Jump to content

Engine Source Code Availability


kablooey
 Share

Recommended Posts

Hi. I'm interested in Ultra Engine, but the lack of source code access is a major detractor for me.

In past experience with proprietary engine SDKs, I needed to memorise a lot of trivia. The cognitive load gets overwhelming - knowing which methods yield, what the return codes mean, when state is stored or ignored... I often relied on leaked code and disassembled binaries to nail down behaviour. Guessing behaviour is slow and painful - you'll be spending 100s of hours in this ecosystem in the journey to shipping your game, you want to know exactly how it works. Though the docs seem fine at a glance, you don't know what you don't know. Here's some questions that could've been answered by code access. In most cases, you're step-by-step describing what the closed-source code is doing!!

Many feature suggestions are really superficial! I could add these myself. Even if the desired change is an anti-pattern, hacks and bad code ship games. Waiting days each time I need a small engine feature implemented is going to suck very quickly.

C4 Engine is a very similar product. It targets windows and modern consoles. It's fully source-visible! Modifications and deeper reading are encouraged. Wicked Engine is is MIT! Take a look at WickedEngine's closed PRs. The third party PRs (i.e. not authored by turanszkij) are small, simple changes that solve specific user issues. They're often merged without changes. Your users are competent enough to write engine code!

Looking at the market for game engines; beginners will use Unity & GameMaker for their wealth of tutorials and assets, take-home hobbyist professionals will use Unreal. This leaves a niche of technically proficient creators on medium-length projects using over-sized, monolithic tools. A hackable, easily-readable engine would be lucrative in this space, and your product has the potential to be that!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ultra Engine is specifically designed to yield the fastest possible performance for VR and 3D and provides order-of-magnitude faster performance over other engines. It uses many trade secrets I spent years researching and developing, and I am not giving the source code out.

The editor provides support for Lua scripts and an extended API that can be used to build new functionality into the editor.

  • Like 1

My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

C4 Engine bundles Slug, a proprietary text shaping library licensed to top studios. It's very valuable IP - so the license stipulates that it (along with other isolatable features) can't be excised from the engine codebase. This has been the arrangement for years, and it seems to be working just fine. I'd welcome any similar stipulations regarding Ultra Engine's technology.

That aside, I believe this tech's value is greater than the sum of its parts - i.e. any singular "secret". Structuring the codebase with performance in mind makes a big difference, modern engines have compromised on that for flexibility.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...