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Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

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Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#51

Post by kmfrk »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #33
zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #8

Unreal, Unity and now Source within just a few days from each other... It looks like the game engine market is commoditizing rapidly.

I have a (possibly crazy) theory: Companies like Valve and Epic have already amortized the cost of development of their engines - those are codebases that span 16 years, and both companies had multiple commercial successes. All it took was Unity to give a little nudge. Now, IMO, the reason for giving so much for free is to keep a player out (Unity) and milk the cow one last time with the eventual royalties. I think i…

There's probably a bit of the Photoshop Effect going on, where companies are mostly interested in having their tool become the dominant one - and the dominant skill - in the industry over piracy litigation.

We're in a perfect storm of access to development tools and interest in indie development thanks in large part to Steam and Kickstarter.

In the case of Valve, I think what butters their bread isn't Steam anyway, but the games people end up making with it that Valve get a cut from through Steam.

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#52

Post by jokoon »

mutagen wrote: post #39

The article attributes all these free engines to Unity but I think they've missed 20+ years of videogame history. First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine. HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has als…

> Ogre 3D

I recently chose to give up on Ogre3D as I was completely frustrated by my inability to make it run on mac. It's also way too big (I don't know if OOP is a reason for that, but I still tend to dislike OOP nevertheless). For example it doesn't seem that you can choose to not use the scene graph.

I loved that engine at some point, but as time passed, I wasted an incredible amount of time trying to either build it (oh the pain) or make a project run across platforms (mac especially).

I recently found an opengl 3.3 core profile tutorial (learnopengl.com, it's really good for motivated beginners), I felt really better learning that since I like to understand how lower level stuff works and how to make things as simple as possible.

Unity/source/unreal engine are great when one wants to sell a beautiful, smooth 3D game quickly and doesn't have too specific or uncommon requirements. But when you want to experiment, there's nothing else than raw opengl.

I really wish Ogre3D was lighter, or that there was be a minimal engine with plain helper functions that let you use, understand and talk to OpenGL to make the best use of it. I can understand that indie devs want to be able to use the best 3D right away, but sometimes it can be nice to give more control to the programmer.

I guess I hard a hard time learning by myself, or that I'm just trolling out of frustration. 3D is not easy and sometimes I think some small dose of KISS would be appreciated.

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#53

Post by Qworg »

kmfrk wrote: post #51
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a (possibly crazy) theory: Companies like Valve and Epic have already amortized the cost of development of their engines - those are codebases that span 16 years, and both companies had multiple commercial successes. All it took was Unity to give a little nudge. Now, IMO, the reason for giving so much for free is to keep a player out (Unity) and milk the cow one last time with the eventual royalties. I think i…

There's probably a bit of the Photoshop Effect going on, where companies are mostly interested in having their tool become the dominant one - and the dominant skill - in the industry over piracy litigation. We're in a perfect storm of access to development tools and interest in indie development thanks in large part to Steam and Kickstarter. In the case of Valve, I think what butters their bread isn't Steam anyway, b…

Steam is both the butter and the bread so to speak. More games = more revenue. I don't know why they didn't do this sooner.

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#54

Post by ygra »

hatu wrote: post #49
z3phyr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real Time Ray tracing is still very far off. Brigade serves as a good proof of concept, but a lot of things are yet to be researched and implemented to make it viable in commercial sphere. Seeing the progress, I do not think commercial real time ray traced game will be a reality any time soon in this decade.

It's been "next gen" for decades. It's just a terribly inefficient brute-force approach to lighting a scene. I don't think it'll ever be viable for real-time graphics.

Even if it'd be viable, the traditional approach is much faster and easier on resources. You still want to retain a part of the GPU for physics, maybe. Or run on lower-end hardware, too. Using ray-tracing for accurate shadows or reflections in part of a scene may be viable, but I severely doubt games will just use ray-tracing for rendering. CAD and architecture stuff may benefit more from that, I guess.

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#56

Post by CmonDev »

djloche wrote: post #28
unethical_ban wrote: post #19

Odd that idTech, known historically as a corss platform engine that was unique for being opened after its profit was done, is now seemingly one of the more closed engines on the market.

They sold the company, and now Carmack at Oculus. It makes sense that the values of the company have changed.

"...the values of the company have changed..." - a polite way of saying "the founders sold out".

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#57

Post by spuz »

geon wrote: post #34
keyle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder when that's going to get old. On an odd note, they did deny "source 2" to ever exist until recently. So, I guess there is hope for you.

Developing the engine (even if it is mostly incremental enhancments from the games released over the years) must have taken up signifficant resources lately. If the engine is "done" now, there should be people available to work on new titles.

Chances are, they are developing the engine alongside a new game built on that engine. That is after-all how most game engines are built.

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#58

Post by mintplant »

jokoon wrote: post #52
mutagen wrote: post #39

The article attributes all these free engines to Unity but I think they've missed 20+ years of videogame history. First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine. HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has als…

> Ogre 3D I recently chose to give up on Ogre3D as I was completely frustrated by my inability to make it run on mac. It's also way too big (I don't know if OOP is a reason for that, but I still tend to dislike OOP nevertheless). For example it doesn't seem that you can choose to not use the scene graph. I loved that engine at some point, but as time passed, I wasted an incredible amount of time trying to either buil…

If you're willing to go the Java route, LWJGL is pretty close to what you've described.

http://www.lwjgl.org (their website seems a bit odd right now)

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#59

Post by gambiting »

mintplant wrote: post #58
jokoon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ogre 3D I recently chose to give up on Ogre3D as I was completely frustrated by my inability to make it run on mac. It's also way too big (I don't know if OOP is a reason for that, but I still tend to dislike OOP nevertheless). For example it doesn't seem that you can choose to not use the scene graph. I loved that engine at some point, but as time passed, I wasted an incredible amount of time trying to either buil…

If you're willing to go the Java route, LWJGL is pretty close to what you've described. http://www.lwjgl.org (their website seems a bit odd right now)

lwjgl is so plain it's no more than a wrapper around OpenGL context.

If you want slightly more than than(but still not a proper engine), I would wholeheartedly recommend libgdx: http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/features.html

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#60

Post by SyneRyder »

vidarh wrote: post #44
mutagen wrote: post #39

The article attributes all these free engines to Unity but I think they've missed 20+ years of videogame history. First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine. HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has als…

I'd go much further back. The idea of turning the game engines and tooling into a commodity dates at least as far back as the early 80's, and I'd expect it dates back to before that too. The first game creation tools I used, were: The Quill, 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quill The Games Creator, 1984: http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/gam... Shoot-'Em-Up Construction Kit, 1987: https:…

SEUCK was £19.95 in 1988[1] and the price had crashed to just £5.99 by 1992[2]. Even accounting for inflation, that must have been less than £50 / $75 in today's money.

SEUCK was awesome - I wonder whatever happened to Shaun Pearson, the guy who made all those SEUCK games for the Zzap!64 Megatape. I think Outtake Two convinced me to buy my copy of SEUCK.

[1] http://amr.abime.net/review_37278

[2] http://amr.abime.net/review_49823

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