After some additional investigation, we decided to just license it under MIT, but contributors must sign a CLA. See our FAQ.
Yes. See this comment. They thought that we couldn’t make modding secure enough. There was some more discussion after that and the last comment says something about it being possible now somehow, but I haven’t looked into it.
Forking an entire engine isn’t really an option for us because it would mean that we have to maintain that fork. We have to make sure to keep it up-to-date and always make sure that we keep our changes working with their changes, all while writing more C++, which we are trying to avoid.
I don’t think that there is really any way that makes sense to do that. They are both different engines trying to accomplish things in a totally different manner with completely different language and technology. Amethyst is very much in line with the goals that we are wanting to pursue for our engine; even if it needs some more work, we are pretty much set on it right now.
By “parallelize” I mean executing code on multiple CPU cores at the same time, aka., multi-threading. Amethyst is designed to take full advantage of all of the CPU cores that you have on the computer, where other engines may only use one core and be missing out on the processing potential the the computer could be using to run the game. The ECS design of Amethyst makes it extraordinarily easy to multi-thread game logic, something that can present quite a challenge under different circumstances.
From the Amethyst Docs:
Most of us have worked with quite a few game engines over the years, namely Unity, Unreal Engine, JMonkeyEngine and many more. While they all are pretty solid solutions if you want to build a quality game, each have their own pros and cons that you have to weigh before using them, especially in regards to performance and scalability.
We think that basing the Amethyst engine on good and modern principles will allow us to make an open source game engine that can actually be more performant than those engines. Those principles are: Modularity, Parallelism, Data-oriented/Data-driven.
Not really. We have no idea how long it will take, especially because we haven’t done any work yet to give us a reference for how long different kinds of development will take.
Thankfully we don’t have to build the entire engine ourselves, because we are building on the Amethyst project, so we will essentially get a bunch of free help from them.
Awesome.
You also might want to check out our new vision and FAQ pages to get more of an idea of what we are working towards.