End of the Machinery Game Engine
The Machinery game engine seems terminated. From email:
Thanks so much for supporting The Machinery.
Unfortunately, we’ve reached a point where it’s no longer possible for us to continue in the current direction. Per Section 14 of the End User License Agreement, the development of The Machinery will cease, we will no longer offer GitHub access, all licenses are terminated as of 14 days after the date of this notice, and you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries. You will receive a full refund of your annual license payment through Gumroad.
We really appreciated you being a part of the Our Machinery Community. We hope we have been helpful in some way to your development needs.
-Our Machinery
100 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadThe Machinery was a young engine but it had pedigree as the spiritual successor to Bitsquid, which did ship in a number of commercial games until it was killed by Autodesk after they acquired it. The main developers went on to found Our Machinery.
Genuine question.
Given the expansive scope of papers donated to historical archives by various engineers from that period, it would be at least atypical if they only took the direction of research and work they wanted, rather than extensive knowhow and documentation of the processes they'd developed while working for Shockley (not "Schockley").
Nowadays the practices that made Silicon Valley possible are illegal in California but legal in China.
> The silicon-gate bootstrap capacitor exemplifies the paths of information between companies at the dawn of the microprocessor era. Practical silicon gate technology was created at Fairchild (with some earlier roots). When employees (including Faggin) left Fairchild for Intel, they took this knowledge with them. (And in some cases took "lots and lots of Fairchild internal confidential documents", see Shima oral history). From Intel, ideas spread to other companies, such as when Faggin leaving Intel to found Zilog, basing the Zilog Z80 on the Intel 8080.
The "Shima oral history" link is to http://landley.net/history/mirror/intel/shima.html, an interview from 01994 with Masatoshi Shima, an early Intel employee:
> Shima: When Zilog developed the Z80, it was quite successful because they knew the weak points of Intel, what Intel was not going to do. After Z80, they made one mistake. The original Zilog was founded by two guys, Federico Faggin and Robert Ungerman. Federico Faggin came from the semiconductors area. Ungerman came from the software and system area. Federico wanted to do the products related to semiconductors, but Ungerman wanted it related to his systems. The company did not have enough money for two businesses at the same time, and it didn't need two top managers, who fought with each other. Small companies are not able to hire good management. They should have brought more people from Intel, but they made an agreement with Intel not to. I think that was Zilog's biggest mistake. Originally Intel hired many, many people from Fairchild. They brought in lots and lots of Fairchild internal confidential documents. I had many such documents in my cabinet when I developed 4004. When Federico told Intel he would not hire people anymore, that meant he would not get the best people for the logic area.
> Aspray: But maybe it was necessary. Intel learned the mistake that Fairchild had made and had threatened suit against this new company. Maybe there wasn't any choice.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/tera-developers-guilty-of-stea...
Also, as someone pointed out, Fairchild. And as they mysteriously failed to point out, Intel spawned from Fairchild the same way.
"We hope we have been helpful in some way to your development needs."
That's a load-bearing "some way," if I've ever seen one.
The current EULA on the website includes a bit that says they can terminate your license and ask you to delete all source and binaries entirely at their discretion[1].
The latest copy on the wayback machine from May does not have that bit.[2]
1. https://ourmachinery.com/eula.html 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20220529230958/https://ourmachin...
So they used the 'we can update the eula at any time at our discretion' clause to add a 'we can tell you to delete your source and binaries' clause and then immediately invoked it.
> you own nothing
> you have no rights
> you promise not to try and exercise any right you think you have
> you agree to binding arbitration with the firm we pay, just in case you ever get it in your silly little head that you do have rights
> you cannot do anything the company doesn't like
> the company can do anything it wants whether you like it or not
> the company is not responsible for anything ever
> the company makes absolutely no guarantees about anything
> the company owns everything
If you're a corporation, you have leverage which you can use to negotiate. Normal people don't, they are offered a take it or leave it deal and it's pretty much always what I described above.
For normal people the leverage comes mostly through market forces, consumer protection laws and regulations because then you are leveraging with your whole economy and sovereign power of your country.
Not as good as individual leverage but better than nothing by a million miles.
I still see most if not all of the clauses I mentioned though in pretty much every terms of service I ever cared to check. We write "buy" on the website but you're not really buying anything, you're licensing it and therefore you own nothing and we can even retroactively take away that license for any reason. Warranty? There is none, products and services are offered as-is and we're not responsible if it's buggy beyond belief or if it gets breached and your personal data get leaked. Thinking about going to court against us? Oh look, you waived all rights to do so individually or as class action, and there's even a huge arbitration section detailing exactly how much of an uphill battle it will be for you should you try to exercise any consumer rights. We don't like it when you tinker with stuff you're not supposed to, so we've prohibited reverse engineering, scraping and everything related no matter how benign. We can totally take any measures we deem necessary in order to ensure your compliance though, like invading your privacy, scanning your system and exfiltrating data like malware but it's not really malware because technically you agreed to it.
In any real justice system, judges would take one look at these abusive clauses and invalidate them on the spot without even giving the corporation chance for recourse. Things are already changing though. Europe is passing laws designed to correct these power imbalances. My country is following their lead.
I doubt the EULA as written is enforceable.
If I had invested a year into building a game on their engine, and they told me to delete my game, I would sue. This is serious monetary harm being inflicted upon developers.
If they're going to drop the engine as a product, I would expect a perpetual "same-version, no further support" license offered to existing users. That's the bare minimum these folks could do.
This way of handling things is screwing over anyone that bet their project on the engine in the biggest way possible. It is not trivial to change engines while in flight. They're asking people to do a complete rewrite.
And if they're really closing up shop, why not release the engine as open source? Are they getting bought out silently?
Makes no sense.
That's very concerning if true. Are there any game engine patents significant enough to cause something this catastrophic?
I hope instead that it has to do with issues related to whatever contract they signed when they sold Bitsquid to Autodesk. (e.g. a non-compete clause or similar)
Not saying it didn't, but it'd be a great way to tank a competitor's business if it were fake. I wanna be sure before I get a pitchfork out.
To the extent this is legitimate, it definitely seems like grounds for a lawsuit. IANAL, so can't say if it'd succeed, but I am not convinced the last-minute EULA change would save them.
Email about the EULA change that added the termination clause two days ago: https://host.zlsadesign.com/SkfpU6ETq.png
This is definitely unacceptable. Are you considering legal action?
They deleted everything besides the frontpage and EULA page, a shame since their blog was a good resource.
I use Godot and now I'm wondering if this can't happen at Godot as well. Perhaps it's time to switch to Unity. You pay but at least they have sort of stood the test of time.
What they could theoretically do is stop developing it, or change the license for all newer versions of the engine to one that would force you to pay to use it (or similar). In which case Godot would most likely be forked on the same day and a big part of the current developers would just move over to the fork.
Essentially they could release "Godot current+1" under a fully proprietary (or GPL for that matter) license and keep the notice that's required by "Godot current" and they would be compliant, since "Godot current+1" would be a derived work from "Godot current".
The requirement to get consent from all previous contributors only applies if they would want to remove that copyright notice. For sofware that is under more restrictive licenses, like GPL, further restrictions apply and then it would be necessary to get an ok from all copyright holders to change the license to something that is incompatible with the GPL (or between incompatible GPL-versions, like GPLv2->GPLv3).
edit: While it would be ok to do this change from a licensing perspective it would of course most likely piss off quite a lot of the current contributors who didn't agree with the change, and they would most likely move to the aforementioned fork that would get started immediately.
Sure they can, but it's meaningless unless they try to enforce it via court, in exactly the same way Our Machinery's license will be enforced.
No, it most definitely is not time to do that. This can't happen to Godot, since FOSS licenses are irrevocable. It can happen to Unity. You'd be moving from a zero chance to a small but nonzero chance if you did that.
Having followed the project from the beginning, the blog, the podcast: I hope they (the people) are ok.
I was very excited to start reading the C code and was hoping a Nim port would be possible. Sad to hear I’m this late to the party because now I can’t even enjoy the blog posts.
On the list of things to worry about, this was always like #100. #1 was a lack of updates, but a rug pull? I mean, what the hell?
This is pretty weird.
Then again, in regards to the engine itself dying, I feel like this is inevitable for many of the projects out there. For example, there was the Xenko engine which was later renamed to Stride: https://www.stride3d.net/
It's actually a nice project, has lots of great features and feels like it should be a more open alternative to Unity, whilst being similarly easy to use. However, compare the attention it is getting in comparison to something like Godot:
On OpenCollective, Stride has an estimated annual budget of around 12k USD, whereas Godot gets around 15k USD per month on Patreon. Stride has a bit under 100 contributors, Godot has almost 2000. Godot gets hype on various game development subreddits regularly, yet Stride gets no such love.Ergo, it's probably pretty easy to draw a trajectory of what the next 10 years might bring for either, with one probably getting more features and development and becoming a mainstay of the indie scene, when compared to the other.
But the great thing is that if whatever engine you use has an open license, you cannot have it be taken away from you (as long as you have all of the actual executables and don't depend on external services).
If that's too slow for you, just edit the website here and make a PR with the info you were looking for: https://github.com/stride3d/stride-website
Rather than encourage me to change it, why don't you? You seem to know a lot more about it than I do for starters. In the time you engaged with me, you could have submitted the PR yourself and thanked me for the feedback. Herein lies why the project likely hasn't caught on—not enough focus on contributing.
And as I said, someone is already working on a website refresh.
I'm not sure from what sources your personal assessment comes from, but from what I know about the project, it's incorrect.
Here's the source for it apparently dying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32303373
And this is what I'm saying: I personally don't see the value in contributing to it if people already involved with it who know far more than me, have demonstrated this to me when asking them a question, would rather give me the link to do a PR than do it themselves. All this wasted energy that could have gone into the project. It says it all really, and I don't say that to be snarky, but there's a reason that Godot has exploded in popularity, and that's likely because the community just gets things done instead of discussing things to a fault.
If you simply want to develop "standard" games, this might not be important to you. But if you are a .NET developer and you want to integrate anything from the .NET ecosytem, Stride is what you want.
Also, Stride has probably the best shader system in the world.
Plus you need to use a PC to develop.
Now I'm thinking Unity assets could be adapted to work with Stride since both use C#. If so, switching from Unity to Stride won't be so bad.
Yea, some kind of converter for unity assets would be cool. But 3d assets should already work... And with other things from the Unity asset store you could run into licensing issue. But I don't know the details about that, might even vary from asset to asset.
Stride has pretty good written docs, for an open-source project. And there are quite some video tutorials on the docs page too. And there is also: https://doc.stride3d.net/4.0/en/manual/stride-for-unity-deve...
For example, if there's a nifty networking library for Unity and I adapted to use it somewhere else, as long as I don't resell the library, I should be fine. Practically I can't imagine an asset store author suing you for using the asset in a non-unity project.
I do vastly prefer a single language engine like Stride, versus Godot which supports visual scripting, GD script, and C#.
What's the name of the networking library you mentioned? I'm interested in that myself...
https://github.com/proyecto26/RestClient
I strongly suspect this could be ported over to work in stride.
https://books.ourmachinery.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20220529231010/https://ourmachine...
https://github.com/OurMachinery/themachinery-books
Probably deleted
And if you accurate and patient enough, I think, you can manually copy latest state of repo
http://web.archive.org/web/20220801082043/https://github.com...
Seems like I dodged a bullet. I was looking at this a few months ago. Decided to play with love2d instead. Did a few projects in it. Then I got into unreal engine. A further distraction via cryengine used up the remainder of my time. I was about to get into the machinery in September.
Wow. Godot was to be October. So yeah. Bring that forwards.
That EULA is likely a bad idea in general. It's also most likely against the law in some jurisdictions. The backstory would be of interest mainly for probably avoiding these Devs in future if there wasn't a good reason for the debacle. Sour taste all round.
I'd like to know what is the underlying issue? Disagreement between founders? Acquisition? Legal problem? Not enough funding? Not enough customers?
Presumably also with some sort of NDA attached to it?
After trying Godot 3.5, it felt like an inferior Unity.
The 4 alpha feels great.
My big fear with Unity isn't a total collapse, but gradual suckification of the engine. For now it's still the easiest way to build amazing games, but things are changing.
I'd be surprised if Godot or another FOSS engine wasn't dominant by 2025, or at the very least viewed as Blender is compared to Maya.