Of historical interest, this game was created by David Rosen, who started the Humble Bundle with his brother. I had no idea it was still in development. In the early days of the project it was pretty impressive to see the engine evolving under the work of a single teenage developer, including features like ragdoll physics which were novel at the time.
Right, I think a lot of people will look at this through modern eyes and wonder what the big deal is, but back in the 2000s when this was an indie darling we were all blown away by the engine.
I went to college with David, and I remember him showing people drafts of Lugaru in at the student computer club. He was very nice, but also very quiet, and despite being in several CS classes together (there were only ~20 CS majors our year) I never got much of a sense for him.
Game engine development is so ridiculously hard. The industry has plenty of little libraries that do some significant upfront lifting, but there's just plenty out there that isn't done for you. Stuff you wouldn't even think about until you realize you want a feature that isn't there. And the further you progress, and the more you learn, the fewer references and prior art you can turn to, because the combinatorics of finding someone who has built up all of those areas of discipline becomes exponentially harder to find.
There are still proprietary technologies today that are decades old that the free and open source community has not recreated simply because for all of the people that work in this space, open source and commercial, there are just not many people at the high end of the scale working on those interesting problems. Those problems are the ones that generally become commercial solutions because no one else is doing it.
After over 14 years of development, I would love to hear what little big problems like this the authors came across.
The game industry has little open source libraries because most games cannot profit off the library being open source. It doesn't increase the marketing reach of the game (it might make good PR for the studio, but the studio doesn't need good PR, it needs revenue from sales of their game!).
And the high-end libraries are worth money, so unless there's an altruist contributing the code, it's not going to get open sourced. Things like speedtree, low-latency video play back (within the engine, like bink vidoes), etc, are all commercial solutions to common problems in games development, and none of these would be given away for free if they could charge for it!
To me, the reason why the game industry has little open source libraries is because games are usually a once-and-done approach to software. So open sourcing part of your game has little benefits because you're not going to go back update the open source libraries. Whereas other software is a constantly updating behemoth, so open sourcing your software can get small beneficial increases from external changes to your open source code.
The profit motive doesn't really seem like the main reason, since most open source software makes no money. Facebook doesn't get money from open sourcing React for instance, but they do get functional improvements to React that comes from it being open source and having more people help work on it.
> games are usually a once-and-done approach to software
This is just false.
The most obvious example of this is live service games - these have been commonplace for over a decade, and have existed for 20 years (WoW in 2004 in my mind is the turning point for that). Slightly less obvious are PC multiplyer games that predate this - as an example Counter Strike was released in 2000 and was "patched" a few times before steam existed.
Even going way back, one shot single player games have been built iteratively since the 90s at least, if not earlier. The idea of a game "engine" is reusing code between games - The LucasFilm games all used similar engines to speed up development from the late 80s. Even today, modern games like Call of Duty have their roots in Quake's game code from the late 90s.
Here's a video I've enjoyed of David Rosen giving a presentation at Game Developers Conference 2014 going over procedural animation used in Overgrowth.
Such fond memories of this game. The fighting mechanics were amazing. I hope that this has the intended effect, allow other developers to learn how it was done, what mistakes look like, and for case studies of how things are done.
I only played a tiny bit of it a few years back but my impression was that the biggest flaw of the game was that it had all these cool mechanics and systems, but then no real direction as to where the overall game would go. very cool tech though, neat to see it open-sourced now
Agreed. I loved watching their dev logs back in high school because they were doing things in physics and combat that no one else was. But it never got over that hump that separates "cool physics engine" from "interesting game concept".
But my optimistic hope is that David Rosen walked for someone else to fly. Like Infiniminer -> Minecraft.
There was a total conversion mod to Overgrowth called "Dark Forest" which inspired something called "Undergrowth"; a really buggy but oddly satisfying roguelike. It was a little glimpse into what might have been possible.
it's weirdly common for successful game studios to have also been involved in a store of some sort - valve's steam came from trying to sell online, cdprojekt's witcher and GOG, epic's fortnite success -> epic store.
I would imagine it's actually more likely that a game being successful is such a lottery that they cannot replicate subsequent successes, where as using the profits from previous success to venture out into a different but profitable domain is more, well , profitable.
I remember a friend in my dorm playing Lugaru back in 2008, it was such a fantastic game back for the time! I still vividly remember the looping soundtrack and the fight effects. Thanks to the team for making sure this little piece of digital history is remembered!
That's unnecessarily negative. It's a 14 year old codebase that they want to share with people that might be interested, not a bid to compete with other engines.
> To be clear, this is not “the next big engine”. Since great open source game engines like Godot exist, using Overgrowth’s engine for your next game project is a bad choice in almost all cases. However, if you‥
> * Are interested in looking at what shipped game code can look like.
> * Want to look at specific code, like the procedural animation system.
> * Are an Overgrowth modder who wants to make a more involved total conversion or mod.
Not only that, but some of their approaches were immensely cool, they used procedural animations from just a few keyframes, have a look at this video that someone else linked a while back "Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE
> That sounds the authors are giving up on the project, not that it's an opportunity for Wolfire to leverage the community to build a brand new thing.
It doesn't have to be either of these things. They have been very clear that they're releasing the code as open source as a learning experience for those interested in one or more of these three things:
1. Are interested in looking at what shipped game code can look like.
2. Want to look at specific code, like the procedural animation system.
3. Are an Overgrowth modder who wants to make a more involved total conversion or mod
They haven't given up on the project nor are they attempting to leverage the community for anything. Instead, they are releasing their code for others to see (and potentially use) in case it's useful...full stop. The code is released under the Apache license in the case that someone wants to reuse the code for their own project and sell it. Actual content is not included because then someone could just resell Overgrowth.
This viewpoint of yours is unnecessarily dense and pessimistic, especially in regards to a company that has done exactly this same thing in the past with Lugaru.
>this was announced a week ago and not a single person has commented/liked/whatever on the post at the bottom.
Given that their yearly disqus discussion is at a staggering 4 comments, I don't think this says anything either way. It seems in this case people chose to comment on the youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOdjo_Do6hM
If you think that no one cares about this, I'd be happy to link to a few reddit posts I read last week on the announcement. There was a volume of discussion at the time from a developer and consumer standpoint (whether or not it was productive I'll leave to your judgement).
>I think people who claim this project is going to be actively developed in 5 years are being optimistic and naïve.
Is this an expectation of a game that's been "released" for 4.5 years? are there some major features promised or bugs that warrants active, continuous (but not necessarily full time) attention from the developers?
Maybe I'm old fashioned from a day where you can't patch your game randomly 13 years later like Binding of Isaac, but I don't see a need for every game to take on a SaaS route for the sake of... well, whatever players here seem to desire in this game and not a sequel. I don't know that answer.
This doesn’t sound quite right. The devs did this with their last game, Lugaru, too. They just seem to like the old idtech model of releasing their engines to the community when they finish their games. I doubt they expect anyone to make another game with the engine, it’s more for modding and porting Overgrowth itself.
The video announcement around 1:20 literally says, in bold, all-caps text,
"This is Not the next big engine"
even giving a plug to Godot for those looking for an engine like that. This does seem to simply be a source of education (which makes sense, given their GDC talks) and modding oppurtunities for the community already invested in the game.
On the contrary, accepting patches for inclusion in the commercial game means it's very much not dead...
It's also understandable people are shifting to using mainstream engines as a baseline. Not just because of the insane complexity involved in a modern AAA game, but skill transfer. If you work 14 years on a bespoke engine, your skills won't necessarily translate to your next job where you're using an entirely different platform.
