Xenko is now completely opensource (MIT)

xen2 · August 2, 2018, 6:10am

Xenko is now completely opensource (MIT) – More details at https://xenko.com/blog/xenko-opensource-mit/

xen2 · August 2, 2018, 6:12am

Simba · August 2, 2018, 7:52am

Hi

Does the splash screen agreement still apply?: https://doc.xenko.com/latest/en/manual/game-studio/splash-screen.html

Under the terms of the Xenko end user license agreement, Xenko Personal (free) users must display the “Powered by Xenko” logo in the splash screen. If you’re using Xenko with a free license, you can edit the splash screen image — for example, by adding a logo above or below the Xenko logo — but you must adhere to the

xen2 · August 2, 2018, 8:06am

No it doesn’t apply anymore (Xenko Personal/Pro/Custom and its EULA doesn’t exist anymore).

Simba · August 2, 2018, 8:10am

Indeed naturally, i have also just noticed the launcher now crashes as well with the message “An error occurred while updating the launcher” even after a complete uninstall. I dont know how this can be reported or resolved since xenko 3 has gone opensource

xen2 · August 2, 2018, 8:27am

Error during launcher udpate, no good…
Please report issues at https://github.com/xenko3d/xenko for now (might move them later to a launcher-specific repo).

firesoul453 · August 2, 2018, 12:37pm

This is good to hear.

Question:

Funding? Is there any? Or how sustainable is it for you to work on this full time?

Changelog since the 2 version of the engine? Whats new in 3.0?

Thanks!

Tom · August 2, 2018, 12:49pm

This is excellent. I was hoping this would be the route taken. I’ve been working with the engine for a few months on a new project. I hope to contribute to it myself with some tweaks / fixes I’ve come across.

xen2 · August 2, 2018, 3:40pm

No funding yet.

I can keep working on it for a while. If it last several years without it growing to something sustainable, it probably means there is a bigger problem (no community/users) and the limiting factor will probably be the motivation to keep taking care of a dead project.

I’ll try to make a changelog (release notes just list new features but not all the bugfixes).

firesoul453 · August 2, 2018, 3:54pm

I appreciate the time and effort you’e put into this engine. I’d like to see it thrive, even if its only to keep other engines on their toes.

Phariax · August 2, 2018, 5:20pm

I am not sure, but I think Microsoft supports (or supported) Godot, just because of the C# integration. Maybe it would be worth a try.

xen2 · August 3, 2018, 2:13am

added raw changelog from git commits (sorry I didn’t spend time to review each commit to clean it up)

github.com

xenko3d/xenko-docs/blob/master/en/ReleaseNotes/ReleaseNotes.md

# Xenko 3.0 release notes

August 2, 2018

## Highlights

### Xenko is now a MIT community-based opensource project!

You read that right. **Xenko 3.0** is out now, released under the permissive [MIT License](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT). 

From now on, you can use and modify Xenko completely **free** — whether you're a professional, a student, or just looking for a new hobby. This includes the runtime and editor.

![Xenko GitHub](media/ReleaseNotes-3.0/xenko-oss.png)

Silicon Studio no longer supports Xenko, but members of the Xenko team will continue to work on it as part of the community.

We encourage people to help us and contribute to the project. If interested, join us on [GitHub](https://github.com/xenko3d/xenko/).

We are really excited to see what people will come up with!

This file has been truncated. show original

Jarmo · August 3, 2018, 2:43am

I think this is great news. I hope to someday be able to contribute to this project and or community. I’m a netcode/network developer currently working on a game with Xenko for a couple months.

jmkinzer · August 3, 2018, 3:49am

@xen2:

<<<< standing ovation >>>>

You deserve our utmost appreciation and I hope it is coming across loud and clear. Please know that there are a lot of us out there that are inspired by your passion and commitment. (Especially those of us who have tried building engines - we know this is a labor of love).

We are all rooting for you and Xenko to succeed!

ahrenm · August 4, 2018, 3:54am

Well this is certainly a big event in the history of Xenko. There is a fair bit of love out there for the engine. Be interesting to see what a community can make of it.

A couple of rando thoughts that could be easily argued against.

It’ seems like there is two projects here that could probably be separated slightly at some point. Xenko the engine and GameStudio the editor. Obviously they need to stay in sync to a degree. But if community resources are limited it might be a good idea to baseline the engine at this point and focus on the editor experience.

Which leads me somewhat to my next thought.

Likewise there are two audiences at play here. People want to use Xenko as an engine to make a game/thing and people who want to contribute to Xenko as an open source project. Given where the product sits today there are limited numbers of people in the first category for whom Xenko is a viable option. It’s just sitting to far behind Unity/Unreal in too many areas. The future of the tool is going to rest in the hands of the second audience.

So in the short term at least they are the audience that needs to get attention. Anything that helps ramp that community up is worth chasing. I think a chat channel somewhere is probably a good idea. And if Silicon Studio have any documentation, architecture slides, developer training guides any thing that helps on-board people who are digging into the guts of the engine/studio this would ‘nice to have’.

And finally my far less humble opinion that it really should be thoughts on the top of the ‘to-do’ list.

In another thread @jmkinzer listed plugins/editor extensibility as his number 1 pick. I back this to the number 2 spot. This kind of support in GameStudio would allow it to grow outside of the direct support of the core open-source community. It open’s up use cases and makes the IDE attractive for a whole bunch of things. Unity does this pretty well, Unreal is not the best. GameStudio can stake a claim here.

For my time and effort, the number one feature that needs to happen is play/debug in editor support. And this one cuts back to our audience of people who actually want to make something. The lack of PIE is a bit of rude shock if you don’t know about it and hit play after deciding ‘sure I’ll check Xenko out’. It immediately sets it behind it’s peers and is kind of an expected feature of an engine at this level.

But more importantly it’s a blocker to learning. Being able to change values on the fly, see their results, understand what the structures are doing. This is how people take their baby steps and that needs to be as easy as possible, because there are a lot of other factors working against them.

One last thought before I end this overlong rant and hand the thread back to people with far more insight.

Xenko should probably spend a little bit of navel gazing time working out what it’s wants to be. It’s never going to be a better renderer than Unreal, it’s never going to hit that market mass of Unity…but it can find a niche and in doing so, find value and a long life.

What that is…I step down off the soap box a this point.

A.

ahrenm · August 4, 2018, 5:26am

Also…when I said “never” twice above…that’s complete garbage.

Xenko can be anything people are prepared to make it.

jmkinzer · August 4, 2018, 7:07am

@ahrenm:

I found your post insightful. Especially about there really being two distinct audiences here and about the relevance of PIE to the first.

Also, now that you mention it: I can only second the suggestion that if there is any additional material lying around [that is not still covered by Silicon Studio IP] related to the engine/editor guts it would be great if it could be dumped somewhere - regardless of how disorganized or stale it might be.

re naval gazing:

I believe you are absolutely correct: the reality is that in a world with UE4 and Unity (not to mention Cry/Lumberyard, etc.), Xenko will be a niche player for the foreseeable future. So the key is to find that niche.

For my part, Xenko’s general appeal - (shameless plug: an appeal which will be enhanced after epic issues #12+#13) – is its clean design, modularity, and flexibility. The thing is, if you wander off the beaten path, you inevitably wind up doing some hacking on your engine of choice. If you’re Unity, this ends up as ugly and inefficient workarounds based on trial and error to figure out how the engine is operating under the hood. Unless you rage-quit first. And if you’re Unreal, well, welcome to growing old in C++ hell while you wait for the build to finish. That’s of course if you can figure out where to even start given that shear size and complexity of that beast.

If one takes this position, it follows fairly directly that Xenko – at least for the time being – is targeting neither beginners nor Indies who need to get a game to market as efficiently as possibly [by sticking to the path of least resistance]. And I am 100% OK with that. I recognize however that other people will have vastly different visions here and in the end the only vision that really counts is that of the developers putting in the blood, sweat, and tears…

EmptyKeys · August 4, 2018, 1:30pm

Great news. Already ported my game to 3.0.0.1 version, so far everything works. Also signed up for Patreon, I hope you will have enough to continue.

I wonder, I added some features to my game (LOD support for example), maybe I could move it directly to Xenko. What do you think?

xen2 · August 4, 2018, 2:33pm

I agree with you. At first, with limited resources we can’t do everything and we will have to focus where it makes the most sense.
Targeting the average Unity/UE user is too difficult for now with current state of the engine (of course some will come over, but that will be for specific reason that won’t apply to everybody).
Also, I obviously won’t be able to do much by myself, so the short term goal is to make the project sustainable and grow by attracting contributors. And as you said, a good target for that is small projects/companies (I would say 1 to 5, maybe up to 10 people projects) who want a somewhat a good enough engine/tech to start on, and would likely need customization or control over their tech (which could be quite costly on Unity without source license or difficult to do on UE4). For those cases, investing time/resources in a project such as Xenko might make a lot of sense.
This should gradually help Xenko have a faster dev/test cadence, and then later down the road, as the product get more mature, word of mouth should attract lot of users. And we’ll be much more ready for them at that point (more stable, more features, bigger community to welcome them, more docs/samples, etc…).

Interested to see if people agree with trying it this way or see another way (maybe a specific niche market)? Anyway, even if the main strategy is the first, nothing prevent other things to happen in parallel as such a community will be comprised of people having different goals.

xen2 · August 4, 2018, 2:37pm

Thanks again for your continued support!

I created a LOD Epic: https://github.com/xenko3d/xenko/issues/37
Feel free to explain there what you have for LOD and see how it can fit in the engine, and create other issues for the other features you would like to backport.

Your help is very welcome!