Some of you may already be familiar with OpenBlox, an open source project which implements a similar API to that of ROBLOX, while not offering any hosting features, or anything that makes ROBLOX the website-based game that it is.
After some discussion, I have come to the conclusion that a separated approach will be best. The core of the OpenBlox engine will be a library, which is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), which allows proprietary software to use the core of the engine if one would wish to do so. I have chosen this option, because I know there are users who wish to create a game, without releasing the source, and release the game binary to DRM services, like Steam. While I would urge you to consider making games open source, I understand that certain people believe that you cannot make money with an open source project and, misguided as that may be, I respect your decisions.
The reference implementation of both the OpenBlox client and server will be under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and can not be included in proprietary software, in source or binary distribution. I will provide an extremely simple client, in the public domain, for proprietary games using this engine. OpenBlox Studio will be under the same license, as both the client and server, and official plugins will be under the GPL as well.
Now that we’ve gone over licensing, let’s get to the fun part. OpenBlox will be using OGRE for rendering, with only my custom SDL2GLPlugin for every platform supported, including Android. OpenAL will be used to provide sound on desktop, and all platforms supporting OpenAL, but FMOD Studio Low Level Programmer API will be used on Android, unless I can find a way to make use of OpenAL on that platform as well. We plan to use Bullet for physics, limited as that physics simulation engine may be.
Studio will be using a similar implementation to what was used before, but I plan to use the runtime reflection API, that I am currently designing, to register classes with Studio and for simple in-app documentation. OpenBlox Studio will include tools that allow developers to compile a filesystem based project into an OpenBlox binary game file. With current plans, the filesystem based project should be compatible with most version control systems, but will only be tested with Git.
If any of you would like to contact me privately, you can always reach me either by email (johnmh@openmailbox.org) or simply by joining the #OpenBlox channel over on Freenode.