Fenris Creations Opens Carbon Engine to the World - now open source

Fenris Creations (the old CCP) has released its Carbon game engine to open source.

The Carbon Engine code can be found on github.

Seems it was released at the start of July - i missed that.

What is not included

Game‑specific code such as EVE’s economy, gameplay logic, and proprietary licensed components is not part of the open‑source release.

Why release it?

A quote from Ben Hunter of Fenris to gamesindustry.biz:

Seems nothing like third party supporters pitching in to help with the code.

"Members of the community have already been submitting pull requests (PRs) – proposed changes to a codebase – for security fixes, and there's been chatter about someone making a web app to watch Eve Online content."

"Fenris has a long history of building communities and engaging with them. If you look back to the early days of Eve Online, when we exposed our application programming interface (API), that was the start of our effort to engage with the community and let them build something with it."

and then the point that there is nothing really of commercial value in it now:

"We arrived at this point two and a half to three years ago, where we decided there's nothing really special about our sauce in terms of the actual code. We, and the community, would be better served by actually getting it out there, having more eyes on it, so that we can actually learn and grow from that, and people can do crazy things with it, which we're very excited to see."

Really so simple?

Perhaps not so simple:

It is old and complex, with architecture dating back to the early 2000s

Not plug‑and‑play like Unity or Unreal

Missing documentation in places

Built for Fenris / CCP’s specific workflows, meaning newcomers may struggle to adapt it for new projects.

What could this mean?

In part this is "interesting" but take this one step further and we could be heading down the road of allowing third party apps to be created for Eve Online.

Very much like you see on World of Warcraft and other games where those apps make the whole gameplay hugely enjoyable.

Fenris somewhat alludes to that in their press release:

"For Fenris Creations, fully open-sourcing Carbon is the next step in a long history of collaboration with players and developers. EVE Online’s community has built around the game for decades through third-party tools, public APIs, economic analysis, corporation infrastructure, alliance logistics, and player-created services. Opening Carbon brings that philosophy closer to the foundation layer, giving developers, researchers, players, and builders access to technology they can use, contribute to, and build upon."

But, lets see what sort of ideas / products this spawns.

If picked up by interested developers who have the time and capability to get their heads around 20 year hold code then this could really go somewhere.