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Ask
Mary-Margaret #5: "Licensing issues"
This month's
column focuses on different kinds of licensing issues: licensing an
engine for development, licensing the right to use another game company's
intellectual property to publish add-on modules, and licensing non-game
intellectual properties for use in game development. To start, you should search the Internet with multiple search engines, and using multiple ways of stating what you want. I did a search for "3D Game Development Engine" on AltaVista and came up with some pretty interesting hits. And you should also start with the major players: NDL's NetImmerse, Wild Tangent's (formerly Eclipse's) Genesis3D, and obviously the Quake Engine, the Unreal Engine, and the LithTech engine by Monolith. Also mentioned on a recent web search: CrystalSpace at http://crystal.linuxgames.com/, Twilight 3D at http://www.twilight3d.com/, and Vortex 3D at http://vortex.planetgeforce.com/. I also found what looks like a great resource at the 3D Engine forum at http://www.f10.parsimony.net/forum15628/index.htm. The best 3D engines site http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ki/engines.html was down the last time I took a look. If you search for "3D Engines" on the web you'll see links everywhere to this. It is an excellent resource; I hope they didn't go dark permanently. In order to get the perspective of actually working with a licensed engine, I consulted with Mike McShaffry, who is the Director of Product Development for Glass Eye Entertainment: "Generally, you'll pay more money for better, more complete, engines and world building tools. You'll pay more for source code than object code, certainly. You'll also pay more for future upgrades or high priority technical support from the licensing company. You may even pay royalties if the engine is particularly popular. The range is anywhere from free to many hundreds of thousands of dollars plus royalties." "Smaller technology companies will license engines that are less well known (good because they aren't overused) but perhaps leave you hanging if you need technical support while you are trying to make a milestone drop to your publisher. Ask them if they are creating a game of their own - if they are they may be overextending themselves, especially if the engine has never been in a published game before." "The only way you can change an engine you license is if you license the source code. Generally, you will then have the freedom to change it any way you like. The trade off is you will not be able to easily incorporate upgrades or bug fixes if you have extensively modified the original engine." "One other thing to think about - a publisher will likely see your technology risks minimized by licensing a well known engine, or perhaps one of their in house engines. The evil catch 22 is, very few technology providers will be willing to let you use the engine without paying a significant portion of the licensing fee up front. They do this for a good reason - it costs them money to support their developers and they want to eliminate anyone who isn't funded well enough to go the distance."
"So what is a small company to do, who wants to get a demo together of the next great RPG? This might surprise you, but I suggest concentrating on the game and do the demo in a sprite engine. A 3D engine can lead an inexperienced team down a horribly long, expensive, and unrewarding trail. Ultima IX was delayed nearly 2.5 years while the team tried to solve some extremely difficult problems. Eventually, the problems were solved in hardware, not software. In the end, a sprite engine will cut technology costs and complexity in half, and make no discernable difference in the quality of the game. Put another way, a sprite engine didn't hurt Diablo, did it?" (Many
thanks to Mike McShaffry for his terrific help with this question!) ________________________________________________________ |
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Features
Engine-Seeking
