I'm starting a small indie game project and I'm looking for an open source game engine to work with. I need open source tools because I want to allow community content in my game but most proprietary engines are not redistributable and make modding support tough. I need an engine that offer networking, decent lighting, an editor, and a common scripting language. Any suggestions are much appreciated.
Any good open source game engines?
Unity3D is a great engine! I don't know if it's open source though. But in my opinion it is amazing. It is very easy to use, and not too hard to learn (unless you don't know any programming language).
Have a look at Urho3D, It uses angelscript and lua.
Of course there are loads out there but I found that Urho3D was the easiest to get up and running which is important if you want to allow modding support.
Or you can look into the web based engines (I don't know your indie game requirements and target platform ) like PlayCanvas and verold.
Of course there are loads out there but I found that Urho3D was the easiest to get up and running which is important if you want to allow modding support.
Or you can look into the web based engines (I don't know your indie game requirements and target platform ) like PlayCanvas and verold.
Unity3D is a great engine! I don't know if it's open source though. But in my opinion it is amazing. It is very easy to use, and not too hard to learn (unless you don't know any programming language).
It most absolutely, definitely not open source.
Unreal is "easy source" (you get the full source code access on GitHub for $19/month).
So far as truly Open Source games engines, no, there aren't really any "good" ones by modern senses. They're all either hobbyist modifications of abandonware like old idTech engines, hobbyist engines of low quality (especially wrt tools and content creation support, the actually hard parts of game development), hobbyist clones of specific games that aren't very usable for new games (especially as they don't even try to pretend that they need new tools or content pipeline work), or freeware pretending to be FOSS but which are under fairly restrictive licensing.
Making a moddable game in a proprietary engine is quite doable. You don't need to ship the engine's toolset to make mods for a game using the engine. Be smart and modular about assets and hard code as little as possible. If you really want to go far, build a proper editor for your game. You _can_ use a full engine like Unreal or Unity to make a game-specific editor and ship that to your users. If you really want to be modder-friendly, the engine's editor is almost certainly the wrong tool for the job anyway. Look at the tools for popular moddable games, like Bethesda's RPGs: the tool is very purpose-built and has many sub-tools and modes specific to how their game works (think item table editors, NPC editors, etc.) that a general-purpose editor like Unreal's or Unity's will necessarily lack.
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Unity3D is a great engine! I don't know if it's open source though. But in my opinion it is amazing. It is very easy to use, and not too hard to learn (unless you don't know any programming language).
It most absolutely, definitely not open source.
Unreal is "easy source" (you get the full source code access on GitHub for $19/month).
So far as truly Open Source games engines, no, there aren't really any "good" ones by modern senses. They're all either hobbyist modifications of abandonware like old idTech engines, hobbyist engines of low quality (especially wrt tools and content creation support, the actually hard parts of game development), hobbyist clones of specific games that aren't very usable for new games (especially as they don't even try to pretend that they need new tools or content pipeline work), or freeware pretending to be FOSS but which are under fairly restrictive licensing.
Making a moddable game in a proprietary engine is quite doable. You don't need to ship the engine's toolset to make mods for a game using the engine. Be smart and modular about assets and hard code as little as possible. If you really want to go far, build a proper editor for your game. You _can_ use a full engine like Unreal or Unity to make a game-specific editor and ship that to your users. If you really want to be modder-friendly, the engine's editor is almost certainly the wrong tool for the job anyway. Look at the tools for popular moddable games, like Bethesda's RPGs: the tool is very purpose-built and has many sub-tools and modes specific to how their game works (think item table editors, NPC editors, etc.) that a general-purpose editor like Unreal's or Unity's will necessarily lack.
That's probably the best solution. Thank you!
I'm starting a small indie game project and I'm looking for an open source game engine to work with. I need open source tools because I want to allow community content in my game but most proprietary engines are not redistributable and make modding support tough. I need an engine that offer networking, decent lighting, an editor, and a common scripting language. Any suggestions are much appreciated.
Yeah... that's not going to be a small project.
Unreal Engine 4 supports all the things you're looking for, though I don't think you'll really need to dig into the engine source code itself. It's sort of open source, where you can download, modify, update and look at 100% of the code needed to build the engine, but you don't own the rights to do whatever you want (ie, you can't freely give it away or sell the engine yourself).
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