If Development Licenses Were Free?

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DR TEAMCAST
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If Development Licenses Were Free?

Post#1 » Sun Mar 20, 2016 4:28 am

I thought this was an interesting subject. Lets say the Katana and Windows CE development softwares no longer needed to have licenses purchased to sell new games developed with them, what would this mean for new homebrew games?

I understand KOS is not exactly as optimized as Katana and WinCE. But could we see full fledged "AAA" quality Dreamcast games using Katana/WinCE with the same amount of time and effort that goes into the KOS homebrews?

Or is it not that simple?
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Roel
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Re: If Development Licenses Were Free?

Post#2 » Sun Mar 20, 2016 6:06 am

As I understand it, WinCE is the least optimised of the three. In any case, it's not that simple. I can't speak for everyone, of course, but in the case of our team the limiting factor is manpower, not the development software.

OGDCFAN99
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Re: If Development Licenses Were Free?

Post#3 » Wed Mar 23, 2016 12:46 pm

Lets say that hypothetically one (or more) of us is very fortunate and Is worth millions one day. I wonder how much "bribe" money Sega would take to release their SDK library as well as GD-ROM masters (either making it open source or signing the rights over.)

It could be a reality as our generation that grew up with Dreamcast gets older and replaces our parents generation which is who created the Dreamcast and is probably mostly still in charge of Sega today.

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Re: If Development Licenses Were Free?

Post#4 » Wed Mar 23, 2016 4:33 pm

Well I'm sure a million dollar offer to Sega to open source Katana and open source a few Dreamcast games, PSO for example, would be an offer they could not refuse

It's not like having the source code is making them any revenue. And they'd still have all the rights to the franchise(s) to continue doing ports
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OGDCFAN99
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Re: If Development Licenses Were Free?

Post#5 » Wed Mar 23, 2016 6:21 pm

I'm thinking along the lines of making Katana freely available to indie devs so they could make full fledged AAA original titles like you said that are pressed on GD's. A million dollars sounds like a decent offer. I doubt they would sell any of their IP's.

But as far as your original question, if it were open sourced we would at the very least get some interesting homebrew stuff coming out of the scene, at least more interesting than 2D shmups and puzzlers... but at the end of the day I agree that it would come down to the manpower.

That being said, they would probably sell ALOT more indie games if they were katana based 3D and utilized the Dreamcast's power like commercial games. So an increase in revenue could be a motivating factor for more manpower.

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Re: If Development Licenses Were Free?

Post#6 » Wed Mar 23, 2016 8:22 pm

Full disclosure: I'm the current maintainer of KallistiOS. I don't think that really biases the rest of the post, but I figured I'd mention it, since it is at least on the topic thereof. ;)

I don't think there'd be any sort of homebrew renaissance if Katana were to be released (not that Sega ever would, since they don't have the rights to release a lot of it even if they wanted to -- a large part of Sega's official SDK wasn't written by them, after all). Why would doing so attract the large swath of new developers that would be required to have such a thing happen, after all? Also, I'm reasonably sure that GD-ROM production is gone forever -- there will never be any more pressed GD-ROM discs made by Sega.

Also, Sega's tools aren't necessarily easy to use either. A small development team is better served using KallistiOS than they are using Katana -- there's more people around to support it after all.

Finally, it is just as possible (if not more so at this point) to create an awesome title using the homebrew tools available as it is with Sega's tools. I think that many people in this thread seem to think that just because people haven't made massive 3D homebrew games means that KallistiOS doesn't support 3D to any major degree. I assure you that is totally incorrect. Recently we've had a bunch of talented people (PH3NOM, amongst others) working on producing a much more sensible OpenGL-like implementation for KOS. That OpenGL-like library makes 3D homebrew even easier to make, especially for anyone who's worked with OpenGL in the past (which is a whole lot more people than those who have worked with Sega's libraries in Katana).

Simply put, Sega's never going to release Katana free of charge, and certainly not as open-source software. Even if they would do so, I don't think you'd see a major renaissance of homebrew anyway -- there's not enough developers that'd be interested in doing that at this point. Yes, a lot of people around here are very keenly interested in the Dreamcast, but in the rest of the outside world, not so much.

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Re: If Development Licenses Were Free?

Post#7 » Wed Mar 23, 2016 8:59 pm

My main question was if you coded two of the same 3D tech demos, one on KOS one on Katana; The 3D demo with Katana would run much smoother? Or is that a naive mis-informed opinion of KOS?

So if the libraries are more optimized, ease of use and support/documentation aside, could a homebrew have as 'rich' of an engine as something like SA2 for example be developed? Better? Or would that be equally as daunting of an undertaking no matter which development libraries are being used?

Even though the amount of homebrew the Dreamcast still gets is great. It is somewhat surprising we have not seen a really ambitious 3D homebrew that matches or surpasses SA2's engine. Admit the neatness of that thought
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Re: If Development Licenses Were Free?

Post#8 » Wed Mar 23, 2016 10:16 pm

To be brutally honest, I've never actually played SA2 on the Dreamcast (I'm pretty sure that I do have SA2, but I didn't get it until long after I had beaten the Gamecube version several times over), but I don't really think that Katana gives that much of an advantage in optimization or things of that nature. Heck, I actually suspect that purely based on the compilers in use that there's a distinct possibility that the general game code itself might well be more heavily optimized. I would suspect that Sega's own libraries (being that they were written by the people who developed the hardware) might well be more optimized and they're certainly more "correct", but as I said, the compilers in use certainly favor the homebrew tools.

Development of any sort of major game engine is a hugely daunting task, regardless of the tools in use. That's why these days most of the AAA titles all use pre-made engines.

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Re: If Development Licenses Were Free?

Post#9 » Wed Mar 23, 2016 11:09 pm

BlueCrab wrote:To be brutally honest, I've never actually played SA2 on the Dreamcast (I'm pretty sure that I do have SA2, but I didn't get it until long after I had beaten the Gamecube version several times over), but I don't really think that Katana gives that much of an advantage in optimization or things of that nature. Heck, I actually suspect that purely based on the compilers in use that there's a distinct possibility that the general game code itself might well be more heavily optimized. I would suspect that Sega's own libraries (being that they were written by the people who developed the hardware) might well be more optimized and they're certainly more "correct", but as I said, the compilers in use certainly favor the homebrew tools.

Development of any sort of major game engine is a hugely daunting task, regardless of the tools in use. That's why these days most of the AAA titles all use pre-made engines.

It is true. Sonic Team back then were very talented developers. It's not like we can't match the same performance with KOS anytime soon. From how I see it, the Katana SDK is a pain in the ass to develop with.
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OGDCFAN99
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Re: If Development Licenses Were Free?

Post#10 » Mon Mar 28, 2016 1:49 pm

This is interesting stuff.

That's funny I always considered SA2 as one of the games that pushes the DC to its max visually. If you've never tried it on Dreamcast, you should play Pumpkin Hill and Meteor Herd up scaled on an XRGB or Atlona scaler.

So the general consensus is that Katana might be a bit more optimized but KallistiOS theoretically has the same potential if there was enough motivation from developers.

Speaking of all this I was reading DCJY's blog this morning and it turns out that a new indie game is being developed that is fully 3D, has network abilities, and is being developed on Katana! (wtf no way?!)

http://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/2 ... .html#more

This scene never stops surprising me.

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