Paradox Game engine going open source! (GPL3 +MIT+ apache)

Paradox supports currently the following platforms:

  • Windows Desktop
  • Windows Store
  • Windows Phone
  • Android devices
  • iOS devices

While Paradox development has been focusing to primarily target Windows, iOS and Android, we have plan to support other platforms. In fact, we have already ported and run successfully Paradox on Linux, PlayStation®4. Also as Paradox is already running on Direct3D11 for Windows platforms and OpenGL/ES for all other platforms, it is possible to easily target a new platform.

features
http://paradox3d.net/features

We are thrilled to announce that Paradox is going open source on github! This is an important step toward the empowerment of game developers. We hope that this will make you more confident in using Paradox. You will have also an unique opportunity to contribute to the project and see by yourself how Paradox engine is working.

news article here
http://paradox3d.net/blog/new-version-open-sourcing

website
http://paradox3d.net/

It means that if you use Paradox built from sources (either unmodified or modified), you must publish source of your game, as well as any changes to Paradox that you might have done (as per GPLv3 license).

I think this part is probably a dealbreaker for many game studios looking into using the engine.

For a lot of indie developers though, it may not be a dealbreaker if it doesn’t apply to games made using official builds provided by the team. Otherwise, how would you be able to get games published to iOS (which is incompatible with the license)? The only downside of that is that it seems unlikely that a commercial developer would be able to use dev. builds and will have to wait for official releases.

As for the engine itself, it looks pretty good and I’m left to wonder if there’s any hidden catch someplace that restricts what you can do with games made with the engine (the good-ole “Too good to be true” mantra). I also don’t know if it’s yet a truly complete all-in-one environment for game creation which includes a built in script editing window and a comprehensive level builder (which the latter apparently doesn’t exist yet as-per the roadmap).