Pingles wrote:An ambitious endeavor. And a noble cause.
But when would it be done? And how consistent would a development platform like that be, where every module is crafted by a different team?
I am guessing it would take you YEARS just to select the people who you want to design just the standards between the components.
Proprietary software is full of dirty, non-standard hacks. Dirty hacks work, just not forever. It takes a special kind of academic to believe that only software based on immortal principles can succeed, which is why they hardly ever produce anything noteworthy. And write everything in Java. Monstrous Java.
So far I have determined that a decentralized system of accountability and a fluid, evolving community is required for sustainable software development. The top-down approach does not function because of deep mathematics regarding axiomatic set theory, incompleteness, and the dining practices of philosophers. e.g. Eventually Linus too will Halt, but Linux will continue. Software needs to be organic and integrated with its users, who are subject to chaotic changes. Because of this we must partially depend on the standards which have come to exist through the mechanism of evolution; culture, ethics, civility, burial rites... ideas which FOSS developers are receptive to. The challenge that I am contemplating is building a temporary 'bridge' which has the robustness to exist long enough to leave a void when it is finally exploited beyond usability. I make the assumption that this void would be filled by something better, the same way that I am waiting for Bitcoin to fail and be reborn.
I am encouraged by your kind support to continue.
Mystify wrote:This would have more to do with the person using the tool than the tool themselves. The quality of the end product is primarily dependent on how skilled the developer are in making a great game, modified by how restrictive their engine is. A $1500 startup cost is not going to be noteworthy in deciding the final price of your game. A 25% royalty would be, so unity wins out there, but if you have something of enough quality to actually get sales, $1500 is cheap.
And you will get a better game with genuine inspiration built on a proprietary engine than a cookie cutter game on a FOSS engine.
I really don't see how FOSS helps in regards to these points
nanicoar wrote:
If we could have an itemized list of all the features you need, such as procedural terrain (I want that too. Planets worth of it. Galaxies.), and developers who would set a price tag on integrating them in convenient ways into e.g. Blender, and somehow skip time in 12 month chunks, everything would be unicorns and sugar giggles.
Sure. But I don't need features in 12 months, I need it now. I don't want to wait for a FOSS engine to eventually meet my needs. Right now I use blender for my 3D modeling, and GIMP for my 2d drawing, and both meet my needs and I am happy. Show me a game engine that does, and I'll happily look into it.
nanicoar wrote:
The past few days I have been contemplating the specifics of how to implement something in code that would put bounties on those features. When we know what the most popular features are they could then be Kickstarted by indie devs looking for work.
With all the money being funneled in this thread, we could probably get every feature we need for commercial production.
But when? I don't want to wait around for a feature eventually. I'd much rather use unity now, which has what I need, and make progress on my game, rather than rage against another engine which doesn't have the capabilities I need yet.
I'm not trying to devalue your purchasing decision. I'm attempting to discuss our shared situation from a different perspective. However, UDK's 25% on game sales is less than Unity's 30% on asset sales.
A funny thing about Open Source is the myriad of unchallenged geniuses who periodically create one-off demonstrations of their skills, GPL the lot of it and then let the entire project fade into obscurity. Often this code is years ahead of its time, on the limit of what the technology of the time allows and consequently it only solves a limited set of problems. These are hardcore hackers with the attention spans of cats on meth, so once 'solved' the project becomes uninteresting to them. However, give 18 months to double transistor density and their code becomes interesting for a whole different set of problems.
What I mean to say by this is that the most of the features that are available in commercial packages are not new by any means. They are old ideas that are dusted off and sold as new. Writing documentation and creating educational material certainly is laudable, but there is a different, special kind of academic who is willing to do that for free for us. If there was a self-sustaining ecosystem which mined all that orphaned code and put the usable bits into a more or less limited selection of popular FOSS packages, it would be the commercial users who had to wait for 12 months.
A long-term financial incentive seems to be the sole missing component in this crazy scheme.