Free snake bites. Torque goes Open Source - by Volitions Advocate
Volitions Advocate on 13/9/2012 at 23:52
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http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21876) LINKY
I actually find this to be a bit of a bad idea. Yeah we have a lot of options as budding indie game developers. And sure UDK is free(ish) and Unity has a free option etc...
Here's where I get cynical. Garage Games, as one of their biggest advertising slogans, state that they don't have a "pay to fail" engine. They give their developers all the "help" they need and create the tools to help them make a game easily.
I'll admit that it's true that Torque 3D has a good list of titles out. Everything from Telltale games is done with Torque (BTTF, Sam n Max, Jurassic Park, Penny Arcade, Homestar Runner, etc), Frozen Synapse.... etc.
But I don't see how having a history of depreciating the value of your software licenses helps your developers and customers in any way shape or form. As I understand it, when Garage Games first started, a Torque license was over $1K (unconfirmed by me, just heard that figure from people who say they were earily adopters). Last I looked you could get it for $100. Might not seem like a big deal, but when you're talking about Multiple seats. It gets prohibitively expensive for a start-up. Now you can get the whole thing for free. Which screws over few people.
Your customers. They paid a shit load of money, (or possibly a bit less depending on when they purchased) and for supporting the technology, they get no aid other than allowing everybody else to benefit from their.... what..? Philanthropy? Apparently you can get a refund
Quote:
We will be offering refunds for T3D purchases that happened on or after Sept 1st but before this announcement.
Nice... a whole week and a half before the announcement.
AND Now that X number of developers have released games on the Torque engine, The rest of the world now has access to a very large portion of their source code. "In before uproar over Frozen Synapse Trainer/Aimbots/nameyourcheatingmethodhere" That's gonna be fun for those guys to fight through.
That's before you add the moral grey area (although, legal, especially if you agreed to it in your contract) about changing any term you want in the contract without your customers' permission, because you put that clause there. And actually using it in such a huge way.
They say they want their customers to succeed. Not to take their money and let them fail like they accuse everyone else of doing. So in place of the revenue from selling licenses, they're going to a Unity style asset store and pay-per-use support system. What? So... We wont just take your money and let you fail, we have a better system where you pay us money for help. In the mean time
Quote:
We’ve encouraged our developers to open source these projects.
At least under the MIT license it isn't mandatory, but hardly seems all that useful since anybody can have the entire game code anyway.
Everything about this seems .... dishonest. Maybe that's a big strong of a word. More like.. un-genuine.
In the end i'm just bitching about something I have no stake in anyway, but I was surprised nobody here said anything. I have a C4 engine license. and while it's true that not many people have had a successful go at releasing their games with it, I still prefer it. It might not have all the flashy tools that UDK or Unity has to make the design guys happy. But its a programmers dream come true. And its an amazingly feature rich engine. One that I paid more for than the price is now, but I'm offered a credit for every single dollar I over spent if I ever decide to upgrade to a fully fledged professional license. It's true that if I want hands on help I need to make a feature request and pay for a support ticket. but the CEO of the company and lead/only programmer of the engine code is the most active member of the forum and constantly gives out free help for those who ask for it, including code snippets. And he's never forced anybody who was an early adopter to change the terms of their contract to co-incide with the terms of his newer licensees. No matter what monetary advantage it loses him.
Has anybody else been following this news at all?
Phatose on 14/9/2012 at 04:47
...What's all that about releasing the game's source code? I suppose they get the base engine, but that shouldn't significantly affect cheating rate.
Nor do I especially think the developer's who've used the engine already have all that much moral ground to beat. Anybody could acquire that source code the same way they did, so it's not like an expectation of confidentiality was reasonable. It's not like buying something gives you a reasonable expectation it will remain the same price you paid.
And they're not actually changing anything in the contracts of the people who bought it. IP is like that - the terms of the license they bought still apply. The MIT license doesn't override any of that.
That kind of thing happens in open source. I could write new software, not using other libraries, and release it under the GPL. But then also sell less restrictive licenses to anyone who wanted to use my code is a commercially distributed software without the burdens of the GPL.
Fafhrd on 14/9/2012 at 09:05
Quote Posted by Phatose
...What's all that about releasing the game's source code?
Yeah, what? Engine source and game code aren't the same thing, and they can't retroactively force the open source license of the engine on previous licensors. Proprietary code stays proprietary.
Volitions Advocate on 14/9/2012 at 11:18
I don't see how having the majority of the engine code would leave many roadblocks for hackers to do whatever they wanted with an existing game based on the engine.
And I'm not talking about gg forcing their clients to retro-actively open source their games. I am talking about how they put the clause in their license agreement stating that they can change the conditions of the agreement any time they want. The licensee is bound to protect the interests of the company, but get no say when the company wants to do its own thing even if it means potentially compromising their work.
Phatose, I agree with your last paragraph, but the software didn't start as oss. I think that's an important distinction to make. And saying that an expectation of confidentiality isn't reasonable is ludicrous. I'm sure gg would have jumped on the litigious bandwagon without hesitation if they found out somebody bound by their contract was handing out their code.
Phatose on 14/9/2012 at 14:12
Well, the vast number of games released in the Unreal Engine haven't been plagued by hacks any worse then you'd expect. The engine portion of it handles graphics, input, physics - not really the kind of stuff you'd want to muck about with if your goal was cheating. Things like HP, hit registration - that's the stuff you want when you want to cheat, and it's not part of the engine.
Again, I think one of us is misunderstanding something. I don't see anything to indicate they've changed, or even could change, the commercial licenses they sold before opening it. Is there something there I missed?
Volitions Advocate on 14/9/2012 at 15:56
Actually it looks like something I have missed. Maybe Torque users are just talking some crap, but I just read the EULA and it doesn't have a clause stating that garage games has any right to amend the contract without permission. I had been told otherwise, my bad.
Bakerman on 15/9/2012 at 03:52
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
As I understand it, when Garage Games first started, a Torque license was over $1K (unconfirmed by me, just heard that figure from people who say they were earily adopters). Last I looked you could get it for $100.
I just want to step in and clarify this since I've been a GarageGames customer for several years now. I can't say much about the period before TGE 1.5, which is where I jumped on board. TGE was basically the Tribes 2 engine, licenses were $100 up until version 1.5, where they added a bunch of stuff and upped the price to $150. Then came TGEA, which was basically TGE with shaders, for roughly $300 if I remember right (I never got TGEA). TGEA ended up being a bit of a mess, but nothing in comparison to when GG got taken over (not sure what the actual legal/financial situation was) by InstantAction and rebranded to TorquePowered. At around that time, T3D, the current version of the engine, was launched at $1000. InstantAction basically managed to run the business into the ground and GG went under, but were bought by Graham Software Development. They re-launched T3D at $100, recently put it up to $175 at around release 1.2, and are now open-sourcing it. The price changes recently are basically GG trying to get on its feet after being pretty much out of business around the end of 2010.
(And for the record, 'when GarageGames first started' is sometime around 2000. They've been doing this for some time :p.)
As someone who paid for the engine (though not at the $1000 price point...), I can't say I'm too bummed by the news. I agree, though, that only doing refunds for like a week before the announcement is pretty harsh. It seems like they've known something like this was in the pipeline for a while. I'm just looking forward to getting more talented developers working on the engine. It's no secret that the engine is a little bit crap in some aspects, though it's improved by leaps and bounds recently. It also makes it much easier to work in a team with people who aren't necessarily coders, 'cause now the tools are open-source, so you don't have to own a license to just edit levels. (Which was IMO a pretty bad decision.)
I'd like to be the first to trot out Blender as an example of a product that started proprietary, went open-source and is doing really well.
Also, the idea of an aimbot in Frozen Synapse is hilarious. But I get your point.
