As a long-time Stardew Valley fan, I never thought I’d find a game that could capture my heart quite the same way. Fields of Mistria has done just that. I’m honestly blown away by how good this game is
note: just a random fan, have nothing to do with this game at all. It kinda saddens me that it hasn’t gotten as much attention though, there are so many mediocre games with soooo many reviews… this game is legit insane. it’s gorgeous!!
Sure, depends on the engine, but very often there is a “scripting” part, be it quests, dialog, etc. and the where those scripting functions/library and language is implemented. The first are part of content, while the latter is part of the engine.
Also games have data tables, where the individual value for each record are part of content and the implementation of what each attribute does is implemented in the engine or some specific scripting.
Engines tent to have a clear split, because different kind of developers have different processes, and engines are often reused for multiple games.
IMO, that means that the whole game would be sources available (for the end user), while the central engine is open source.
This is just somewhat of a wishful thinking, not a requirement or whatever.
And sure, game devs releasing an engine/game as open source after they are done with it, would be great too. But I like to dream big ;)
Just open sourcing the actual engine wouldn’t do much. At best, you’d be able to make it work on newer hardware if problems arise, or port it to other OSs. Great stuff, but not enough when it comes to improving the game, preserving multiplayer, and so on.
There’s a great amount of scaffolding on top of the base engine that any moderately sized game implements, be it through scripting or native code. That’s what I meant by the line between the engine and the game being blurry. If you want to make meaningful changes to the game, you need access to that framework portion, but releasing it would allow for easy reverse engineering of everything else. It’s a difficult balance to achieve.