games, etc...

Isn't UE4/5 fully source available?

You need to get a license to get the source. When you pay for the license, you also agree that you won't share that source.

ID's engines are always called "The world's most expensive xcopy". You always get the source, but you never share it.

Same model. Get the license, get the source.

See the relevant page at: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...

From that page:

> This page provides detailed instructions for subscribers to download the source code for Unreal Engine (UE) from the Unreal Engine GitHub repository, and to get started working with the code.

(Emphasis mine)

The UE4/UE5 source code is only available under license, but the bar to acquire said license couldn't possibly be lower. You just connect a GitHub account, click through a EULA, and automatically get access to almost* the entire source code for free.

* The NDA'ed console bits are hidden of course but all the PC code is there. Not just release snapshots either, you can see all of Epics commits in real time.

But it’s source available, and it’s not free software, correct?

It’s just free as in beer.

“Click through EULA” is the mammoth in the room.

Yes it's source available, not true free software. Kvirani never said it's free software though.

I think the point is that you're not legally allowed to borrow its techniques

Something as abstract as "techniques" is in general not copyrightable. Worst case, there is a software patent but that is not something that is granted automatically.

It's not open source but it is free

IIRC (from memory) it was called Source because it was a derivative of the Quake 2 engine that id gave them a copy of after a meeting (on a cd simply labeled “source”) even before they had a contract in place.

If this apocryphal story is true, they might only have a license to it (making it a derivative work) and depending on the terms of their licensing agreement from id they might not be able to do that without having their legal people talk to ZeniMax’s (they bought out id software and are their parent company now) lawyers, which runs to thousands of dollars in pure costs even if everyone is totally cooperative and on board and wants to make it happen immediately.

Close, but it's a little different. When they were making Half-Life their code was in a 'Src' directory. Around the time HL1 released they forked the code into a `GoldSrc` directory so that they could start moving ahead with other projects in Src. Internally they used "source" and "gold source" to refer to the HL2 vs HL1 engines, and it stuck.

The story goes that the name comes from their version control system. When they licensed the Quake engine (the original one, not Quake 2) they started a repository imaginatively called "src" to iterate on it. As Half Life 1 approached completion that was forked into a stable branch called "goldsrc", which became a semi-official nickname for the HL1 engine, while more experimental work continued on the original "src" branch which eventually grew into... Source.

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