The Xenko game engine is now open source!

Half a month for me. $640 is just below my country's minimum wage.

 

As Ryiah said there 21 Contributors to the project. I think that means 20 of them are other people the 1 is the project leader. However there are more people working on the project if you'd check the discord there are more than 21 developers working on it. (Including the project leader). $638 covers the first goal of hardware to test Xenko like a Mac or IPhone. The next goal is $2600 and that is for working on it 2 days a week part time. He has a Job so he can live which means he only works on it in his spear time. There are other developer working on the project as mentioned earlier and they are not being paid. They are doing it from the passion. The discord has people talking all the time,there was someone yesterday asking if it's a good idea from unity but he decided to not switch until there are more tutorials, which I plan to make when I'm further along with my project.

 

I fully expect a project to have more people actively working on it in some fashion whether that's indirect (eg building and maintaining a website) or direct (eg beta testing and providing feedback), but with that said you generally determine the activity of a project through the repository stats.

Just keep in mind while you're pointing this out yet again that this is common to all communities. A quick search for the Godot and Xenko Discord communities (Godot's link came from Reddit, Xenko's link came from their official Twitter) came up with the following links and they provided statistics.

https://discordapp.com/invite/zH7NUgz - Godot - about 2,000 online - about 10,000 total members
https://discordapp.com/invite/f6aerfE - Xenko - about 70 online - about 370 total members

Unsurprisingly the differences in size between the communities isn't too far away from the differences in commits and contributors between the repositories. Godot's Discord has twenty-seven times as many members as Xenko's Discord.

Godot's Discord members are undoubtedly just as passionate and unpaid as the members of Xenko's Discord.

 

I'm not trying to say that Xenko is more active or Passionate than Godot. I'm just using it to show that Xenko is not dead. Just like Unity, It will take time for an engine to get popularity. Unity first came out on mac in 2005 and was am Mac exclusive engine, sometime around 2008, 2009 it came out on Windows because it was "Dead". Look at it now, It has a huge community with lots of tutorials. Some games that are powered by Xenko are starting to come out on steam though.

 

From the perspective of a normal open source project and the number of commits and contributors that would be expected of a normal open source project it's effectively dying. Unless they massively increase the number of active developers they simply won't be able to keep up with the competition and that will eventually kill off the project.

Just to drill this home a bit let's look at another project. Crystal Space 3D was a game dev framework from several years ago that was reasonably popular and competed with Ogre3D. Crystal Space has more commits and almost as many contributors as Xenko. Yet it hasn't had any updates to its repository or any releases in seven years.

Xenko may very well become a reasonably successful game engine, but its current state of development is not too far away from becoming just like Crystal Space 3D. Only time will tell and unfortunately it's future is not looking too bright right now.

https://github.com/crystalspace/CS

Except it's had time to gain popularity. Godot and Xenko came out the same year. If it had just been released in the past few months it's current state would be completely understandable, but it's had three years to achieve some degree of popularity and this is the best it's been able to do so far. It's competition has only had a few additional months and they're way ahead.

Sorry, but I don't buy this. I'm going to need to see references before I believe it. I have yet to hear this in the years that I have been a member with this community.

 

Not exactly shocking is it? Small company going trying to copy Unity with a fraction of their resources then requesting a similar pricing scheme (Yes, I know they've now gone MIT). It might of been prudent to bring the engine into a somewhat competitive state before asking for an outlay.

Also I'm always at a loss why new engine dev's try to directly compete with an established project, you don't have the community and resources available for it to grow.! So instead of slowly becoming a jack of all trades master of none in the shadow of another project why not fill your own niche?

For example, if I was making a 3D engine with limited resources I'd probably focus on PC / MAC and console using a single graphics API, forget diluting efforts to every platform under the sun it'd be better if they were working on tools. Let's face it Unity and Epic struggle to keep up with demand from time to time so what chance did they have?

Godot did it's own thing and it's becoming successful for it.

 

Exactly. At the time both engines came out there were already three major commercial game engines (Unity, Unreal, and CryEngine) on the market but there were no complete open source game engines. We had frameworks and partial game engines but nothing close to the quality of Godot.

Godot made the correct choice to be open source from the beginning and it massively benefited them. Xenko made the choice to compete with commercial engines and simply couldn't measure up to them. By the time they finally went open source it didn't help them as Godot was already massive and there are only so many open source developers to go around.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/05/16/blast-from-the-recent-past-unity-25/

 

Firstly Xenko is acctualy gaining developers. About 2 to 3 per a month. Secondly Godot is primarily Python based and there aren't many Python game engines which is what beenifited them. Xenko is focused on C#. You can make the argument that Godot has C# support however, that is yet to mature or work correctly. The last time I tryed it was on version v3.0.6 stable mono release so thigs may have changed. It is impossible to make a game In Godot without using Python since the C# support just isn't there. Godot does not support C# until it matures enough to make a game without using python.

 

I would have gotten more into xenko but it would not run on mac back in the day. I take it that is still the case?

 

Aah, the good old days.
Sorry for the off-topic.

 

I'm not sure, Check discord / ask someone on it. I know that it works on Linux which is why I'm not sure...

 

(Edit) I'm sorry but it does not support MaxOS yet, however it is being currently ported. I'd expect it to be out in about a month. 2 months max. https://github.com/xenko3d/xenko/issues/63 (I pressed reply instead of edit :/)

 

Neither of those links back up your statement about Unity coming to Windows because it was "dead".

Xenko's homepage continues to point towards the system requirements which only lists Windows for the editor. There is no macOS editor support and there is no Linux editor support.

https://doc.xenko.com/3.0/en/manual/requirements/

He said he will try and make time. He never says it's in the middle of being ported and there is definitely no indication that it will only take one or two months. Stop trying to provide your own interpretation of the comments. I can understand wanting to support your favorite game development tools but spreading your own opinions on statements isn't helping it.

Below is an issue thread that comes from only a few days prior asking about ports to macOS and Linux and the statement it makes is that it "will require a lot of work to migrate". What you've been seeing on the forums isn't Linux editor support but Linux build support. There is a huge difference between the two that you seem to completely misunderstand.

https://github.com/xenko3d/xenko/issues/8

 

Just to get the record straight, Xenko doesn't use Mono.

Xenko targets either Xamarin for iOS and Android (which contains some Mono code), .Net standard or .Net Core (for desktop and XBox).

The other references to "Mono" are for the MonoCecil library (IL rewriter) and some tooling to be able to use MonoDevelop.

The runtime also works on Linux, but for the moment the tooling is limited to Windows for the editor and building the project.

 

Thanks for the detailed correct.

And yet another confirmation of the current state of the editor.

 

Xenko's .NET ecosystem is far ahead of any available game engine right now, this is a huge yes. A huge no is the overall limited editor usability/extensibility and lack of basic functionality which is must-have for daily convenient work. But this can be addressed relatively quickly since the source code is open.

A while ago I made several TPL-based scientific simulations using the engine without any problems.

And just a fun fact, some Unity's developers were previously worked at Silicon Studio on Xenko. @xoofx

 

So, the burst could've been a Xenko only feature. That's interesting.

 

Only if the idea of burst and its implementation was entirely on the people who formerly worked on Xenko and also if Unity just... didn't try and improve performance, happening upon the same idea.

 

I don't know the whole story of Alex, but he was the lead software architect for 5 years there (C#, C/C++, HLSL/GLSL, etc...). His teams were about <10 people: object-oriented shading language based on HLSL, GPU pipelines, parsers/converters, overall optimizations. Various great stuff was done and could be more, yes.

 

I think it's a classy move for a commercial entity to open source an engine and give their community the option of continuing atleast with any projects they are already working on.

I think it's great to have choices of game engine too. For the community that uses Unity, one less choice, even if it never seemed particularly attractive, is still less choice and less competition.

For whatever reason it sounds like a small number of people did feel Xenko was the best tool for their project.

 

@nxrighthere

I do hope Xenko continues to grow as viable alternatives are always welcome but without dedicated people working on it like Godot it's reasonable to think otherwise.

Whilst it's great having open source (or source access) in reality due to complexity (or time constraints) it rarely benefits, there's been a few major issues with Unreal for years and even with a large community nobody either could or wanted to fix it. Even the likes of Disney actively avoided source access @zombiegorilla might be able to give more details on that.

Toolsets can take years to build, especially if a lot of fundamental changes need to be addressed (like Unity) and they're not lacking for resources. Like @nat42 said, at least they didn't rip the carpet out for people continuing their projects..

 

You know, different people/teams/companies have different goals, resources, requirements, and so on. For example, the game engines such as Xenko, yes, they might lack dedicated people working on it unlike competitors, but the engine offers key features where even commercial software far behind. In the case of Xenko is CoreCLR with the RyuJIT and state-of-the-art GC which designed for workstations and servers. If you are networking programmer and your team aims for high-performance managed server environment with tons of great native debugging tools then the choice between Xenko, Godot, and Unity becomes obvious, the last two is not suited for high-performance game servers/simulations/scientific projects with visualization. Mono/IL2CPP is not the right tool for the job.



This was discussed at the beginning of last year, nothing has changed significantly.

This is a big topic, some stuff explained in this blog post if you are interested.

 

Incase you missed it there is the enhancement tag which means there has been some progress made on actively porting it. At minimum the research has been done.The minimum requirements your giving are for 3.0. We are on 3.1
By 1 to 2 months I mean having it in the 3.2 beta. Or 3.3 beta. 1 to 2 months for the 3.2 beta.

I tried to split up the quote but It Only added to it. Read that first.

 

I don't pay any attention to beta releases when it comes to evaluating a game engine because the features may or may not be released and may or may not be in a state that is acceptable for a production environment. That said I did a quick check for any info available on Xenko 3.1 and the only mention of Linux is for builds not the editor.

Checking the Xenko blog posts there is nothing mentioned about those releases which leads me to conclude that this is just speculation on your part. Once again, on both cases, your interpretation is not matching up to the actual statements being made by the actual developers of Xenko.

 

Enhancement just means the artifact is to add new functionality, not fix existing. It has nothing to do with how much progress is being made.

 

This. Below is the link where it mentions it as well as the other labels.

https://help.github.com/articles/about-labels/

 

By the way, marking an artifact as an Enhancement is often the kiss of death. They almost always get lower priority than functionality bugs unless the enhancement is actually scheduled development.

 

This. I was going to comment that I'm almost jealous of the misunderstanding - it implies they've never known the pain of a ticket for some massive pain point coming back from a dev team with that dreaded label

 

Yep, I've been working QA as my day job for the last 15 years. I've learned if I want something resolved I need to do everything I can to justify the artifact not getting marked as Enhancement. Once that happens, it means the developers have no intention of working on the artifact unless they get free time, which rarely happens. Otherwise I need to go to the dev team managers or a pm and make my case for why the product needs this enhancement so they can get it on the schedule. If I don't then Enhancement is basically the nice way of the dev marking it Wontfix.

 

I concur. I'm a developer, I do the same.

 

Did you miss the Dev meeting? That was one of everyone's key points and the lead dev Xen2 did say that the feature will be in 3.2 or 3.3

 

Do you have the logs from it?

 

We've had the ability to build to Linux for a while. And 3.1 is not in beta. You can check that on the Xenko launcher. You say you don't pay attention to beta builds but you said Godot has C# support. That C# support is in Beta and doesn't work without Python.
As I said earlier I built the engine from source. I said nothing else about how I got it working. I said I got it to work. Not that the support is official.

 

No I don't keep information like that but I will check give me a few minutes.

 

I have never once said that you didn't. I said you don't have the ability to run the editor on Linux.

Godot's C# support is in the stable release.

Godot's C# support doesn't require Python.

Likewise we don't waste our time attending every dev meeting on the planet.

 

At lunch it says that C# support is in beta. When I tried using it with a test project it was not possible to make it without using some Python.

It's on Discord. Im not sure if that's all of it though. From what I just checked that's most of it.

 

It requires python If you try to use it to do something that it does not support in C# yet and I've tried doing that in my test project. The same thing I normally do when I'm testing a engine. Anyways I need to go do other things. I'll be back online tommorow.

 

Open source free 3D engines does not have the same updates as big ones like Unity or Unreal 4, they lack too much features and tools.
When you have game to produce and release you need a 3D engine that is stable , able to work on a wide range of hardware, have less critical bugs, and have all features and tools or plugins you need.
They lack too much features, and you'll hear, someone will make it, it's not a priority or make it yourself, so yeah the choice is yours to keep using it or use another 3D engine more appropriated to what you need.

Anyway, it also depends on what you are working on, on a small game or as hobby it's okay to choose some free 3D engine, but in working with a team or in some indie studio you will take mature, proven and stable 3D engine and more up to date about tools and features.

 

Honestly this is100x better than the days of old, when games and software would become "abandonware" or what have you because the publisher/developer went out of business/bankrupt/decidedToStopSuppporting it. I love that Git exists and enables people to make their work freely available like this.

 

Saying that, Unity and Unreal are also free. At least for most of devs, until start earning threshold.

 

Y'all see a dead engine. I see potential.

 

You need more than just potential. You need game engine developers who are willing to invest their time. There are only so many to go around, with even less that are willing to work on an open source project, and Godot has had a three year head start to recruit them.

What's worse is that they need to keep pace with the competition with fewer developers or risk losing their potential. Each of their developers needs to be able to do the work of several of the competition's developers until they've recruited more.

We'll have to wait and see what happens with both engines. It's always possible devs will leave one project for another.

 

This potential would need at least few person team, full time, to be able compete, with now advanced Game engines.
10 years ago, this potential could have potentially a chance.

 

Realistically speaking, Xenko's potential as a progressively growing software was over when Silicon Studio abandoned it, and all talented developers left. With all respect to Virgile, two or three guys for such project are not enough to stay truly competitive in long-term...

 

Guys, there are plenty of examples of dead projects getting reincarnated by dedicated developers and communities. Tor is one of them... and it isn't about competition.

 

I've always thought that in order for open source projects to potentially succeed at game engine development then the engine needs to be focused on just one type of game/platform. For example a VR only engine or a 2d only engine. Then maybe it could stand a chance because then all of these 1000's of features that everyone wants can be rejected with no our engine doesn't need that because it supports X only.

Do everything and anything game engines are just too big and complicated.

 

Not really free, you must agree some licensing terms, and there is some revenue limit in Unity or Royalties in UE4.

Level of quality and features have a price.

For example to do 3D sculpting you put the price and use Zbrush to get the most advanced features, the fastest and the more stable software.
When it's a money constraint perhaps you'll use Blender, but it's really not comparable.
It's the same for 3D engines, level of quality and features are not free.

Even Blender best features to speed up your workflow are plugins you must buy (Hardops, retopoflow etc ...).
It will be the same for open source 3D engines, if they get an asset store to attract more people, the best assets or plugins won't be free.
Like 3D art, free 3D art is really not comparable to expensive professional art you buy.

Anyway, it's always a matter if you are ready to put the price for some level of features and quality, or not, would it be 3D engine or something else.

 

Yes, but there are just as many if not more projects being abandoned. Remember there are only have a finite number of open source developers. If a developer goes to a project to restart it he would have had to leave an existing project.

Which is where competition comes into play. Contrary to what you might think competition is important. If a project is more successful it will draw in more developers and more users than one that is less successful which in turn leads to the project becoming yet more successful and repeating the process.

Just as an example compare Torvald's Linux to GNU's Hurd. Hurd was a kernel developed by GNU as a replacement for the Unix kernel. Yet because Linux gained more popularity initially it never managed to keep pace in spite of the fact it came out a year ahead of Linux.

Linux has had multiple major version releases whereas Hurd has yet to reach 1.0. Linux basically destroyed its competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd

 

I don't want to argue, but this is what I said. Just in different words.