Wolfire Games Forums

Hi,

Since the last thread on this subject is 3 years old, and as an indie developer who would be very interested in Phoenix engine licensing, I would like to know if you intend to open some kind of licensing on the Phoenix engine more or less soon. (and if you do, what kind ? A non-source access but only API with pre-compiled binaries would be excessively great for example)

I´m not talking about mods for Overgrowth as I suppose the game engine core is something well separated and much done and stable by now, and it look like from the alpha videos that art assets and game-play dev for overgrowth are the main things you are working on, so do you consider this option at all ?

Thank you,

David is actually still working pretty hard on core technology. The Phoenix engine isn't finished. The animation and rigging editors are disabled for now, as well as the brush tool I believe.
You could, in theory, make your own game from scratch with just the Overgrowth.exe, I suppose. You'd just clear out OG specific parts the scripts and keep the generic stuff. Then rework it all. It'd be a huge pain in the ass and at least two or three years of work, but it could be done I suppose.
I don't think David plans on licensing the Phoenix Engine, but I could be wrong. As far as I know, he's moving on after OG. Not sure what his plans are for the engine itself. Maybe he'll release it open, maybe not. I really have no clue.

Your best chance of getting an answer on this will be to email the team at [email protected] they will be able to tell you more.

I can tell you however, that we did an interview with David a while back, and he said that he had no immediate plans to license the engine when he was done. Basically, he feels that the engine itself is not suited for use in any type of game that is not something like Overgrowth. And if you want to make a similar game to Overgrowth, enough of the game level mechanics are in the scripting layer that a full conversion mod will essentially be the same thing.
It's also worth noting that as Korban said, the engine is still under heavy development, and there are still changes happening that would prevent it from being useable anytime soon, as weekly changes can and will break many features currently in the game. And there are many features that are broken that may or may not be fixed.

During that same interview, David did discuss a possible project he is considering beyond Overgrowth, where he may code a set of tools that people can use to create games on their own. Something more modular, and therefore more available on broad fronts for people looking to make games in the future. This might be the closest thing to an engine you would see from Wolfire given their current plans.

I loved the sound of that modular engine he talked about. Sounded so awesome. After OG, I'll be sticking to his development just to see what awesome stuff he comes up with.

Thanks for the updates on this question,

I think it would be sad in a way if the engine is not re-used / licensed after OG. Of course Overgrowth will likely be a very good game, but I really think the engine have great potential, especially for indie devs. The rendering is actually very nice, and so is the terrain technique and probably many others technical parts.
Even if the core is somehow very linked to the OG game, I think there will always be quite big part of the engine that could be extracted. May be it will take some work, but it could be eventually done quite fast by a dev community if it goes GPL-like after the release of the game for example (if the team don´t want to do it).

Anyway, it seams not ready yet, but I hope this kind of discussion will occur after the release of OG

I'm certainly under the impression that if David does end up making modular tools in the future, some of the code from Overgrowth will make it into those tools.

Also, I know the devs have discussed the possibilities of making it open source in the future, so they are not set in stone either way. We'll just have to wait and see what they do.

For a long time before I joined the forum and bought the game I thought this was Unreal Engine..
Was just so pretty.

Pheonix could compete with UDK granted if there were easier character making.

Like we said, the engine is in development.
There's a rigging editor in-engine. The old video showed a stone column being rigged and animated easily. It's just been disabled because it was too much work to keep it operational each week. David just uses Blender for now. Once OG is done, or maybe even in beta, those two will likely be made operational again and opened up.
It goes to logic that with a rigging and animation editor built in and as easy to use as they were in that video, making a character would be easy as pie. As in, if you have the model a one day effort to get the rig and some initial animations in, and this is given that the character is something totally different, like a giant ant.