Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by astn » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 5:27 PM UTC

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…

>a minimal engine with plain helper functions that let you use, understand and talk to OpenGL

You can try http://libcinder.org , http://www.openframeworks.cc or http://www.sfml-dev.org

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

#122

Post by maaku » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 5:54 PM UTC

pertinhower wrote: post #92

mangeletti wrote: post #83

The thing that boggles my mind is how there seems to be concern about this concept of charging 5% (like Unreal 4 does). In my mind (not a game developer - tell me if I'm way off here), the framework gives you about 90% of the work up front (10s of thousands of man hours). Then, once you finish your game and it's a success (sales-wise), you pay only 5% of your revenue. This seems like a wonderful deal, right?

Absolutely. In the 2000s the Unreal Engine had a price tag of half a million dollars up-front plus royalties (I don't remember the percentage) on the back end. That these companies are giving their engines—even their source code—away essentially for free indicates either that (1) engine sales was never a very lucrative line of business or that (2) the promise of establishing your technology as a defacto game engine s…

Licensing engines was insanely lucrative, until Unity. Then everything changed -- you could go out and get a good engine with decent framework tools for a few hundred bucks. Why pay six figures up front and X% of revenue when a few hundred bucks for Unity did the job just fine?

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

#123

Post by ripter » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 6:03 PM UTC

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 didn't get that from the article.

"It’s something of a golden age of video game engine licensing. Not too long ago — hell, 5 years ago, licensing a big, brand name engine (including Source) involved gnarly negotiations, NDAs, and a small mountain of cash. Then Unity came along and changed the game."

Unity did change the game. There have always been game engines and game makers. But Unity was the first big name engine, with complete tooling, to go free. Suddenly developers had access to a full featured game engine with little upfront investment. If the game failed, it wasn't as big of a deal. If you payed the half a million for Unreal or Source, and the game failed, you had bigger problem.

Torque tried, but failed to compete. Blender, Orge 3D, Panda 3D, etc never became big name, widely used engines. They might be cheep/free, but good luck getting everything to work. The documentation and support just aren't there.

Modding is different. Unreal and others included their editor so you could mod the game, but you couldn't make a new game and sell it. You had to stay in the confines of Unreal/Half-Life/Warcraft/Starcraft. DOTA and Tower Defense came from the Warcraft 3 modding community, but they where still Warcraft 3. If you want to release your modded Warcraft 3, sell it, move it to other platforms, then you either have to pay for the engine, or use another engine.

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

#124

Post by nightski » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 6:09 PM UTC

ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #114

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, this doesn't make sense for VN's, but its not surprising that a lot of indie success stories are often 2D games that don't use these pricey engines. The cost is a disincentive as well as the extra 3D work compared to what can be done efficiently via 2D. The value argument doesn't make sense if my original vision was a 2D pixel game that I could personally do in my spare time compared to being given the hottest…

Minecraft was written from the ground up. Writing their own engine in Java has been the subject of great debate because of how poorly optimized it is, how every update shattered the mod scene, or how much work it takes to port it to all the various iterations on all the various platforms. Terraria was written in .NET using XNA and met with huge success. But they too have seen similar problems and have to use external…

This assumes you can just plug in the engine and all is well and good. Many of these engines are optimized for certain types of games and do not play well when bent against their will. There is a large cost of learning to utilize the engine and get the best performance out of it. You are also heavily committing yourself to something where it is possible a wall could be hit and there would be no way out of it. Moving away from one of these engines is very expensive and may involve re-writing the majority of the game. It is not something you want to decide lightly.

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

#125

Post by oatmealsnap » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 6:11 PM UTC

Can Source 2 really compete with UR4 and Unity5? HL2 was amazing for it's time, but the reason that Portal looks so good is because most of the animations and lighting effects are pre-rendered.

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

#126

Post by dietrichepp » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 6:14 PM UTC

benologist wrote: post #104

mangeletti wrote: post #83

The thing that boggles my mind is how there seems to be concern about this concept of charging 5% (like Unreal 4 does). In my mind (not a game developer - tell me if I'm way off here), the framework gives you about 90% of the work up front (10s of thousands of man hours). Then, once you finish your game and it's a success (sales-wise), you pay only 5% of your revenue. This seems like a wonderful deal, right?

I think non-game development is accustomed to taking tools and giving nothing back, particularly with open source. GPG provided a sharp wakeup call around this recently. http://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryptio... Game development does this but I think less as game architecture can require significantly fewer tools. Rovio were once called out at a GDC convention for giving nothing back to (the por…

For development tools, we all remember paying for development environments in the 80s and 90s. But then GCC was everywhere, Visual Studio had a usable free version, and Borland went up in smoke for various reasons. Platform owners realized that they were in a race to make development as easy and cheap as possible for their platform, except for a few odd cases where that wasn't in the best interests of brand image (game consoles, iOS).

Libraries are a different story, but if you look at e.g. C# development tools you'll see that they're subsidized to drive adoption of Windows and SQL server licenses. Java was an attempt to drive people to Sun hardware, and now Oracle is monetizing it with the Ask toolbar (I guess?).

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

#127

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 7:14 PM UTC

dtech wrote: post #45

sliverstorm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Source and Steam fit together? Source is an engine, Steam is a distribution platform. I think the only truly significant interplay is: - Source games will probably behave well with the Steam Overlay and probably work in Big Picture Mode with controllers - Steam recognizes the Source libraries as a distinct element, so you only have to download the Source engine once even if you have many games that use that…

> Steam recognizes the Source libraries as a distinct element I don't think that's correct, all Source1 games include their own copy of the engine and aren't automatically updated to newer versions etc. (Valve does update them though). The engine download is only for mods and some 3rd-party games.

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by rasz_pl » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

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.

ID is now owned by the biggest lawyer scumbag in gaming history, ZeniMax Media's Altman. They dont license, they sue people.

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

#129

Post by rasz_pl » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 8:03 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #11

fekberg wrote: post #5

How does Source and Steam fit together? Would it make sense to lower a potential fee for Steam exclusive games built on Source? Would it be "risky" trusting the same company with both the game engine and distribution? It's really great seeing Source 2, Unreal Engine and Unity lowering the bar for game developers to deliver their products.

In isolation, I agree with you -- this is what a competitive market looks like, Unity has forced the other engine makers to become more competitive. Competition is good. In the broader picture... I'm not sure. I keep thinking about the video game crash of '83, and how market oversaturation crippled American video game makers for years. I wonder if the constant lowering of barriers to entry isn't hastening something s…

>video game crash of '83

you need to remember games were blue pixel chasing three red pixels back then, that was the main reason for the crash.

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

#130

Post by hcarvalhoalves » Wed, Mar 04, 2015, 10:08 PM UTC

z3phyr wrote: post #43

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…

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.

You are probably right it seems far off now.

But I'm sure ray-traced engine is the killer-app of the Oculus Rift, and companies like Valve and Epic are aware of that gold rush. Once people see ray-tracing on VR they are not going back.