[MUD-Dev] Jeff's Rant: A World Full of Wheel-Makers

[Brian Hook]

At 12:08 PM 5/21/01 -0400, Dave Rickey wrote:

> Frankly, iD's Quake engine was a step *back* for the concept of
> engine liscensing, as John Carmack's refusal to do *anything* to
> make it more flexible

While this is quite true (John's reticence was because id's business
model was based on successful games, not engine licensing...engine
income was strictly gravy), I would argue that Quake is probably one
of the best examples of true code reuse in existence.  Many successful
games have been built on that engine, and unlike many other "engines"
and "libraries", the licensee would start out with a functional game
that they could then modify.  The problem with pure engines is that
many of them end up falling apart on real projects because they were
never really put to the test of making a commercial application.

> and insistence on rewriting it from scratch with each version caused
> many projects using it to balloon in budget or go under completely.

This is not the fault of the engine, but poor planning and, frankly,
idiotic licensing terms on the part of licensees.  Licensees were
practically stumbling over themselves to license early versions of id
engines, even though id would constantly warn and say "Look, this
isn't done yet, you're better off waiting".  And because licensees
could not make games faster than id, they were constantly playing
catch up because they'd complete their Gen 1 game only to find id
releasing their Gen 2 game.

No matter how id could have made that engine, there was no way to
abstract away fundamental underlying technologies that didn't exist
yet.

> If I was looking for an engine to make a new game, I would stay
> *far* away from it.  Name recognition isn't what you want in an
> engine.

Proven execution, however, is.  However, in my opinion LithTech is
still probably the best of the pure licensable engines because they
have predicated engine licensing as a revenue model (so you get high
quality support and docs) AND they've shipped well regarded games with
their engine.

Brian Hook

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