Open Source and Game Engines Report

From the fall of 2005 through the summer of 2006, I worked intensively on a report for the Academic ADL Co-Lab and PEO STRI that covered, essentially, the current state of open source game engines (as of then). With the success of America's Army and several other military training tools based on commercial game engine technology, there was a lot of enthusiasm in the military training community for the upsides of game engines being used for training purposes, but there were likewise questions about whether game engines would follow a similar path to many other kinds of technologies, with commodity / mass market technologies being replaced by no strings attached Open Source technology. The report was the results of my collaboration in the ADL Co-Lab on trying to wrestle with those questions.

It was an amazing opportunity, and, with the exception of my first year working on ice cream breakfast and my first year at Raven, I doubt I've ever learned so much, and covered so much intellectual ground, in such a concentrated time period. My only regret, really, is that by the time the project drew down, I felt like I was finally just getting to the point that I could really start doing a great job with the topic. Nevertheless, I'm proud of the work that went into the report.

The report is no longer online - I might try to track it down at some point in the future.

A lot of my thoughts from the report are summarized in my open source game engines GLS presentation, which I gave a year after the project had finished. Despite being a few years old, I think most of my discussion is still interesting and relevant.