Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

People refer to games with proprietary assets as open source all the time. The source code is open - the assets are not. For one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28201265 / https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason/blob/...

Source as a word has a meaning that doesn't include non-source things.

View on HN

That’s an open source engine, we already have a word to define what that is.

And we have Open Weights to define what those are.

No, an engine is only the code that is shared between games. For instance "urban terror" by frozen sands is a closed source game on top of a (now) open source engine (the Quake3 engine). Quake3 is a (now) open source game (with closed assets) on top of its own open source engine. Quake and it's derivatives are a particularly nice example of the distinction between a game and its engine because the engine includes an interpreter for the game code, leaving a very clear boundary. Meanwhile many games end up intermingling their engine and game code (e.g. see the Eve Online devs write about this - another closed source game on top of a now open source engine).

BAR is an open source game. All the game source is open.

Bro, your link literally says in the read me it is an engine.

No? It says

> Open source RTS game built on top of the Recoil RTS Engine

BAR is a game, Recoil (a different thing - not the repository I linked) is an engine it is built on top of. Recoil is - incidentally - a fork of spring, an engine many open source RTSes are built on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com