sorry, I don't know if anyone here will find any of this interesting.
I just recently ran across a project (Xonotic) which shows something
interesting:
Quake1 derived projects are apparently still ongoing, and managing to
deliver reasonably good looking games (sort of surprising, really, as I
had thought Quake1 had mostly petered out several years ago...).
this points out something:
the only "real" drawback of the Quake engine is mostly that it is GPL.
say, if one uses it, they are either stuck making a GPL'ed game, or
having to license an engine such as Source or idTech4 or similar, and
possibly remake a lot of their content to fit the engine (since these
engines are not really either particularly backwards compatible or
cross-implementation compatible).
I am almost left thinking that maybe something "sort of like the Quake
engine, but available under an MIT or BSD license" might be better, as
then one can use the same engine for both open-source and proprietary games.
but, one can argue:
"but, hey, isn't the Linux kernel GPL, and people can use it for lots of
stuff?..."
but, this is partly because of an oddity of how the GPL is interpreted
(mostly by Torvalds and friends), namely that in this case, the GPL only
applies to the kernel itself, but not to anything run on top of the
kernel (this is a special case mostly for things like VM's and OS's,
where the GPL doesn't apply from one to the other).
(also, a lot of what is done with the kernel in commercial settings
involves the use of loopholes, which I guess sort of puts the rage on
RMS...).
the problem though is that it doesn't likely apply to games, since a
game can be considered a "single program" (because it is generally all
code in the same process and often directly linked), meaning that the
GPL would apply itself to the entire work (unless of course, all of
ones' content were purely data-files and scripts, where the VM special
case could apply).
well, my own project is sort of "Quake-like", but is not derived from
the engines' source.
I am almost left wondering if I should just release the whole damn thing
as MIT as, otherwise, I am not likely to really make any money off this,
and my engine is still "less good" than many of the modern Quake-engine
variants around.
also, as has been mentioned before (on here, I think), my creative and
artistic skills are notably lame, which is a problem (this being a large
portion of a 3D game project).
BTW: if anyone wonders what my BGBScript language was mostly intended
for, the above is part of it (sort of, me and "goals" is a bit
uncertain, but game-scripting was a major potential usage domain, as was
scripting for 3D tools and similar).
but, yeah, it could all matter if, say, in the future game engines
became more like open platforms which people can build-on, rather than
one-off pieces of technology intended for delivering a particular game,
and ideally without the same level of vendor lock-in which has
traditionally been the case (or the need to license engines or pay
royalties to deploy games or stand-alone content for them...).
or such...
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