[HN Gopher] Overgrowth: Open-Source Announcement
___________________________________________________________________
Overgrowth: Open-Source Announcement
Author : kjeetgill
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-04-26 05:34 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.wolfire.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.wolfire.com)
| daenz wrote:
| idle_zealot wrote:
| This doesn't sound quite right. The devs did this with their
| last game, Lugaru, too. They just seem to like the old idtech
| model of releasing their engines to the community when they
| finish their games. I doubt they expect anyone to make another
| game with the engine, it's more for modding and porting
| Overgrowth itself.
| Scaevolus wrote:
| That's unnecessarily negative. It's a 14 year old codebase that
| they want to share with people that might be interested, not a
| bid to compete with other engines.
|
| > To be clear, this is not "the next big engine". Since great
| open source game engines like Godot exist, using Overgrowth's
| engine for your next game project is a bad choice in almost all
| cases. However, if you..
|
| > * Are interested in looking at what shipped game code can
| look like.
|
| > * Want to look at specific code, like the procedural
| animation system.
|
| > * Are an Overgrowth modder who wants to make a more involved
| total conversion or mod.
|
| > Then this is for you!
| daenz wrote:
| "Please take our ancient codebase that will take a long time
| to learn, with 0 assets to make it usable out-of-the-box, but
| don't use it for a real game because it doesn't make sense to
| do."
|
| That sounds the authors are giving up on the project, not
| that it's an opportunity for Wolfire to leverage the
| community to build a brand new thing.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| > That sounds the authors are giving up on the project, not
| that it's an opportunity for Wolfire to leverage the
| community to build a brand new thing.
|
| It doesn't have to be either of these things. They have
| been very clear that they're releasing the code as open
| source as a learning experience for those interested in one
| or more of these three things:
|
| 1. Are interested in looking at what shipped game code can
| look like.
|
| 2. Want to look at specific code, like the procedural
| animation system.
|
| 3. Are an Overgrowth modder who wants to make a more
| involved total conversion or mod
|
| They haven't given up on the project nor are they
| attempting to leverage the community for anything. Instead,
| they are releasing their code for others to see (and
| potentially use) in case it's useful...full stop. The code
| is released under the Apache license in the case that
| someone wants to reuse the code for their own project and
| sell it. Actual content is not included because then
| someone could just resell Overgrowth.
|
| This viewpoint of yours is unnecessarily dense and
| pessimistic, especially in regards to a company that has
| done exactly this same thing in the past with Lugaru.
| daenz wrote:
| >The code is released under the Apache license in the
| case that someone wants to reuse the code for their own
| project and sell it.
|
| From their post: >using Overgrowth's engine for your next
| game project is a bad choice in almost all cases.
|
| Also why only open source it 14 years later? Makes no
| sense.
|
| Also this was announced a week ago and not a single
| person has commented/liked/whatever on the post at the
| bottom. These are all signals.
|
| You can call it pessimistic and dense, but I think people
| who claim this project is going to be actively developed
| in 5 years are being optimistic and naive. I'm willing to
| make a small wager on my claim, open to any takers.
| [deleted]
| setr wrote:
| Who said anything about leveraging the community for
| anything? Stop putting words in people's mouths and
| actually read what's in front of you.
|
| Overgrowth is the kind of legendary horrifically scope-
| creeped passion project that any even mildly responsible PM
| would have put to the grave a decade ago, whose developers
| are so stupidly obsessed and time-oblivious with the most
| minute and arbitrary details that you couldn't even dream
| of a "release" version until it already happened.
|
| This project is the kind that can't die until they do, or
| they get thoroughly bored of it.
|
| They released the source. That's it. I don't know why you
| want so badly to assume malice
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| On the contrary, accepting patches for inclusion in the
| commercial game means it's very much not dead...
|
| It's also understandable people are shifting to using
| mainstream engines as a baseline. Not just because of the
| insane complexity involved in a modern AAA game, but skill
| transfer. If you work 14 years on a bespoke engine, your skills
| won't necessarily translate to your next job where you're using
| an entirely different platform.
| daenz wrote:
| Why not open source it in the first 13 years? How many bugs
| or modifications are there left in a 14 year old game? Unreal
| Engine is like Walmart and Amazon, and indie game engines
| (like this) are like the mom-and-pop shops. Time will tell if
| I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Of historical interest, this game was created by David Rosen, who
| started the Humble Bundle with his brother. I had no idea it was
| still in development. In the early days of the project it was
| pretty impressive to see the engine evolving under the work of a
| single teenage developer, including features like ragdoll physics
| which were novel at the time.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Game engine development is so ridiculously hard. The industry has
| plenty of little libraries that do some significant upfront
| lifting, but there's just plenty out there that isn't done for
| you. Stuff you wouldn't even think about until you realize you
| want a feature that isn't there. And the further you progress,
| and the more you learn, the fewer references and prior art you
| can turn to, because the combinatorics of finding someone who has
| built up all of those areas of discipline becomes exponentially
| harder to find.
|
| There are still proprietary technologies today that are decades
| old that the free and open source community has not recreated
| simply because for all of the people that work in this space,
| open source and commercial, there are just not many people at the
| high end of the scale working on those interesting problems.
| Those problems are the ones that generally become commercial
| solutions because no one else is doing it.
|
| After over 14 years of development, I would love to hear what
| little big problems like this the authors came across.
| natly wrote:
| It's strange how much this game has affected me over the years
| (just by following its development) even though I've never even
| played it.
| shahar2k wrote:
| considering these guys made the humble bundle in between bouts
| of making this game... (plus a bunch of other projects I
| personally love)
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Such fond memories of this game. The fighting mechanics were
| amazing. I hope that this has the intended effect, allow other
| developers to learn how it was done, what mistakes look like, and
| for case studies of how things are done.
| JoeOfTexas wrote:
| I watched this around its early days, even bought into the
| kickstarter. I guess I got old cause I didn't even know it was
| released haha.
|
| The animation techniques were pretty impressive at the time
| because Unity / Unreal didn't have anything like it yet.
| posnet wrote:
| Link to the actual repo:
| https://github.com/WolfireGames/overgrowth
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-28 23:00 UTC)