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End of the Machinery Game Engine

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#61

Post by maccard »

10987654321 wrote: post #42
devd00d wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it's legal and it will certainly destroy companies. And what makes it worse, is that my best guess is that they are going to capitalize on this move. Maybe repackage it as some other high priced software. Either way, the whole company should be ashamed. I use Godot and now I'm wondering if this can't happen at Godot as well. Perhaps it's time to switch to Unity. You pay but at least they have sort of stood th…

Godot is MIT-licensed so no, they can't arbitrarily revoke your license and force you to stop developing your game. What they could theoretically do is stop developing it, or change the license for all newer versions of the engine to one that would force you to pay to use it (or similar). In which case Godot would most likely be forked on the same day and a big part of the current developers would just move over to t…

> Godot is MIT-licensed so no, they can't arbitrarily revoke your license and force you to stop developing your game.

Sure they can, but it's meaningless unless they try to enforce it via court, in exactly the same way Our Machinery's license will be enforced.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#62

Post by p_l »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #59
elefanten wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious if you could supply any specific examples of that being normal in old SV? Of people taking a massive cache of proprietary work, including original research done by colleagues? Genuine question.

Fairchild semiconductor is one example.

At best the "traitorous eight" took with them the direction of research and work they wanted, which wasn't supported by Schockley - and Schockley did try to lockdown as much of the IP he could, taking patents out even if they were dubiously assigned to company.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#63

Post by matheusmoreira »

maccard wrote: post #60
matheusmoreira wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely no point in reading any user agreements or terms of service. The following statements effectively summarize all such documents: > you own nothing > you have no rights > you promise not to try and exercise any right you think you have > you agree to binding arbitration with the firm we pay, just in case you ever get it in your silly little head that you do have rights > you cannot do anything the c…

I downvoted you because this is HN, not reddit. It's absolutely not true, and doubly so in the situation where you're dealing with b2b agreements. Most service agreements for enterprise agreements are negotiable, and certainly don't contain the above clauses.

> Most service agreements for enterprise agreements are negotiable, and certainly don't contain the above clauses.

If you're a corporation, you have leverage which you can use to negotiate. Normal people don't, they are offered a take it or leave it deal and it's pretty much always what I described above.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#64

Post by kevingadd »

elefanten wrote: post #52
kragen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, we don't have any idea how bad their legal position is. They might be considering themselves lucky to avoid prison, like Anthony Levandowski. 50 years ago doing what he did was normal; it was how Silicon Valley got built. Since then the laws have changed.

Curious if you could supply any specific examples of that being normal in old SV? Of people taking a massive cache of proprietary work, including original research done by colleagues? Genuine question.

Not precisely what you asked for but relevant to this topic of a game engine: A bunch of former NCSoft developers got sued (and lost) for heading off to their new game studio BlueHole with stolen Lineage 3 code and design material. This resulted in jail time.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/tera-developers-guilty-of-stea...

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#65

Post by [deleted] »

kevingadd wrote: post #64
elefanten wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious if you could supply any specific examples of that being normal in old SV? Of people taking a massive cache of proprietary work, including original research done by colleagues? Genuine question.

Not precisely what you asked for but relevant to this topic of a game engine: A bunch of former NCSoft developers got sued (and lost) for heading off to their new game studio BlueHole with stolen Lineage 3 code and design material. This resulted in jail time. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/tera-developers-guilty-of-stea...

[deleted]

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#66

Post by stephc_int13 »

This is sad, I've been following their work for some time and I think they were onto something, many good design ideas, very clean albeit a bit verbose sometimes.

I'd like to know what is the underlying issue? Disagreement between founders? Acquisition? Legal problem? Not enough funding? Not enough customers?

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#67

Post by enqk »

This only makes sense if they got into legal problems with a powerful entity which would have raised issues with software patents or copyright on the Our Machinery engine.

Presumably also with some sort of NDA attached to it?

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#68

Post by 999900000999 »

Well, I can't wait for Godot 4 + C# now.

After trying Godot 3.5, it felt like an inferior Unity.

The 4 alpha feels great.

My big fear with Unity isn't a total collapse, but gradual suckification of the engine. For now it's still the easiest way to build amazing games, but things are changing.

I'd be surprised if Godot or another FOSS engine wasn't dominant by 2025, or at the very least viewed as Blender is compared to Maya.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#69

Post by Vespasian »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #63
maccard wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted you because this is HN, not reddit. It's absolutely not true, and doubly so in the situation where you're dealing with b2b agreements. Most service agreements for enterprise agreements are negotiable, and certainly don't contain the above clauses.

> Most service agreements for enterprise agreements are negotiable, and certainly don't contain the above clauses. If you're a corporation, you have leverage which you can use to negotiate. Normal people don't, they are offered a take it or leave it deal and it's pretty much always what I described above.

That is right.

For normal people the leverage comes mostly through market forces, consumer protection laws and regulations because then you are leveraging with your whole economy and sovereign power of your country.

Not as good as individual leverage but better than nothing by a million miles.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#70

Post by tebjan »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #56
KronisLV wrote: post #46

> ...you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries. This is pretty weird. Then again, in regards to the engine itself dying, I feel like this is inevitable for many of the projects out there. For example, there was the Xenko engine which was later renamed to Stride: https://www.stride3d.net/ It's actually a nice project, has lots of great features and feels like it should be a more open alternati…

Stride looks good, but am I right in thinking that unlike Godot, it doesn't support macOS or Linux as a deployment target?

Stride can deploy games to win, macOS, linux, iOS and android.
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