Now here is something really interesting. When fans asked Epic Games on its forums whether the team would open source Unreal Engine 1 and 2, Tim Sweeney replied and claimed that they might – one day – open source the original Unreal Engine.
Sweeney was crystal clear that this won’t happen tomorrow, and it’s still not set on stone (though Epic would love to open source it to everyone).
Naturally – and as you may have guessed – open sourcing Unreal Engine 2 and 3 is out of the question because of ‘dependencies on a large number of external closed-source middleware packages with complex licensing requirements.‘
As Sweeney said:
“Open sourcing Unreal Engine 1 might be possible, but getting the source and dependencies into a releasable state would take a lot of cleanup effort that we just haven’t been able to find time for. I hope we can do it someday!”
That’s definitely great news for all indie devs, modellers and mappers.
Let’s hope that it won’t take a decade to open source UE1.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Are you sure that it’s impossible to buy a full license on UE4? I mean, you probably need to contact them directly for it. No one even knows the real price of big game engines, such as CryEngine, UE or Source, since these deals happening without disclosure.
Also, you get full access for C++ source code of U4 for a monthly subscription.
Bugger, wrong reply. Delete plox?
Dont even bother Tim
They most likely still give the same type of deal they gave before, some up-front flat fee, then no Royalties up to X amount of profit, then royalties. I have never heard of UE3 being Licensed Royalty-Free, unlike CE3, which I heard a few years ago was going for a one-time payment of over 1 Million USD.
Besides, you can always unsub, you don’t lose your access to the Engine, you just stop getting Updates. Spend 15 quid on it every 6-12 months if you’d rather, you’ll get the Updates later, but you’ll spend less.
As Nines also said, the Sub includes access to the Source Code, which with UE3, you had to buy in order to get access to. It’s a give-&-take relationship with Unreal 4 this time around, you can’t really compare it to anything else, since there’s nothing else to really compare it to, UE3-UE4 comparisons don’t really work in this case, either.
P.S. CE is currently available on a Monthly Sub Basis on Steam as well, not that I’d recommend it.
For developers – what would be the reason to start your development of on Unreal 1 as opposed to id tech 3? Both of these engines are so hilariously outdated, anyone who can make them look contemporary would probably do best to just write a new engine from scratch, that way avoiding all the baggage that comes with old engines.
Easy, porting Unreal Tournament to other devices. Android, OpenPandora, Dragonbox Pyra.
I don’t even know what the latter two are. I know Android but do any Android devices support mouse and keyboard input (properly with no smoothing on the mouse etc)? Why play a PC game on a tablet? Surely if that’s the kind of gameplay you want you have a PC any way…