I'm one of the developers of CryEngine, so if there's any questions, we are watching :)
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1) What's the business goal of CryEngine putting this stuff out here.
2) (Possibly related) can you give an "I am not a lawyer, and don't speak for my employer, but here's a layman's take on it" interpretation of the CryEngine licence?
The license is basically you can use the engine for free with no royalties. Our model is Pay What You Want: https://www.cryengine.com/get-cryengine
Basically you pay whatever you want, if you want, and have a choice of how much of that goes to the developers and how much goes to an Indie Fund that we use to fund indie projects that use the engine.
We also offer "Insider Memberships" (https://www.cryengine.com/get-cryengine/service-packages) for studios that want some closer support from us, trainings, etc.
Wow. I really hope that works out for you... (and that this decision wasn't born out of desperation)
Because I really like this pricing model (and your engine) and I hope it will become standard over time ... but at the moment unfortunately it isn't and still too many people and companys won't pay anything if they don't have to. So good luck to you.
with unreal, unity and other things having zero cost (up front anyways); the playing field has changed.
>The license is basically you can use the engine for free with no royalties.
When you review the license, it is really not like this. Only games made explicitly for "entertainment purposes" can use the engine -- even "Serious Games", which I guess means games that may straddle any actual utility, are not allowed. Most likely Kerbal Space Program would be considered excessively "scientific" and not allowed to use CryEngine.
There's also a very scary clause that essentially says "if we don't like your game we can classify it as objectionable and withdraw your license".
This is a cool release from an academic standpoint, but should probably not be used by real people for real projects with the license as-is. There are many excellent truly open-source game engine options.
> There are many excellent truly open-source game engine options.
i'm not sure what you mean by "truly open-source"; what "game engine options" are you referring to?
>i'm not sure what you mean by "truly open-source"
Software distributed under a license approved by the OSI. These licenses, as far as I know, place no limitations on the type of speech that can be produced with licensed software. To use CryEngine, the people who work at CryTek must not find any of your project's content "objectionable".
>what "game engine options" are you referring to?
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/
http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d
https://github.com/id-Software
and many others; I'm sure there are big lists floating around. All of the engines listed here can be used even if the authors of the engine disagree with what you want to say, and I believe they've all been used in real, honest-to-goodness commercial games.
Unfortunately nothing in your list even comparable to UE and CryEngine. Ogre is just graphics engine (not game engine). idTech have great code, but it's even released dated and it's lack of tools.
Irrlicht and Torque is good options for small indie games (actually there many more great engines for small games), but they still can't be compared with "big" commercial engines.
This is nice, but can you please disclose the political views of your lawyers and C-suite? It seems that if a user happens to have a subjective political disagreement with someone at CryTek, the license to use CryEngine can be revoked per section 2.4, which states:
"use the CryEngine for the development of any Games which are harmful, abusive, racially or ethnically offensive, vulgar, sexually explicit, defamatory, infringing, invasive of personal privacy or publicity rights, or in a reasonable person's view, objectionable;"
Just checking but you do realize Creative Commons Licenses have this same clause. They call it "moral rights". When I asked about it I was told it's a right many countries require them to respect so it's in the license.
Note: I'm just as horrified as you about that clause but it's in every CC license AFAICT
> if a user happens to have a subjective political disagreement
given that politics tends to be much more qualitative than quantitative, it's unclear that any "political disagreement" can be anything other than "subjective".
Yes, I agree. I added "subjective" not because it uniquely qualifies the type of political disagreement, but because it emphasizes that your game's life is dependent on never having a simple disagreement with any present or future employee of CryTek. If the license to the engine is pulled, it would probably mean you have to start your project over from scratch.
There's also "enterprise licensing" which is probably where CryTek hopes the big money will come from. It's essentially moving the company towards more of a consulting business kind of model. That's the way I read it at least.
Sounds a lot like Red Hat's business model to me.
i didn't know what cryengine was. I mean, you probably don't need to tell people what it is, but the github repo, documentation introduction, homepage, and first page of the getting started material don't have the words:
"CryEngine is a game engine designed by the German game developer Crytek. It has been used in all of their titles with the initial version being used in Far Cry, and continues to be updated to support new consoles and hardware for their games."
which I found on wikipedia after clicking through 3-4 pages. General consensus seems to be that it is pretty awesome though, so keep up the good work.
Did you lose the source code at some point? Because it looks like the output of a decompiler.
Haha, definitely not. Which part looks like that?
Not sure if this would be a compliment or otherwise.
Are there plans to fix the art pipeline to not require expensive autodesk products?
In other words, fully and officially support blender :)
With version 5 we have an FBX importer that we are working a lot on. It should allow you to import from Blender or any other modelling packages
The beauty of open source is that people who want new features can submit pull requests. ;-)
From what i have seen there have already been attempts at this. The problem is there art pipeline is so archaic that nothing ever works properly.
In other words fixing the art pipeline needs to be an offical, fully supported endeavor. Which is why I asked.
I heartily agree. It would be nice if CryEngine had official support for Blender and would make CryEngine look better as well by supporting Autodesk alternatives.
Where is the actual UI code for the Editor? Is it included?
Oh and thanks for all your hard work, I've learned a lot from you guys over the years!
The Editor code is not included, we might include it later on
What does this function do? Was the person who wrote it atleast given an Oscar?
https://github.com/CRYTEK-CRYENGINE/CRYENGINE/blob/release/C...
I haven't look through the repo yet, but I know there was some shake-up a while back with the Star Citizen developers injecting capital into CryEngine. I don't care about the politics, but I am curious how the branch published here relates to branches used by developers on those projects, i.e., will things like their 64-bit fork be merged at some point?
Is CryEngine Cinema is built into the engine? or that's a separate product?
I guess you are talking about Film Engine (used to be Cinebox). That's a separate product: http://filmengine.com/
What is it?
Not sure why I was downvoted... I didn't find any explanation of what this project actually is in the README, and someone associated with the project said to ask him questions, so I asked. Still don't know what this is. I guess it only caters to a specific "already-in-the-know" audience? I'll see my way out :)
Upvoted because of course you're absolutely right.