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Show HN: Toy – A thin C++ game engine

hugoam.github.io

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Re: Show HN: Toy – A thin C++ game engine

#11

Post by halfastack »

hugoamnov wrote: post #9
shezi wrote: post #6

Note that the engine is licensed under GPLv3. Which means that any game must be licensed as such as well.

Hi, the license is a temporary choice. I wish to release it under a permissive license in the future, I'd just like to secure a tiny bit of funding before that !

Just a note that if you accept any merge from anyone else, when changing the licence, you'll have to have their consent to change the license as well. Sounds like it might be a difficult thing to switch, depending on how many contributors you'll have when wanting to switch.

Re: Show HN: Toy – A thin C++ game engine

#12

Post by sbjs »

halfastack wrote: post #11
hugoamnov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, the license is a temporary choice. I wish to release it under a permissive license in the future, I'd just like to secure a tiny bit of funding before that !

Just a note that if you accept any merge from anyone else, when changing the licence, you'll have to have their consent to change the license as well. Sounds like it might be a difficult thing to switch, depending on how many contributors you'll have when wanting to switch.

Is that true though? I thought all third party contributed changes are licensed separately, with the contributor still having all rights, unless they explicitly say otherwise.

Re: Show HN: Toy – A thin C++ game engine

#13

Post by gitgud »

hugoamnov wrote: post #8
gitgud wrote: post #5

Looks very interesting, but not what I expected a "thin" game engine to be, as it seems fully featured; Obj importer, physics, UI components and sound capabilities.

It's thin in the way that all the goodies are in separate modules that you don't have to use, and also in the way that it still runs in the browser with all these goodies. But it's also not so thin, you are right :)

Great idea, I recently did an opengl project and just getting TinyOBJLoader to work was a task in it self.

Thin & Batteries Included!

Re: Show HN: Toy – A thin C++ game engine

#14

Post by gmueckl »

gitgud wrote: post #5

Looks very interesting, but not what I expected a "thin" game engine to be, as it seems fully featured; Obj importer, physics, UI components and sound capabilities.

Look at the example code further down: the engine isn't a heavy framework with tons of abstractions between the big systems and the game code. You get to directly access and drive all the individual systems yourself.

The most common "big" game engines don't allow that. There you get a big, quite opaque runtime that somehow will do rendering, sound, physics and networking and occasionally call individual fragments of your game logic in between.

Re: Show HN: Toy – A thin C++ game engine

#15

Post by gitgud »

shezi wrote: post #7
gitgud wrote: post #5

Looks very interesting, but not what I expected a "thin" game engine to be, as it seems fully featured; Obj importer, physics, UI components and sound capabilities.

The second row of the main page states this: "The first concern of toy is to bring the thinnest and simplest stack of technology for making games directly from C++, instead of focusing on a monolithic editor, or insulating the user from the core systems." So I think this is "thin and wide", instead of "thin and small". Having all the components you need and having them directly accessible counts as thin in my opinion…

Fair enough, my interpretation of a thin game engine is a thin abstraction over the mechanics of the game... but now that I think about it, this is exactly that...

Re: Show HN: Toy – A thin C++ game engine

#16

Post by cpburns2009 »

sbjs wrote: post #12
halfastack wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note that if you accept any merge from anyone else, when changing the licence, you'll have to have their consent to change the license as well. Sounds like it might be a difficult thing to switch, depending on how many contributors you'll have when wanting to switch.

Is that true though? I thought all third party contributed changes are licensed separately, with the contributor still having all rights, unless they explicitly say otherwise.

IANAL: My understanding is the same as @halfastack's.

> I thought all third party contributed changes are licensed separately, with the contributor still having all rights, unless they explicitly say otherwise.

That's true, but it prevents the project owner from changing the license unless either the contributed code's license is compatible with the new license, or all contributors consent to the license change. That is, going from MIT to GPL is fine, but GPL to MIT is not.

Projects concerned with this frequently require contributors to sign a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) where the contributor gives permission for the project to use the contributions and relicense them in the future. E.g., Ubuntu [1].

[1]: https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/contributors

Re: Show HN: Toy – A thin C++ game engine

#18

Post by nine_k »

shezi wrote: post #6

Note that the engine is licensed under GPLv3. Which means that any game must be licensed as such as well.

GPL has great provisions against hostile forks, but as is it's a bit too restrictive for games as final products.

I'd imagine that LGPL would give both an incentive to contribute to the engine, and a way to commercially release games based on it, without GPLing all the assets and all the game mechanics.

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