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Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

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Re: Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

#81

Post by moron4hire »

pjmlp wrote: post #64
moron4hire wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proprietary, closed, vertically integrated tooling in Unity and Unreal are what make them such terrible tools for use in a professional development environment. All of the best programming tools are free, open source software. Yet somehow we're meant to believe game programming is "special" in some way that it shouldn't use the same ecosystem as every other area of software development. Yeah, right.

Because the values of the game industry are rooted in the demoscene, commercialization of game related IP assets and consulting work related specific hardware and design knowledge, without any religion about freedom of tooling, this is what most FOSS advocates fail to understand about the industry.

Given that every other industry has moved to FOSS software for their tooling, it's the game industry that has a "religion" about proprietary software being necessary to make money.

Re: Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

#82

Post by mikulas_florek »

ralfd wrote: post #78
mikulas_florek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, binary release is not GPL. However the main advantage of open source engines for game developer is their source being opened so you can change it. I wished so many times I have access to Unity source in my dayjob. But in case of Xenko, if you modify it you have to publish the source code of your game - which is a no-go for most game companies.

> I wished so many times I have access to Unity source in my dayjob. Wouldn't that be trap though in practice? Everytime a new Unity version comes around you would have to patch/test your changes back in.

Yes, it might be a trap. However you could at least:

* submit a patch

* find out that it's specific behaviour causing the bug and avoid it

* now how to optimized your code

* know how things work - Unity's docs misses a lot of details.

Re: Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

#83

Post by jackmott »

trueSlav wrote: post #51
pjmlp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of work still needs to go into those engines to achieve feature parity, specially in regards to GUI tooling. Just check Unreal's 2017 roadmap.

Whoever thinks that all these random 3D engines are worth anything to anyone but hobbyist programmers is delusional to say the least. "gui tooling" (or as I like to call it: "the engine") represents maybe 80 to 90% of value of an engine like Unity or Unreal. I'm sure that anyone who's actually done some project in one of these can confirm what I'm saying. The amount of money and time spent on the tools of UE is simpl…

Unity had no GUI tooling until very recently, yet was already very popular.

Re: Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

#84

Post by jackmott »

galangalalgol wrote: post #69
mikulas_florek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think importance of tooling is highly subjective, depends on your habits and workflow. Some people need to have an editor like Unity, others just want to create their whole game in code, e.g. www.randygaul.net/2017/02/24/writing-a-game-engine-in-2017/

That guy says his must-have feature of c++ is operator/function overloading. That seems an odd choice to me. I have been a c++ developer for over a decade. I would have leaned more towards it being a necessary evil.

It isn't even necessary. Its just convenient, maybe sometimes =)

Re: Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

#85

Post by iainmerrick »

galangalalgol wrote: post #69
mikulas_florek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think importance of tooling is highly subjective, depends on your habits and workflow. Some people need to have an editor like Unity, others just want to create their whole game in code, e.g. www.randygaul.net/2017/02/24/writing-a-game-engine-in-2017/

That guy says his must-have feature of c++ is operator/function overloading. That seems an odd choice to me. I have been a c++ developer for over a decade. I would have leaned more towards it being a necessary evil.

It's a must-have for 3D programming, for working with vectors and matrices. OpenGL's shader language is basically C with (hard coded) operator overloading for this reason.

Re: Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

#86

Post by moron4hire »

mikulas_florek wrote: post #71
codelitt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure hope so. I think one of the barriers may be the compatibility with a lot of the devices coming out in VR. For example, to build something for the Hololens, Unity3D is the only option. IIRC, for Oculus, the only OSS game engine that targets it is Torque3D. I'm not sure how much cooperation these engines need from the manufacturers to begin targeting them, but that can be hard for OSS projects to do.

VR is so minor market at the moment that it's just not worth to support in general engine with limited resources.

On the other hand, adoption is usually easier in niche markets.

Re: Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

#87

Post by iainmerrick »

sddfd wrote: post #9

What became of ogre3d? http://www.ogre3d.org/

There's Urho3D (https://urho3d.github.io) which seems to be mostly a clone of OGRE. I don't know if any of the same people work on it.

Xamarin have a C# wrapper for it, UrhoSharp (https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/urho/). I'm working with it now and I like it a lot better than Unity so far; but I strongly prefer to work in code rather than doing everything in Unity's IDE.

Re: Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

#88

Post by mikulas_florek »

plafl wrote: post #77
pjmlp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the values of the game industry are rooted in the demoscene, commercialization of game related IP assets and consulting work related specific hardware and design knowledge, without any religion about freedom of tooling, this is what most FOSS advocates fail to understand about the industry.

My opinion is quite similar to yours. I have never worked in videogames but my, uninformed, opinion has always been that open source videogames lag so much behind other types of open source programs because they require a lot of non-programmers to work. I don't think the complexity of the engines is the main problem, after all operating systems or compilers are also quite complex and critical software. So, what is so…

> So, what is so special about programming that makes people want to share their work for free?

I created my engine for myself, I guess a lot of open source projects start with one person solving his problem/having fun. I open source it because:

* money is not everything, it might bring value to some people, but I doubt people would be willing to pay for it * even if it's open source it does not prevent me to earn money with it * I benefit from people using it - submitting patches, reporting problems, testing on different hardware * it can bring money in different ways * if I share my property (e.g. car, flat, computer) with somebody else, it limits my use "rights", if I share software, it limits me in no way

Re: Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

#89

Post by talmand »

mikulas_florek wrote: post #75
vvanders wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, back when I was in games our ~70 person team was about 10 developers and the rest were artists/animators/designers. Tooling cannot be understated and most of our goal was to be a force multiplier on the majority of the team who actually do the creative work. That's what these engines bring and while hobby engines are nifty they're not going to be making strides into that space until they have a compelling toolin…

It is said that restrictions boost creativity and I've seen artists do amazing things even though their tools were complete crap. Question is how important tools really are. I would argue that vanilla Unity tools are nothing special and yet it's the most used engine in the world and people make amazing games with it.

With my former career as a creative in games dev, I say that's complete crap. I had access to good and bad tools. With the good tools I could experiment and test ideas quickly. With the bad tools I spent too much time just trying to get stuff to work. I would want tools that boost my creativity by giving me freedom, not boosting creativity to be able to finish my tasks.

Maybe you are thinking boosting creativity to work within the limits of the hardware? That's a different topic.

In my experience, vanilla Unity has better tools for creative out-of-the-box then many engines before it.

Re: Show HN: Lumix Engine – Open source C++ 3D game engine

#90

Post by mikulas_florek »

jackmott wrote: post #83
trueSlav wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever thinks that all these random 3D engines are worth anything to anyone but hobbyist programmers is delusional to say the least. "gui tooling" (or as I like to call it: "the engine") represents maybe 80 to 90% of value of an engine like Unity or Unreal. I'm sure that anyone who's actually done some project in one of these can confirm what I'm saying. The amount of money and time spent on the tools of UE is simpl…

Unity had no GUI tooling until very recently, yet was already very popular.

Indeed, and even the new GUI is very limited. Also other tools are not really great, e.g. animation graphs. But I consider this Unity's way the cause of it's success. To make good tools you have to taylor it to specific use case, making it more complicated and limiting users with different use cases.
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