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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