Yes, seriously everyone should watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/@AngeTheGreat

Other engine simulators work by approximating the engine.

Ange's engine simulator works by approximating physics of air fluid dynamics through a combustion chamber and exhaust, sound propagation, etc and then putting an engine into that simulation.

It's incredible how productive and precise he is.

Absolutely insane.

Also, I love that it was open sourced. Although it sounds like from the GitHub page summary that there was some shenanigans involving a "certain very high profile game studio" that I'd love to hear more tea about.

He published it as open-source for like 5 seconds before taking the repository down in order to charge for it on Steam! I'm a little weirded out by that pattern of open-sourcing it and then just changing his mind.

I think what happened was that it became his full time job, and he started to need to be able to make money from it. At least, that's what I remember; I haven't seen much about it as of late.

I'm still just not really comfortable with the ethics of withdrawing source code that you previously published. There are tons and tons of things he could've simply kept to himself on top of his first release, but he chose to take back the entire release instead.

Like, he seemingly fully intended it for the public because it's cool and interesting and he wanted to show how it worked, but then he simply changed his mind and completely removed all of it? Makes me doubt he has the public interest in mind at all, because he could've still developed the Steam version and kept that version closed source, but he just decided to take back all his goodwill instead

> Makes me doubt he has the public interest in mind at all

But why?

He's doing what he loves. He's able to support himself doing that. What he chooses to do with the internal product of his labors is his choice. Committing to open source software is a big lift for a lot of people. Maybe he didn't want that.

Once again, I have issue only with his taking it back after already open-sourcing it. It felt disingenuous. That's all. I would have no issue with simply never open-sourcing, but he open-sourced it and then took it back.

He could've never open-sourced it in the first place. He could've archived it and kept the rest of the development private. He could've done anything other than what he did. It's one thing to take back something that you never intended to release, but he fully intended to release it and even made a video about how it's fully open and available, but then he just went actually nevermind.

It's just so, infuriating that he would take it away like this after he told everyone he was giving it out. To me, that act of taking it away takes precedence over whatever I'd think if he'd kept it closed all along.

Edit: I just looked it up and apparently he did keep an archive online. I swear he'd taken it down before and there was a whole thing about this, but maybe he put it back up later? It's here: https://github.com/ange-yaghi/engine-sim

So you got angry over your own feelings of entitlement?

The moment you give away something for free people value it at $0 and expect you to support it for free indefinitely. They get angry immediately if you decide to charge money for it, as if it was some incredibly smart and prudent decision to build your project/business on an external dependency you made zero effort in keeping alive.

No wonder then that he decided to quit the open sourcing but keeps working on it for money.

I still don't get how people see these 100% voluntary projects, which by definition are always a donation of free labor, and then get angry when the donations stop. All software projects have life spans, the difference is that anyone can go and keep maintaining an open source project to extend the lifespan

While I am personally guilty of free loading on a lot of open source projects and never giving anything back while profiting myself, I was never under the illusion that I am owed an endless stream of free code and maintenance. If the underlying project is discontinued it is on me to either keep maintaining it or switching away from it. This is true even in banal situations like with software that is still being maintained and you're merely sticking with a fork of an older version.

I was upset when I heard it'd been taken DOWN after it already went up. Not based on literally any expectation of any future support or literally anything. Literally at that point it had already been published and then reportedly unpublished. It's back up now and learning of that resolved my frustration, but man you are making a lot of incorrect assumptions about me, even after I clarified myself multiple times on this exact point.

I have a podcast interview with Ange where we talk a bit about the first time this blew up on HN

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=bi6bLSCnjcY&si=r4atSKfsBEQ...