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End of the Machinery Game Engine
209 points by eigenbom on Aug 1, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 93 comments
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




This looks pretty shady.

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.


That's not how licenses work. If they change the EULA, users of the software have to agree to it again for it to bind them. Usually what happens if a library license changes is that users are stuck on an old (potentially unsupported) version if they don't want to agree to the new EULA.

I doubt the EULA as written is enforceable.


Exactly, this is BS and would not fly in most half-decent legal systems, specially given the timing.


I've always thought this kind of "we can update the EULA" clause pretty much invalidated the whole idea that you should carefully read EULAs. If one of your starting rules is "the rules are whatever I say they are" then there's no point even reading the other rules. In reality, of course, nothing means anything until it's tried in court.


There is absolutely no point in reading any user agreements or terms of service. The following statements effectively summarize all such documents:

> 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


I have a local ISP that lets you opt out of binding arbitration provided you notify them within 30 days from the start of service. The only customers who would know that are the ones who read the terms.


I downvoted you because this is HN, not reddit. It's absolutely not true, and doubly so in the situation where you're dealing with b2b agreements. Most service agreements for enterprise agreements are negotiable, and certainly don't contain the above clauses.


> Most service agreements for enterprise agreements are negotiable, and certainly don't contain the above clauses.

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.


That is right.

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.


Yes. It turns out consumer protection and market regulation forces are already making corporations change those terms. For example, I'm not seeing "no refunds" in terms anymore, I'm seeing "no refunds except for cases defined by law". Why not outline those cases so that consumers can understand their rights? Because they obviously don't want to have to refund anyone and would rather consumers remain ignorant of their rights.

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.


Those market forces don't mean much when everyone offering a comparable service has those same conditions - there simply isn't a market for that part of the offering.


> If one of your starting rules is "the rules are whatever I say they are" then there's no point even reading the other rules.


I was wondering about that. When you go to the Our Machine web page, it shows the EULA having been updated yesterday, which immediately made me suspicious.


So the EULA says that they can ask.


Ceasing development is one thing, rug pulling licensees by demanding they delete the framework they've built their projects on is another thing entirely. The hell happened at Our Machinery?

The 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.


Not only that, but they'd have to delete and force consumers to delete any copies of games published that use the license, unless I am misunderstanding it. There's no way that's enforceable (IANAL, but good lord).


Maybe this is part of an out-of-court settlement with Autodesk to avoid a lawsuit.


Then they need better lawyers.


Maybe, we don't have any idea how bad their legal position is. They might be considering themselves lucky to avoid prison, like Anthony Levandowski. 50 years ago doing what he did was normal; it was how Silicon Valley got built. Since then the laws have changed.


Curious if you could supply any specific examples of that being normal in old SV? Of people taking a massive cache of proprietary work, including original research done by colleagues?

Genuine question.


Not precisely what you asked for but relevant to this topic of a game engine: A bunch of former NCSoft developers got sued (and lost) for heading off to their new game studio BlueHole with stolen Lineage 3 code and design material. This resulted in jail time.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/tera-developers-guilty-of-stea...


Basically the entire collection of papers of the Charles Babbage Institute consists of boxes of stuff people took home with them, including original research done by colleagues.

Also, as someone pointed out, Fairchild. And as they mysteriously failed to point out, Intel spawned from Fairchild the same way.


Fairchild semiconductor is one example.


At best the "traitorous eight" took with them the direction of research and work they wanted, which wasn't supported by Schockley - and Schockley did try to lockdown as much of the IP he could, taking patents out even if they were dubiously assigned to company.


Yes, my claim wasn't that investors approved of their employees leaving to compete with them; my claim was that, since then, the laws had changed in ways that gave them more power to prevent it, for example by vastly expanding the scope of trade-secret law. Levandowski wasn't accused of infringing any patents.

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.


Just ran across https://www.righto.com/2020/10/how-bootstrap-load-made-histo...:

> 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.


They also nuked the forums, discord, every other social.


Hopefully this will be a lesson that proprietary licenses subject you to rug pulls with no recourse, which FOSS licenses protect you from. Had Machinery been FOSS, then you could at least still keep using the last version of the engine that they did release, and even fork it to continue development yourself.


the funniest thing is that they were going on and on about how they would love to make the engine open-source so it could still be developed in the case they stopped working on it


> 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

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.


Patent / Copyright issues would fit this.


> Patent

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)


> ...you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries.

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:

  - https://github.com/stride3d/stride
  - https://github.com/godotengine/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).


Godot is just older and more established, but Stride has a better render engine, software architecture and is a pure .NET project. So the engine and the scripting use the same technology. Godot has a C++ core and only "interprets" the scripting languages, which is conceptually quite different.

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.


I want to like Stride, but the documentation is so sparse I had a hell of a time getting anything working.

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.


Yes, you can theoretically do code-only projects on mac and linux, but win is definitely the most comfortable dev platform for Stride.

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...


As far as I can tell, as long as you pay for a unity asset and you don't just resell it by itself, you can use it in whatever way you want.

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#.


Yes, your are right... Most libraries that work for unity should also work for Stride, with some modifications.

What's the name of the networking library you mentioned? I'm interested in that myself...


I was actually thinking about this, which is an MIT license library.

https://github.com/proyecto26/RestClient

I strongly suspect this could be ported over to work in stride.


Nice one, thanks!


Stride looks good, but am I right in thinking that unlike Godot, it doesn't support macOS or Linux as a deployment target?


Stride can deploy games to win, macOS, linux, iOS and android.


If that's the case then the website could really do with an update as that's the first thing any dev, studio or publisher looks at in 2022. "Can we reach our target demographic?"


Yes, it is only community driven, there is no fulltime dev working on it. But I've seen someone working on a website refresh.

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


It's not that it's too slow for me, it's that it isn't my place to do it, despite being a FOSS enthusiast. I don't use the project, have never tried it, and am currently heavily entrenched in Godot and Unreal. Looks very interesting, but switching mid-development won't happen. Furthermore, if it is apparently "dying", it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, sadly.

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.


My contributions to Stride are on the graphics and rendering side of things.

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.


Web design and content writing are two quite different things, and the two should be kept apart for optimum results, as has been the case for, well, twenty-plus years at this point with CMS et al, even headless ones.

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.


There are probably many reasons why this engine was not adopted by devs. For me, the last time I tried, the performance was terrible even in the most trivial test map. I dropped it instantly.


"... 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."

"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.


I'm sorry, is this in any way legal? Did they just tell people to delete their games? Like... I'm pretty sure this kind of rug pull would destroy any company that relies on this engine. 14 days for a full re-write is insane.


Actually, I might know someone who can answer this. Or, at least they'll have to figure it out. I didn't realize this was that platform. A friend started a company last year to build a game based on this, and I'm pretty sure they already released said game.


They're gonna reach out and see how far this extends. According to 3.B, the game would be a "derivative work", and as such shouldn't be subject to this requirement. They've already started working on replacing it with Godot.


I doubt it's legal and it will certainly destroy companies. And what makes it worse, is that my best guess is that they are going to capitalize on this move. Maybe repackage it as some other high priced software. Either way, the whole company should be ashamed.

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.


Godot is MIT licensed, and as such this 100% can't happen. Absolute worst case is they limit or remove future versions, but MIT basically means "mention that this was MIT licensed." Do that, and they can't stop you from doing anything with it. Repackage and resell it? sure. Wrap it in your own commercial project? Go for it. You just can't stop someone else from using the source code as originally released.


Godot is MIT-licensed so no, they can't arbitrarily revoke your license and force you to stop developing your game.

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.


> Godot is MIT-licensed so no, they can't arbitrarily revoke your license and force you to stop developing your game.

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.


Changing the license would be very difficult, AIUI they would need to convince everyone who had already contributed to consent to the change in licensing.


Since Godot is MIT-licensed (which only requires a copyright notice and a note that says 'this is using code from a thing under the MIT license') changing the license would be trivial.

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.


> 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.

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.


I really would not think above switching to unity considering in the past few months they have layed off hundreds of employees, the CEO called game developers "fucking idiots", and they merged with a malware distributor


I'm guessing copyright or patent issues. That would explain their "you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries."


How do these developers ever expect to be taken seriously again? This is a reputation killer; no one should ever trust them.


Probably sold the tech to a buyer who is trying to maximize the value of their purchase, which they think they can achieve by screwing everyone currently using the engine as much as possible and doing something else with it instead. Who knows, maybe its new purpose is to be placed into an incinerator.


I'd be interested in the backstory to this. (Like everyone else I guess)

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.


For a moment I thought this was my fault because I had just asked for a free academic license, and somehow that would be the final straw :(

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.


You dodged a bullet. Me too. I just started my 3D journey, dabbling with Godot, Three.js and Unity. If I had stumbled upon Machinery and decided to use, I would have been annoyed now.


Well, I can't wait for Godot 4 + C# now.

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.


The thing about Godot is that you are always… waiting for Godot.


Did they get acquired by some big company? Their blogposts always felt like they want to be acqui-hired.


This is sad, I've been following their work for some time and I think they were onto something, many good design ideas, very clean albeit a bit verbose sometimes.

I'd like to know what is the underlying issue? Disagreement between founders? Acquisition? Legal problem? Not enough funding? Not enough customers?


So everyone's games using it will need to be taken down too? That is so strange.


Section 3.B of the EULA says no, but also that can be changed at any time, so possibly. I have a friend who released a game using Machine earlier this year, and they're scrambling right now to get a lawyer to look at this. Current opinion is that the 14 day limit means they can't work on it anymore, but current game binaries are free to remain online. They're already working to replace the engine, as they have no faith that 3.B won't be expunged as well.


Don't you have to agree to new EULA terms? Of course a company is free to update a EULA, but it's an agreement between two parties not a one sided mandate.


Anyone got a mirror of a release zip (such as https://ourmachinery.com/releases/2022.5/the-machinery-2022.... ) ?


Probably not the way they hoped to reach HN front page...

Having followed the project from the beginning, the blog, the podcast: I hope they (the people) are ok.


For those interested in the blog posts and other technical information about the engine they shared with the public, check out:

https://books.ourmachinery.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/20220529231010/https://ourmachine...

https://github.com/OurMachinery/themachinery-books


https://github.com/OurMachinery/themachinery-books is 404

Probably deleted


It cached in web archive too

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...


IANAL but that doesn't sound like it would be enforceable at all. Consider that even in the case of something like a (physical) product recall, it would not be legal for them to break into your house to take them back.


Holy shit, what madness is this.

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 only makes sense if they got into legal problems with a powerful entity which would have raised issues with software patents or copyright on the Our Machinery engine.

Presumably also with some sort of NDA attached to it?


what happened and what direction is going to take the project from now on? You know, the web page has barely any links at all from a product which seems it was good, if it ever was something else than a landing page.

P.D. add "Tell HN:" to the title or a link to the web page


Wtf is/was "the machinery"?


Well it used to be a game engine. It was on people's radar because the devs had previous success with a different game engine and they wrote fairly technical dev blogs about the process.


GamesFromScratch has a nice intro that's still up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_8utTBfE-U


And the same content creator on this engine today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUJyms9WstQ


Can we see a screenshot or some other confirmation that this happened?

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.


Termination email: https://host.zlsadesign.com/rkHpL6ET5.png

Email about the EULA change that added the termination clause two days ago: https://host.zlsadesign.com/SkfpU6ETq.png


Thank you!

This is definitely unacceptable. Are you considering legal action?


Agreed, this is a crazy outcome. I don't actually use the engine; I evaluated it a while ago for hobby projects but never went beyond that. So this doesn't directly affect me.


Aside from second hand copies of the email, you can see that nearly all links to ourmachinery.com now 404.

They deleted everything besides the frontpage and EULA page, a shame since their blog was a good resource.


Was this a hack?


[flagged]


Any additional info to back this up? What specific issues?




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