License support for consoles

[greysonstorm]

Hi, really should have checked the license for Tilengine for some reason thought it was MIT buts it LGPL would you be able to/willing to supply a license for console developers as releasing my codebase or objects is not really an option for me

Grey

[greysonstorm]

[megamarc]

[Domarius]

Hahah... if he doesn't have the patience to wait a few days for a response on a forum, then it's unlikely he has the patience to make a video game, in ANY engine!

[greysonstorm]

Hahah... if he doesn't have the patience to wait a few days for a response on a forum, then it's unlikely he has the patience to make a video game, in ANY engine!

Nice, :p the problem I had was the publishers wanted a final list of thirdparty software i will use. But its all sorted now using something else but tilengine is currently very useful for prototyping.

Oh and please dont take this a me being rude in any way but i've been working in the game industry for 20 years so i have found what you wrote very funny considering.

[megamarc]

greysonstorm told me some days ago in a PM about the pressure from game publishers, and the legal and technical quirks about developing for consoles. I think your comments are very interesnting and worhtwile of being reproduced here. May I write a small summary?

I'm glad that you consider tilengine a useful tool for prototyping. Knowing that you have so much experience in the game development field, I'd really appreciate any suggestions or criticism about tilengine and how would you like to have it improved, from a game developer point of view.

[greysonstorm]

thats a very good point about making a summary, i do come off like a spoilt child without the context from the pm's,

As for tilengine itself i think its going in the right direction i still havent looked to closely at the internals i've only made a few tweaks here and there so it would compile for the xbox, i have made a quick and dirty hack to log all messages to a file i noticed you add the beginnings of this in the 2.1 update i'll have to clean up my code and do it better for 2.1 as having a physical log to check makes debugging alot easier

[Domarius]

Hahah... if he doesn't have the patience to wait a few days for a response on a forum, then it's unlikely he has the patience to make a video game, in ANY engine!

Nice, :p the problem I had was the publishers wanted a final list of thirdparty software i will use. But its all sorted now using something else but tilengine is currently very useful for prototyping.

Oh and please dont take this a me being rude in any way but i've been working in the game industry for 20 years so i have found what you wrote very funny considering.

Hahah not at all, I'm glad you took it in good stride. I wrote that only based on what was there.   I'm actually glad to find out there's more to the story and we have a new Tilengine fan!

Yeah I would like to see what was exchanged in PM, it'd be good to see something based off 20 years experience

[megamarc]

Basically the interesting info in the PM is that the Xbox development kit only allows for creating and linking static libraries, not the standard shared ones. As per license terms, if you use a static version of a LGPL library in your project, you also must provide the means to anybody to relink your project with a different version of the library. In practice this means releasing the sources of your project, that is incompatible with any proprietary, commercial software.

I wouldn't ever enforce anybody to release their sources if using static Tilengine, that is silly, but the LGPL license requires this point to be satisfied. There is no conflict when using it as a shared library as I originally intended, but providing a console devkit that enforces using static libraries is just as silly as the LGPL requesting the freedom for the end user to relink it. The combination of both issues blocked grey to use Tilengine in a future console game. Sad!

The hurry to get a quick response was due to a deadline imposed by the game publisher to get a list of the tools that were going to be used in the development.

[Domarius]

Wow that is pretty interesting actually... and a shame. GreysonStorm, is your name referencing Jason Storm, a popular DOS game, by any chance?

And I'd be keen to follow the development of this XBox game you're making if you're allowed to share. Or a page to follow for when it's released.