Other FOSS engines

hormahis

There is one more project to the list of royalty free game engines, name Defold. Can be easily found in web. It has many interesting features and matches each criteria mentioned by the Topic Starter. It also has 'live' community and some events (so as jams and meetups etc.). Supports ios, android, win, linux and web deployment and scriptable with LUA. Just one moment about the engine - they insist your project and data files must be published to community's web server, though, yeah, it helps much with version control and team development. But still if you're standing alone it seems impossible for you to get access to your project. I tried some tutorials with this engine and I found it quite nice yet powerful.

memer

Defold is not free as in speech, one of the criteria listed in the OP.

Rukiri

Don't see Sphere being mentioned here, now I'm talking about minisphere which has the sphere 2 api. Open source and cross platform, however have no idea about the graphical limitations... You should be able to do anything ps2 related (non 3d)

https://spheredev.org/

BinaryOrange

Panda3D - A Python-based engine. I played with this a lot back in 2010, but never got around to making anything with it. While it seems development has almost completely halted, I'm sure someone somewhere is updating it!

Stencyl is now open-source as well, but not free monetarily.

memer

Stencyl is not free as in speech, so doesn't qualify for the listing. Excerpts from the EULA (personal edition):

"Licensee may not sublicense, lease, rent The Software, or any portions thereof." "Additional Requirements: Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any proprietary rights notices (including copyright and trade mark notices) which may be affixed to or contained within The Software or works created using The Software including but not limited to games displaying the Stencyl logo before the game begins. If Licensee desires to remove, obscure, or alter such notices, Licensee shall obtain permission from Licensor." "Cannot create derivative works"

I am glad that the OP said "free as in speech" rather than "open source" in their criteria, because it means I do not have to argue about the semantics of "open source". For software to be "free as in speech" you need to be free to modify and distribute the software to anybody for any purpose. I have only looked at the personal (free) license, but I have no reason to think that the paid licenses are free as in speech, because it would make their business model ineffective.

TeddyDD

Thanks for suggestions everyone :) @BinaryOrange it seems that Panda does not have editor right? I'm quite confused about Stencyl since on the github they use MIT license https://github.com/Stencyl/stencyl-engine My guess is that Stencyl core is open source while editor is proprietary.

@memer said: I am glad that the OP said "free as in speech" rather than "open source" in their criteria, because it means I do not have to argue about the semantics of "open source".

For me open source == free software. To be honest I prefer "open source" term since "free software" makes people think it's must be for free. I don't mind paying for software as long it's free as in speech (examples: Ardour, BPainter). I call things like Unreal "shared source". But that's just me, and I guess "free software" is unambiguous in this context :smiley:

I added Bitsy - I love this one. It's really limited and simple but people are making cool little games with it! https://itch.io/c/90743/bitsy-games

BinaryOrange

@TeddyDD , that is correct, Panda3D does not have a visual editor. Many people on those forums have created one, though none of them are included in any of the binaries or anything.

Megalomaniak

@TeddyDD said: I call things like Unreal "shared source".

That is the proper term as coined by Microsoft when they released their own OSI certified open source licenses in addition to what they coined shared source licenses.

As for Panda3D there are as Binary Orange mentioned some standalone editors made by individual community members(lots of duplicate effort there) as well as one or two blender plugins.

Akien

I love this list, thanks for making it and curating it. My interest in free and open source software was what brought me to Godot in the first place :)

AFAIK Torque3D is FOSS, cross-platform and has an editor (or various editor components, not sure exactly), so IMO it fits in the list. Maybe also mention Torque2D, even though it's not actively maintained.

TeddyDD

Author of TIC-80 has released the source code under MIT license. Definitely worth a try. It's less restrictive than Pico-8 but still you have to limit scope of your game - that's what fantasy consoles are about :smile:

basse

maybe not the most used... but delightfully weird.. http://vectorpoem.com/playscii/

TeddyDD

Damn, how I could forgot about Playscii? I use it as ASCII art editor but I totally forgot its also an engine. Thanks

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