March 14, 2001

3:45 PM

GarageGames announces that their Tribes 2 engine can be sub-licensed for $100 and the games made through it will be distributed by them.

So who wants to break into the 1st person/3D game market? I have lots of free time...
posted by john (8 comments total)

Very cool. Maybe it's time to transfer those gaming designs from paper to reality...
posted by owillis at 4:00 PM on March 14, 2001

Wow, no doubt.. .what an idea. I can imagine lots of people trying but not suceeding, but this does really open the door for the slackers (like me) who just don't have the resources for dev of a whole game. ....interesting......hmmm.
posted by tomplus2 at 4:49 PM on March 14, 2001

Bear in mind that anyone who wants to can download the source code to q3a and make a mod for it if they want. Id have been doing this for a while. One of the most succesful games of the moment is a mod for halflife called couterstrike. Though none of these people are actually charging for their mods.
posted by davidgentle at 7:12 PM on March 14, 2001

davidgentle: there's a difference between making a mod of an existing game and making a new game from an existing engine. there's limitations in the first that there aren't in the second.
posted by pnevares at 8:16 PM on March 14, 2001

Well, Valve DID buy/hire Team Fortress Software, and there was a similar licensing arrangement for Counterstrike (both now come in a box with the base software).

I saw some really inventive things being done with QuakeC, though you really had to wonder whether some of the effort was really worth it (e.g. QuakeRally, which hacked the engine to create a racing game). In the end the better mods were the ones that worked around the same basic format of a first-person shooter.

This is really a tremendous opportunity, though. I may actually check this out ... my timeline is pretty long (maybe 3 years ...) but I have an idea or two that I'd really, really like to see happen.
posted by dhartung at 10:17 PM on March 14, 2001

There's no technical reason why you couldn't take the game enine of q3a and make it into a completely different game as long as you didn't charge for it.
posted by davidgentle at 10:21 PM on March 14, 2001

There's a difference between engine source and game source.
posted by littlesolty at 6:02 AM on March 15, 2001

david: Agreed. If you licensed the Quake engine. Running a mod on top of Quake is not the same thing at all. You're just making Quake, a game written using the Quake engine, use different graphics and game physics, via hooks that were built into the game for this purpose.

Mods are much easier to write than entirely new games that use a raw engine. It's a difference of an order of magnitude.
posted by dhartung at 3:38 PM on March 15, 2001