The Xenko Game Engine [Official Site, GitHub] recently released their 3.0 update which came with a surprise announcement of it now being free and open source.
Announced a few days on their official blog:
You read that right. Xenko 3.0 is out now, released under the permissive MIT license.
From now on, you can use and modify Xenko completely free — whether you’re a professional, a student, or just looking for a new hobby. This includes both the runtime and editor.
Main focus for this release was on the open-source transition, but Xenko 3.0 also includes some new features, such as a switch to the new C# project system, video, hair and skin rendering.
What's interesting, is that Silicon Studio are no longer going to be supporting it. This means that it's now down to the Xenko team to work on it independently along with the community. To be clear though, if you do plan to contribute they have a Contribution License Agreement they require you to sign.
As I understand it, they previously had a dual-license with the code under the GPL, but for those who that caused issues they also had a paid-for version. With it now being under the MIT license, it should remove any barrier for people to use it. Linux support, from what I've read is currently experimental. They also said on Twitter that the Linux build is currently disabled, but it should be enabled again soon.
It seems like a pretty advanced game engine, with support for both OpenGL and Vulkan. Nice to see it so open now, will be interesting to follow it along.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
But I guess that's to be expected because the subset of people who both care about open source and games is incredibly small.
I do play proprietary games myself, but the mainly negative reaction here for this news is disheartening.
Quoting: ArthurAmazing how people like to drag down other people's work. I think the Linux gaming community has become somewhat spoiled, and don't even appreciate fully free software anymore. It's pretty much all about proprietary engines and games now.
But I guess that's to be expected because the subset of people who both care about open source and games is incredibly small.
I do play proprietary games myself, but the mainly negative reaction here for this news is disheartening.
Nobody said anything about the engine getting more open being a bad thing, many rants there were aimed at game engines or FLOSS in general.
I personally think it's a good thing, and wish them best! :)
However, I would like to state that as a user, I prefer the GPL anyway, and it was already available under that license.
Quoting: ArthurAmazing how people like to drag down other people's work. I think the Linux gaming community has become somewhat spoiled, and don't even appreciate fully free software anymore. It's pretty much all about proprietary engines and games now.Not exactly that. When people talk about modern/nextgen game engines, they usually put graphics first. Other areas don't improve as fast so it's hard to impress people with audio, input or physics. And I feel that graphics fidelity is improving much slower recently than it was, say, 10 years ago. It's probably in line with the Moore's law so it's not surprising. But these days it's not that uncommon to find an indie game with really good looking graphics, not much worse than that of AAA titles. And FOSS engines are also catching up, they might not be that advanced but they're certainly capable of producing good visuals and have handy editors. I believe it happened exactly because the graphics race slowed down. Good looking games and engines don't belong to AAA monopolies anymore so more criticism is expected. No one says something like "shit, not another FOSS engine, we have enough already!" but it's hard to expect people giving a standing ovation to that in 2018.
natewardawg Aug 7, 2018
XYC:
- If this project is dead,maybe someone will create a new project called Xenko2 (based on Xenko src).
Virgile (Xenko programmer):
- Unfortunately current Xenko license (GPL+custom) doesn't allow that. Also the editor is not opensource.
- We are trying to change all of that (cf blog post): "Meanwhile, we’re exploring the idea of a version of Xenko run entirely by the community."
Personally, I think it's great news for this project particularly to be released as MIT! It was previously dual licensed as Commercial/GPL, but in a way that made it very difficult to contribute in a way that made it safe for the community. It was only safe for the engine developers.
For instance, if you wanted to make a game in Xenko, you could do it for free and release your game under whatever license you wanted if you user *their* Commercially licensed build. Great!
To the best of my understanding, the problem was that if you used your own build of the engine your *entire game's code* had to be released as GPL. So, if you needed to modify the source for the engine in such a way that it wouldn't make it back into an official build, which is pretty easy to do if you need something specifically for your game, and even though you made the engine source available, you had to release your entire game under the GPL!!!
Now that it's all MIT licensed this is no longer an issue.
Also, it looks like Virgile plans to continue development on it :)
https://www.patreon.com/xenko/overview
Preformance: Pardox project (Xenko Engine) was optimized to achieve great, natively multi threaded DirectX 12 and Vulkan performance. The engine is written in C#, but compiles to native assembly so you shouldnt worry about .Net overhead.
Graphics: Xenko has real world based PBR pipeline, which is capable of achieving great visuals. Further, there is a node based visual system to tune the rende pipeline to your project's needs. All needed stacks (e.g. PPFX, AA, etc.) are also included.
[I dont remember any skin rendering demo of xenko, maybe you saw a demo of Paradox when it was WIP, before the name changed?]
Linux support is still kind of WIP, but since xenko is fully open source now, with some community help, it'll get better over time.
Things like Visual Studio integration need to get more multi platform, for example.
Xenko was opensource. Xenko 2.x was when the dual license crap was added.
Last edited by Sudo_halt on 9 August 2018 at 9:58 am UTC
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