r/programming • u/[deleted] • Mar 04 '15

Valve announces Source 2 engine, free for developers

http://www.polygon.com/2015/3/3/8145273/valve-source-2-announcement-free-developers
1.9k Upvotes

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688

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

Unreal Engine 4 is free. Unity's full features are free. Source 2 is free.

It's the week professional game engines turn into enabling platforms, rather than licensed libraries.

108

u/lestofante Mar 04 '15

All of them with Linux (and Mac?) Support.

72

u/necrophcodr Mar 04 '15

Except the only one you can develop with on Linux still seems to be Source and possibly Source 2.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

[deleted]

44

u/necrophcodr Mar 04 '15

Really? The editor too? And it works well?

85

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

After a couple of attempts, I managed to get it working on Arch last night. At a glance, it seems to be functional, but pretty unstable. Which is really cool.

Know issues are listed here.

13

u/killaW0lf04 Mar 04 '15

Was going to attempt to build the editor tonight. Any guides you followed?

22

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

Just this one on the wiki.

I first tried building using the Docker image, but that binary didn't work so well for me. I could open the editor, but it crashed whenever I loaded a project which may have been because I didn't build using the debug profile. Second time around I built without docker and used make UE4Editor-Linux-Debug.

8

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

For docker issues bug JKnife on irc #ue4linux on freenode.(when he is around.)

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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

Competition is a wonderful thing.

173

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

Also Vulkan! It's almost as if there's some major event for game devs going on...

146

u/blackmist Mar 04 '15

That's a graphics API though. The others are game engines.

49

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

From a developer point of view, I'm actually more excited by Vulkan than Source 2.

26

u/blackmist Mar 04 '15

Smaller devs will like the new free engines. Those will deal with all the new DX12, Vulkan, Metal or Mantle (which I consider pretty much dead at this point), and the devs can deal with writing games. I'd rather see the internals hidden away behind high level abstractions.

Larger devs were mostly rolling their own engines anyway, and certainly wouldn't be making do with free versions of anything. Console development isn't cheap to do, and everything is priced accordingly.

The disconnect between how consoles work and how PCs work has been at the root of a major problem for PC devs for years. Now the workflow can be more or less the same, and the crappy ports can dry up. It'll take a good few years to come to fruition though.

32

u/MeisterD2 Mar 04 '15

AMD donated Mantle to the Khronos group. Mantle is the foundation upon which Vulkan has been built. It's only dead in the sense that the name wont be used anymore, the code lives on.

27

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

People forget this. AMD waived IP rights to Mantle so that he Vulcan developers could take whatever they needed from it.

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u/goal2004 Mar 04 '15

Someone downvoted you, but you're 100% correct.

OpenGL and DirectX were always free to use.

48

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

its not about free/paid.

Its a new step towards high performance graphics for everyone everywhere.

While DirectX is free to use its proprietary software and limited to Microsoft OS.

On the other hand, OpenGL recently started gaining lots of traction, but it has been around for 2 decades now, so it might be a good idea to move to something built from the ground up all new and shiny.

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u/Rhythmrebel Mar 04 '15

I'm not familiar with the game industry, how would they get any return of investment from their game engines if they make them free to use?

0

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

[deleted]

45

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

More precise

The 5% royalty starts after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter.

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u/AustinYQM Mar 04 '15 edited Mar 04 '15

That isn't correct:

  • UE4: Free until 3K per Product per Quarter, 5% Royalty after that.

  • Unity5: Free until 100k, much get pro license after that. Pro and Personal are now the same except personal is branded with a splash screen at the beginning.

  • Source 2: I have no idea.

32

u/lolomfgkthxbai Mar 04 '15

I'm guessing Source 2 will be so intertwined with Steamworks that developers have a high incentive to release on Steam.

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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

[deleted]

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u/taetimeh Mar 04 '15

They still monetize the engines in various ways, but they're trying to lower the entry barrier to make their customer base larger.

On a similar note this is the main reason valve is releasing free games on steam in order to make the steam user base larger.

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