I've never really considered Unreal Engine. I'm more of a hobbyist making small 2D games, recently picked up Unity (been using SFML and LibGDX before) to make some small games.
I guess UE doesn't really target small games? When I think of Unreal Engine I think of AAA FPS Games with amazing graphics, but has anyone actually used it for small indie games?
Also nice to see it's opensource, I guess I read the news a couple of months ago but I forgot. I had no idea.
Indies have been using it a lot recently. Off the top of my head I can only recall Antichamber [1] as a successful UE-made indie game but there are also a ton of small games made with it. You should check out RockLeeSmile's videos [2] if you want to see some.
That being the case, it still has benefits of open source. For example if your game isn't working and you have the skills you may be able to find out exactly why and then have it requested to fix and verify the fix. I would credit them for that and I'm pretty sure that exact scenario has happened for a dev agency.
Well, the source is only "open" to subscribers: it's in a private Github repository. Stop paying, and you stop getting access to it, and it's illegal to publish even for perusal.
Exactly: the source is "open" to paying subscribers, just as the source to... just about any closed source software anywhere, can be seen if you buy a licence to see it. It fits NO definition of OS that I'm aware of.
I believe that is still considered open source, just not Free, Open Source Software (FOSS). It's basically one point shy of the GPL in that you can't redistribute the source, but modifications are allowed. I believe they even take contributions.
Open source doesn't depend on whether you pay for it.
The OSI definition of open source (which was the original coinage) requires that users be able to redistribute the source. Companies have been licensing the source to game engines for ages, but that's not open source.
Unreal is neither. The source is copyrighted, you must pay them to see it, and you're not permitted to redistribute it, and can only modify for your own purposes (or merging into mainline) I believe.
Open Source = source is available and free as in beer. Examples: libpng, zlib, apache, python, llvm, chrome, firefox
Free Software = source is available and free as in beer and copylefted (you must also release your derivatives as free software). Examples: gcc, mysql, linux, gnome, gimp
Unreal is neither of these. It's not free as in beer nor copylefted. It's just that if you are allowed to use the source if you license the engine.
Open source software does not necessitate any price requirements, but rights to redistribution, modification and running for any purpose without restriction. The definition you gave - "source is available and free as in beer" can still very well apply to proprietary software, if redistribution is forbidden. There actually is such a thing, it's called "shared source" by Microsoft.
Free software is any software that satisfies the four essential freedoms [1], of which being copyleft is absolutely not required in any way.
For all practical purposes, OSI and FSF standards are equivalent. They differ in that the former is more oriented toward pragmatics and business, whereas the latter toward ethics and philosophy. As a result, the FSF tends to encourage copyleft more than the OSI do, but they do not necessitate it by any means.
I guess UE doesn't really target small games? When I think of Unreal Engine I think of AAA FPS Games with amazing graphics, but has anyone actually used it for small indie games?
Also nice to see it's opensource, I guess I read the news a couple of months ago but I forgot. I had no idea.