UE4 license issues.

[User #1751331]

I took at the Unreal Engine for License agreement listed here.

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I was a bit concerned about a bit of the wording in it. A bit of consultation and they came to the same conclusion and same issue.
So far I just sent a message in on the custom license system and hopefully I can work something out with them or no chance in hell I'll agree to the license the way it is.

The concern.

Section 7 regards records and audits.
In it requires records of development and manufacture but it isn't specific to what that includes.

The reason that's problematic is in Section 9 they retain full rights and ownership to anything presented as feedback.
Legally that can include any documents or records handed over to them. Because the first section isn't specific they could legally contain source code or any documentation on how you solved problems and so on. In effect they could end up owning the product you make and at the end of it all you wouldn't attain any rights to anything other the artwork and so on.

Honestly, it is a bit fishy that is even in the EULA since they no longer make money off the product manufacture time or anything just 5% off the sale of the product.
The only time that they make money during the manufacture of a product is the licensing off assets to you or they do work for you in the development and production cycle such as you can't solve a problem and you contact them and they assign someone to help solve the problem. Which then both parties would have a record of already.

As for the custom license agreement I asked them to be more specific and told the legal concern.
I figure this way if they do it and I can agree to it great I'll make use of it f not I simply won't use their engine.

Update:
EPIC reached back to me appears what I asked wasn't unreasonable.

Always pays to read and understand what you are signing.

 

[polywog]

No game engine does everything you want out of the box. It's common for developers to "contribute" code to adapt the engine to their particular needs. A considerable percentage of every game engine out there was actually written by others, and this is how it's always been. If your code is something that may benefit other game devs, it may be incorporated into future versions of the engine. You're using an engine that thousands of people have contributed to.

 

[User #1751331]

No game engine does everything you want out of the box. It's common for developers to "contribute" code to adapt the engine to their particular needs. A considerable percentage of every game engine out there was actually written by others, and this is how it's always been. If your code is something that may benefit other game devs, it may be incorporated into future versions of the engine. You're using an engine that thousands of people have contributed to.

There is a difference between a voluntary contribution verse one of assumption.
If we were to make the assumption that is what this is about.
It would be like you going to work on your car one day realizing that hey you can make an improvement that can save fuel economy and then the motor company laying claim to it. Thus stealing your IP (intellectual property).

If they are going to lay that level of claim on something I create why the fuck should I do the work let them do it!

The only reason I was thinking of using them is it would get me demo up and running faster. If they won't change I'll just wait till I finish work on the rest of what I am doing and to hell with using their engine.

 

[polywog]

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I for one appreciate the open source community. It allows me to utilize vast resources at little or no cost, and speeds production exponentially. Do I mind sharing my work with other devs? Hell no. I hope others make money off it, too.

 

[User #1751331]

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I for one appreciate the open source community. It allows me to utilize vast resources at little or no cost, and speeds production exponentially. Do I mind sharing my work with other devs? Hell no. I hope others make money off it, too.

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Well I've been a contributor to open source since the beginning. But I still need to make a living and still need to protect the IP I am not intending to share.

The point is if they were more specific on defining the feed back and not requiring crap that isn't needed for what they are supposedly doing then. I would be happy.

If I found something where the engine could be improved and I felt it would bennefit other developers. I would be more than glad to provide feed back on how to do it. But I am not giving every God damn bit of code I write over to them. Especially shit I spent decades developing. Believe it or not mostly the only reason I want their engines is to make use of their tools systems to get a working prototype out I have my own engine. The end product will be moved to it because I would have to make a lot of mods to UE4's engine to do what mine does. But for making a basic prototype and shooting some early concept work UE4 would allow it to happen faster. But if I can't use them they aren't the only toolset in the market.

Stop acting like this is related to open source. The UE4 isn't open soure and the people wanting to use it aren't creating opensource projects. So there is no damn comparison here.This is purely a case of attempt IP theft by legality. In short they hope the people aren't smart enough to read the EULA and put 2 and 2 together.

 

[polywog]

Stop acting like this is related to open source. The UE4 isn't open soure and the people wanting to use it aren't creating opensource projects. So there is no damn comparison here.

I've played one role or another in the development over 200 games, and contributed to every engine out there. They are all built on open source. Stop acting like they aren't.

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Open source doesn't mean you can't make money off your work, quite the contrary.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

 

[User #1751331]

I've played one role or another in the development over 200 games, and contributed to every engine out there. They are all built on open source. Stop acting like they aren't.

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Open source doesn't mean you can't make money off your work, quite the contrary.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Open source means you are required to make the source code available with the product. Depending on the license. MIT license Zlib license however don't. GPL does on all versions. UE4 the engine is by no means open source.

My own engine uses libraries such as Opengl,GLEW, and SDL and such to deal with hardware however. That isn't an actual part of the engine because I can and have code at the hardware level before with graphics cards. I don't need anyone of those libraries they just make life a bit easier. And mean I only need to compile one set of code that will work from platform to platform.

You can't download the source code for UE4 without agreeing to the EULA and licensing. They don't make a copy of game source when you buy the game. When unreal was created there wasn't many 3D game engines already in existence. Quake was around doom but none of those were built or modeled the same way. Both the first two were running on a manual rasterization vs unreal was designed to be modular and made use of hardware. You don't need to believe though the source from ID is available it has been made open source. But since then people have updated the original quake game to make use of opengl and so on. Back in the 90's there wasn't to many game engines available and 3D ones were closely guarded.
In 2000 the torque engine was one of the cheapest engines you could license
OGRE didn't exist till 2005
Crystal space at its release in 1997 while Opensource wasn't worth wasting time on Didn't have a stable release till 2012.
Frankly the way a lot of us developers learned back then was guys like John Carmack going on to sites like flipcode.com and having open discussions with the community. Which is why a lot of engines after those early ones are built that way.

 

[polywog]

 

[User #1751331]

You realize that isn't a hardware supported 3D engine. You can see how it was made essentially in the book of "black art of 3D game programming" by Andre LaMothe.
Then engine was nearly entirely rewritten when they supported 3DFX. Frankly calling it the same engine is a good bit a lie.
It wasn't that good of job. Which is why they moved onto use Netimmerse from gamebase co. ltd. for Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind
It became gamebryo which lead to the creation engine in Skyrim.

Bethesda hasn't open sourced Xngine as of yet. They don't own the full rights to the later engines. Gamebryo USA.
Though the creation engine is an in house engine made by Bethesda it is a fork of the source code from Gamebryo so some of it's IP value still falls under their control. Meaning Bethesda can't Open Source it because it is not entirely theirs to do so.

Pretty familiar with it. Xngine was one of the first programs I ran a decompiler on. Made mods for pretty much every game morrowind on that Bethesda put out. Mostly because my son was dealing with the divorce and getting him interested in stuff like that got his mind off of the issue to some degree.

 

[polywog]

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[User #1751331]

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That isn't showing me anything new and it just reconfirmed what I said above. Which was general history of the engine.

About the only thing you should take away from it is the parts that are the same aren't actually part of the game engine such as the file loader and handler. That's why it can be used from one engine to the next.
The game engine itself is usually consists of the graphics engine, physics if the is one, sounds, resource manager and controller.
Everything else is interchangeable on a well made engine. You can swap out the hardware drivers such as opengl or direct x. Different sound so, different file structure...

 

[polywog]

At this point it's obvious that you have nothing of any value to contribute to UE4, so you should be safe using it.

 

[User #1751331]

Update EPIC Games reached back out to me. Looks like what I asked wasn't considered unreasonable.