The Mirror, a game engine first announced the end of 2022 have just made a big announcement at GDC 2024. They are going entirely open source, releasing both their networking backend and the custom fork of Godot Engine they use as a front end, under the MIT open source license. The Mirror aim to be an approachable development platform for games in the same vein as Roblox and UEFN, but entirely built on open source software.
Details of the open sourcing of The Mirror:
Gaming is the frontier – not just of content, but the internet itself. The move to 3D takes on many terms: Gaming, spatial computing, 3D creation engines, metaverse, VR/AR/MR, digital experiences, immersive worlds, and more. Browser apps are largely stuck in 2D, yet the power of 3D is controlled by the few.
Problem 1: Epic Games/UEFN, Roblox, Unity, Apple, Meta/Facebook, et al. want to keep you in their walled-garden ecosystem. You can’t fully own your creations. Rather, you’re at the whim of Unity changing their pricing model and pulling the rug out from under you. It’s time to democratize the next step of the internet.
Freedom to own means you control the destiny of your creations via true ownership of everything – including the engine.
Problem 2: Game development has largely been separated from web development due to the sheer complexity of both domains. This is a key part of why all-in-one platforms like Roblox and UEFN/Fortnite have gained massive traction.
With these two problems, there hasn’t been an easy way to develop a full-stack 3D multiplayer game with true ownership.
This gets solved today. We’re fusing key pieces together to create an open-source alternative to Roblox and UEFN with real-time collaboration.
How? Godot is the greatest thing to happen to game development since sliced bread, the game engine that allows for true ownership. We’ve added numerous out-of-the-box features, such as real-time collaboration, no-code visual scripting, medium-code in-world GDScript, runtime asset streaming, netsync, asset pipelines, marketplace, networked Jolt physics, out-of-the-box player controllers for first-person, third-person, and VR, Ready Player Me characters, damage handlers, pubsub variable updates, persistent data storage, free 3D models, and more.
What’s missing from game development: A web server that provides out-of-the-box everything and connects fluidly to the engine.
mirror-web-serverprovides you with auth, asset management, MongoDB storage, minimal migration headaches, schemas via Mongoose, Redis pubsub real-time updates, websocket and HTTP requests, OpenAPI docs via Swagger, and more. It’s super modular with being built on the cutting-edge NestJS framework with Typescript – arguably the best thing to happen to NodeJS since Express.We tackle the technical complexity problem even further by focusing on no-code-first. You can create games in The Mirror even if you’ve never written a line of code before. As you get better, you can begin writing GDScript in real-time in-world. If you’re an expert, our long-term vision is bidirectionality with Godot: you can start in The Mirror and end in Godot, or start in Godot and end in The Mirror.
Even better: All of this happens in real-time. Similar to the movie Inception, you can create your world in real-time with friends, colleagues, and players.
We’re excited to give our full-stack platform to the world with the permissive MIT license. We owe a big thank you to the Godot engine’s many contributors and co-founders, Juan Linietsky and Ariel Manzur (advisor), as well as the founder of NestJS, Kamil Mysliwiec.
Key Links
You can learn more about the Godot powered Mirror game engine and it’s open sourcing in the video below.