Me too! If I was an outsider, I know exactly how I’d feel. And that worry is entirely warranted. If you make a viral success with these assets, Garena might come knocking.
But that’s the thing. I fell in love with the engine during my time there. And the only reason was thanks to the assets. I didn’t want to make a million bucks, I just wanted to tinker and play with it.
My hope is that fellow tinkerers will find this useful. If nothing else, they can be stub assets till you’re able to swap them out for your own. And they certainly look gorgeous in comparison to most free models. More importantly, it’s a cohesive dataset —- the entire world is built from parts that all have the same style, which is quite hard to cobble together from random assets you find online.
If Garena ever does have an issue, I’m hoping I can get them on the phone and work out a deal. They want money, we make money, there are ways of transferring some money to Garena to make everyone happy. It’s also a way to reboot an otherwise dead franchise. Plus it costs them nothing to wait and see.
But yeah, this is ultimately a labor of love, and I have no idea how it’ll turn out. In the meantime, it’s at least an incredible reference of one way to implement a modern (circa 2011) game engine.
Indeed. If the axe comes down someday, oh well. Till then, it’s an interesting experiment that ultimately no one is harmed by.
Garena being based in Asia also helps quite a lot, since the IP concerns are a bit less. Cross cultural IP wars seem less frequent, and Asian franchises in particular seem a bit less aggressively litigious than English counterparts.
There is a moral aspect to it too. I put a year or so of my life into developing that game. It’s not legally mine to give away, but it’s the only chance the franchise has for survival. So I’ll just be clear about all of the risks (which seem minimal) and everyone can go into it with eyes open.
> Asian franchises in particular seem a bit less aggressively litigious than English counterparts.
Shall I tell you about a small Asian franchise owner called Nintendo, or the reason why the most anonymous among the commonly used file sharing networks—Perfect Dark—originates and has most of its users in Japan?
More seriously, there’s (East) Asian and there’s Chinese, and only the latter can be said to uniformly have lax copyright and trademark enforcement.
> I fell in love with the engine during my time there.
OK, uh, I’ve tried a bunch of times to put this in terms that wouldn’t imply a whole lot of work, but I couldn’t, so I’ll just ask outright:
Any exploration hints for someone who hasn’t ever delved into a modern engine and has their knowledge limited to the very obsolete stuff in Abrash’s books and the generalities in Nystrom?
I’ve long wanted to explore how game engines are built, but people don’t usually say good things about the internals—if you do here, that sounds like a chance.
Yes! So many. And writing about them is one of the many things I need to do. Please, please keep in touch — my email’s in my profile, and you can reach me quickly and reliably via Twitter DM. https://www.twitter.com/theshawwn
You’re exactly my target user. I want to help as many people get into gamedev as possible.
The most important thing is to get the codebase open in an IDE, and building. From there you can place breakpoints and start looking at things.
One trick is to literally just hit the pause button in the debugger while the game is running and see where you end up by looking at the stack frames. I use that all the time to map out new codebases. Then start changing some code and see what happens.
I’m sorry I haven’t been able to get something comprehensive together yet; my wife and I have been in the hospital for the last month, and we have a month to go. But it’s almost over.
EDIT: there’s a dev stream too. Sorry for the quality and the music, but you might be able to glean some useful tricks. Pay close attention to the chapter titles, since it’s a serialization of my thought process as I hunted down a bug: https://youtu.be/VBj0RcpxCIc?t=132
But that’s the thing. I fell in love with the engine during my time there. And the only reason was thanks to the assets. I didn’t want to make a million bucks, I just wanted to tinker and play with it.
My hope is that fellow tinkerers will find this useful. If nothing else, they can be stub assets till you’re able to swap them out for your own. And they certainly look gorgeous in comparison to most free models. More importantly, it’s a cohesive dataset —- the entire world is built from parts that all have the same style, which is quite hard to cobble together from random assets you find online.
If Garena ever does have an issue, I’m hoping I can get them on the phone and work out a deal. They want money, we make money, there are ways of transferring some money to Garena to make everyone happy. It’s also a way to reboot an otherwise dead franchise. Plus it costs them nothing to wait and see.
But yeah, this is ultimately a labor of love, and I have no idea how it’ll turn out. In the meantime, it’s at least an incredible reference of one way to implement a modern (circa 2011) game engine.