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Originally Posted by Astronouth7303
And if we just mod UT2k4, the cost would be to buy UT2k4 for everyone. Not real cheap, either.
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It really isn't that expensive, and you do get a perfectly good game out of it. (I have of course been referring to modding--it's obvious that you can't afford to buy the code for the engine, sponsor or no sponsor.)
Doing so means that you have a engine that is known to work properly. If you use something else, there is a higher probability of something beyond your control going wrong. What guarantees that it will be fixed in a timely fashion, so as not to inconvienience you greatly? And why not make use of the Unreal modding community? That's arguably better than getting an SDK and reading the documentation, and fighting with low-level code, but still ending up with a product that's based on a sub-par or dated backend.
If the price is such a big deal, why not use the old Unreal Tournament? It's exceptionally efficient, very scalable, runs on anything (of consequence), and is "known good". The techniques to mod it (note--once again, I doubt it's worth it to even
think of buying the code!) are established and widely available.
Whatever you do, don't paint yourselves into a corner by choosing an engine for which you will be debugging errors totally unrelated to your project--let someone else do that for you! (Open source is ideologically nice, but do you have the time and energy to bugtest someone else's work in progress, while you simultaneously try to develop an implementation of the same thing, using ever-changing builds, and without a guarantee of stability? It's a crapshoot.)
One other thing about open source (or any source, really): once you do see the code, will you know what to do with it? Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's not exactly easy stuff to interpret, especially the first time around. If you have real expertise (high school comp. sci. probably doesn't constitute expertise), or are willing to invest
significant time to learn, then it may be reasonable; but if you want to work on a FIRST video game, and not spend your (not-unlimited) time learning the nuances of a particular engine, the best route is still modding someone else's work.
It's a matter of perspective--what do you really want? To learn 3-D game design/implementation, or to produce a FIRST game? They aren't mutually exclusive, but neither are they the same thing. Another thing: if you're recruiting volunteers, make sure they know in advance your answer to this question--if they assume that you're going to have a game within a certain time period, and find that you, the leaders, are still tinkering with the intricacies of the engine when you "ought to be" working on the game itself, they may just quit out of disillusionment.