Irrlicht, Ogre, Godot, Armory3d, mostly defunct BGE

[Rigsie]

Several people have just sort of spouted off about opening the source code to WA. Problematically, it is a Unity game. Not really possible. I mean you could make it into freely available Unity assets, but what does that achieve?

One of the main issues with getting any sort of decent open source game is the disjointed nature of the gaming engine scene in open source and the fact that there really is not one single flagship game for open source.

Is there ANYONE here that takes this seriously enough to sort of give me the inside scoop on which direction I should jump in choosing one of the various open sourced engines to boost a project for physics based 3d?

Does anyone know of an open source game I ought to be looking at? Best one I know is Minetest. Not really into a Minecraft clone, although I have played it some.

just.... The IDEA of open source is very appealing to me, and of course it has been demonstrated to work in certain situations. But it just seems the gaming industry is its death. NOTHING gaming related gets done open source.

[Wazubaba [Wazu]]

I will preface this by saying I only read the OP because this looks like 3 pages of inane arguing. I've tinkered on game engine design and other things though have not put out any games (mainly develop software for myself) or any engines beyond 2d things atop SDL2 in various languages.

Godot can do MMO though their physics system can be a bit wonky (probably not half as bad as WA's though). This is fixable however, if you are brave enough. I would definitely suggest, if you are an absolute beginner or against making your own engine, to use this engine. It is basically foss unity, though they are MIT licensed which is up to personal autism if this changes that. As a bonus you have an easy way to support other platforms than just Windows (linux pl0x).

Irrlicht I would suggest against because it is old as hell and it shows. Not a bad engine at all, just it was made for quake basically. Anything else feels like fighting against the grain from my experience.

UE4 is a bloated hellspawn of insanity from what I've seen. Some people swear by it. I swear at those people.

I wouldn't try to do anything ever in bge. That thing is dead as hell (for now). Armory is the choice if you *really* want to use bge for whatever reason, though haxe seems way more focused on random webcrap than actual systems stuff.

There is also absolutely nothing wrong with making your own engine from scratch either, despite what larpers on various forums say. You will learn a lot, have a perfectly-tailored engine for your needs, and have absolute control over everything. The only people who advise against this generally have their driving motivator at the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Bonus to this is that you start to understand other game engines at a more fundamental level (this is almost like how learning C can basically let you learn just about any other language quickly since they are all generally based off of algol anyways).

Please for the love of god though, if you do this? Learn how to bake a physics mesh please. Don't sit here with some insane setup of every single individual piece having its own bloody colliders, just rebuild your single physics body when a part is added or removed. Hell you can even just do it on exiting build mode if you must. Their method was basically unity built-in physics used poorly and with reckless abandon by the looks of it. Also don't buy into janky-ass proprietary libs that have obscure licensing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ because that is one area where opensource virtually always blows away the competition. Also do not fall for the coherent UI meme gui library. It is a godawful mess, runs so bad that I've seen a good few games have to switch away later on in development (to wit, crea and edge of space come to mind, though I think I've seen a few others), and also iirc costs money for the joys of basically bundling a crappy web browser into your game.

FWIW: there is no point in them releasing the source to WA because this game was made by people with absolutely no clue what the hell they were doing. They chose janky meme libs for their networking, only figured out right before the end how basic caching works (I.E. not having every bloody ship loaded into memory at all times), and probably more things that I simply did not see due to my arriving to this game (3 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ copies with the DLC) late. The only thing that would be nice is if they would release their assets, though I'd not be shocked if those too were done in horrifying ways. Also not exactly that hard to make yourself anyways, so meh.

Also the reason there are no real flagship opensource games is because either the devs get too greedy to stay opensource or are too autistic to make a game that more than 5 people enjoy.
Red Eclipse was awesome though back when I played it heavily.

[Rigsie]

Learn how to bake a physics mesh please

Possibly the most useful quip so far. So now I have an actual piece of information to do with making the project.

Interesting that you think yet another engine might not be that bad an idea. Seems to me from a project standpoint it would be nice to be able to get a group of people to stick with at least ONE of these engines and upgrade it to modern standards, rather than restarting over and over.

I'm favoring Armory right now. I was piddling with BGE when it died, so yea.....

[RitchieJ]

Messaggio originale di Rig Nan Roach:

. . . stuff like blacksmithing and whatnot . . .

Good for the soul –
Closest thing you’re going to get to that ‘tactile’ feel in virtual space is digital sculpting.

I can recommend Google’s ‘Tilt Brush’ on the Oculus Quest.
And soon-to-release ‘Gravity Sketch’ on the same platform.
Or ‘Oculus Medium’ on the Rift.
No workshop required, no mess to clean up.

This 'Road to Tokyo' blog is well worth a look
https://www.oculus.com/blog/the-ultimate-vr-sculpting-tournament-relive-the-road-to-tokyo-drama-and-watch-the-series-finale/

[Rigsie]

Messaggio originale di Wazubaba Wazu:

FWIW: there is no point in them releasing the source to WA because this game was made by people with absolutely no clue what the hell they were doing.

How closely were you paying attention to the animation of the characters in WA? And the ship builder?

I think those are the points at which they did their best work. Would like to know some source of info about animating in a way that allows for things like climbing up stairs even though there is no set animation because the steps can be any random size, and so forth.

Physics and perhaps somewhat procedural (maybe the term is "data driven animation").... that is a key.

This thing made me drool.

[Rigsie]

Messaggio originale di RitchieJ:

Messaggio originale di Rig Nan Roach:

. . . stuff like blacksmithing and whatnot . . .

Good for the soul –
Closest thing you’re going to get to that ‘tactile’ feel in virtual space is digital sculpting.

I can recommend Google’s ‘Tilt Brush’ on the Oculus Quest.
And soon-to-release ‘Gravity Sketch’ on the same platform.
Or ‘Oculus Medium’ on the Rift.
No workshop required, no mess to clean up.

This 'Road to Tokyo' blog is well worth a look
https://www.oculus.com/blog/the-ultimate-vr-sculpting-tournament-relive-the-road-to-tokyo-drama-and-watch-the-series-finale/

Freaking VR really brings this gaming paradigm of simulation to the next level. I can well imagine actually hammering out a weapon in a game using VR. Whenever I have tried to imagine doing that with standard video game controls, it just seems like it would be stupid to even try.

[Wazubaba [Wazu]]

Messaggio originale di Rig Nan Roach:

Learn how to bake a physics mesh please

Possibly the most useful quip so far. So now I have an actual piece of information to do with making the project.

Interesting that you think yet another engine might not be that bad an idea. Seems to me from a project standpoint it would be nice to be able to get a group of people to stick with at least ONE of these engines and upgrade it to modern standards, rather than restarting over and over.

I'm favoring Armory right now. I was piddling with BGE when it died, so yea.....

Yeah, Armory or Godot frankly would be the best options. I've never used Armory but I've toyed about with BGE so I imagine it is basically like that but more powerful.

Custom engine was more because you could hand-tailor it to your goals, though would require the most work. Basically you just cherry-pick random libraries and stitch them together with your own custom libs for things and glue code. Not really that hard to make just very easy to get wrong and require a huge amount of effort to repair if you don't know what to plan for.

I can't guarantee that I can help with the project, but I might be able to throw some models your way (I work with blender, gimp, a slightly outdated version of substance designer/painter, and if this is a FOSS project, I recently got the indie version of 3dcoat though I have no clue wtf I'm doing yet in that.). I have very little experience in character design though, and complicated rigging I am not very familiar with. Also I do not have, use, or desire to ever have or use windows again, at least not until reactos is stable, so that can be a bit of a problem.

RE: WA's character animation system: As far as I saw it was just bog-standard animation interpolation and offsetting the feet to the surface they are on. Also the char going basic kinematic ragdoll when in free-fall. Definitely nothing close to the system in this video lol. Their builder wasn't really that advanced either. It was procedural in that the way you build the skeleton was some sort of node tree with meshes connecting them with some textures repeating along UV and some greeble mesh stuff, though the components were just basically welded onto the ship entity, which is why they sometimes vibrated slightly when the game was lagging.

I'd say the problem with that video is that it most likely is highly-dependant on a navmesh. You can actually still do this even with something like WA, but you'd have to do some tinkering.

Oh quick edit to add - If you are going to setup a git repo definitely look into how git-lfs works. Most sites support it and it is an absolute necessity for bundling your binary assets.

Messaggio originale di RitchieJ:

Messaggio originale di Rig Nan Roach:

. . . stuff like blacksmithing and whatnot . . .

Good for the soul –
Closest thing you’re going to get to that ‘tactile’ feel in virtual space is digital sculpting.

I can recommend Google’s ‘Tilt Brush’ on the Oculus Quest.
And soon-to-release ‘Gravity Sketch’ on the same platform.
Or ‘Oculus Medium’ on the Rift.
No workshop required, no mess to clean up.

This 'Road to Tokyo' blog is well worth a look
https://www.oculus.com/blog/the-ultimate-vr-sculpting-tournament-relive-the-road-to-tokyo-drama-and-watch-the-series-finale/

I recently experienced this with 3dcoat. I never expected how oddly relaxing it was to sculpt, though good lord am I inexperienced with it. I can only imagine how awesome this would be in VR.

[Rigsie]

FOSS. I was hoping to be able to pay coders and for end users to make money hosting custom sites that I think of as bespoke instances of the game. That would be where all the modders would fit in. For once, I would like to see modders have someone's blessing to make some money if they can put together a community around their vision.

The code itself, once actually uploaded into the project, would be free and open source in the most absolute sense I can make it.

To the best of my understanding, that is still FOSS. But I am not keen to assign a license to it that just forbids people making any money, like I feel some of the licenses CC puts out can do.

[Wazubaba [Wazu]]

Messaggio originale di Rig Nan Roach:

FOSS. I was hoping to be able to pay coders and for end users to make money hosting custom sites that I think of as bespoke instances of the game. That would be where all the modders would fit in. For once, I would like to see modders have someone's blessing to make some money if they can put together a community around their vision.

The code itself, once actually uploaded into the project, would be free and open source in the most absolute sense I can make it.

To the best of my understanding, that is still FOSS. But I am not keen to assign a license to it that just forbids people making any money, like I feel some of the licenses CC puts out can do.

GPL can be used for profit (Aseprite, arguably one of the best sprite editors around, is GPLed), just it requires a lot of weirdness in shipping code with the thing in question or some odd lawyer speak I don't fully grok. This would require them to also keep their code opensource which might not be a bad thing given how modding communities work. This also means that if a critical bug is fixed in your code you will have access to the fix.

LGPL is like the GPL and I really don't understand the differences enough to comment. From what I know basically it means that your code can be linked against without their code having to be a GPL derivative as well. It generally is used for FOSS libraries.

Alternatively there is MIT, which won't require the mods to be open source, and can definitely be used in closed-source commercial products.

Up to you honestly. All have merits and detriments. There are other ones but these are the most common in the FOSS community.

The problem is that if these are mods made to your code specifically I am pretty sure they have to retain your license. If there are mods made via some kind of modding api then that might be different.

[Prayer]

If you havent seen the link yet in the other thread I created rudimentary discord channel for gathering.

https://discord.gg/HY5wPX5

[Rigsie]

Yeah if anyone wants to chat about this in real time with perhaps fewer pissed off people saying to get lost, join that discord. I am in it now.

[Wazubaba [Wazu]]

When you set up a public repo please post it here. I don't use discord due to both personal reasons and that the thing simply does not work properly on my system (neither their *spits* electron client or their web one) without using a third-party client which is fairly limited and a pita (also against their ToS because they can't do their data-mining ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥), but if I have spare time I might be able to help out and should at least be decent enough at bug-testing if nothing else.

[Lecky]

Godot Engine.
Lightweight, completly free, open source.
Give it a try.
https://godotengine.org/

[Rigsie]

We need an existing FPS game I think, and the only one I am seeing openly available among those more maintained engines is the one that comes with Armory3D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41JFd6EadzA