I’m not a smart nor good developer so maybe I’m looking at this wrong, but if you’re a game Dev and you’re using Unreal Engine or Unity, aren’t you already bound to whatever license they have?
I believe if you’re following say Unreal’s structure, you’re using their server/client netcode, and while you can release whatever you’ve made you can’t use or share any of Epic’s code. That would still require users to agree to Epic’s EULA to get the full engine to compile your server setup.
Add in server handling for VoIP, audio middleware like FMOD, proprietary stuff like Xbox/PS crossplay, Steam’s SDK, etc and I feel like that’s a tangled web.
I’m also very tired and am probably not fully registering here.
I’ve never worked with Unreal’s server setup, but I imagine it doesn’t absolutely require to use their code, right? You can still make an Unreal game on the client and use something else for your server, meaning there must be some sort of common interface between them.
The point is yes, there is going to be code you can’t legally release, libraries you can’t use, but you can release what code you can, and then leave the interfaces for code you can’t, leaving hobbyist devs to pick up the slack. You can even make servers from scratch that way, as with stuff like AzerothCore, where all of the code was figured out from scratch based on packets from client to server and studying hex code for hours. Technically AzerothCore was just building on top of MaNGOS but that was created using packets.
Even if you strip out the code you can’t legally release, that’s a hell of a boost to development that you wouldn’t otherwise get.
Taking a cursory glance through the solutions that already exist for this (which are largely standalone MMO style servers):
You lose out on many network troubleshooting tools unreal has built-in, as well as some of Unreal’s play-in-editor testing tools. Its also common to add roughly 1.25-2x netcode development time as you’re going to be coding things in on the Unreal client side as well as the server side.
I can see why this is feasible but rare to see in the wild. I think anything you pitch to an exec with a note that it may add 6 months to a year of extra development time (and QA time) is going to cause people to start swinging.
Edit: This comes off as negative and I don’t mean it to be - A lot of companies do their own Unreal engine tweaks and I could see if a company built it up, they could have something solid and easily reworkable for future projects.
I’m not a smart nor good developer so maybe I’m looking at this wrong, but if you’re a game Dev and you’re using Unreal Engine or Unity, aren’t you already bound to whatever license they have?
I believe if you’re following say Unreal’s structure, you’re using their server/client netcode, and while you can release whatever you’ve made you can’t use or share any of Epic’s code. That would still require users to agree to Epic’s EULA to get the full engine to compile your server setup.
Add in server handling for VoIP, audio middleware like FMOD, proprietary stuff like Xbox/PS crossplay, Steam’s SDK, etc and I feel like that’s a tangled web.
I’m also very tired and am probably not fully registering here.
I’ve never worked with Unreal’s server setup, but I imagine it doesn’t absolutely require to use their code, right? You can still make an Unreal game on the client and use something else for your server, meaning there must be some sort of common interface between them.
The point is yes, there is going to be code you can’t legally release, libraries you can’t use, but you can release what code you can, and then leave the interfaces for code you can’t, leaving hobbyist devs to pick up the slack. You can even make servers from scratch that way, as with stuff like AzerothCore, where all of the code was figured out from scratch based on packets from client to server and studying hex code for hours. Technically AzerothCore was just building on top of MaNGOS but that was created using packets.
Even if you strip out the code you can’t legally release, that’s a hell of a boost to development that you wouldn’t otherwise get.
Taking a cursory glance through the solutions that already exist for this (which are largely standalone MMO style servers):
You lose out on many network troubleshooting tools unreal has built-in, as well as some of Unreal’s play-in-editor testing tools. Its also common to add roughly 1.25-2x netcode development time as you’re going to be coding things in on the Unreal client side as well as the server side.
I can see why this is feasible but rare to see in the wild. I think anything you pitch to an exec with a note that it may add 6 months to a year of extra development time (and QA time) is going to cause people to start swinging.
Edit: This comes off as negative and I don’t mean it to be - A lot of companies do their own Unreal engine tweaks and I could see if a company built it up, they could have something solid and easily reworkable for future projects.