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Work in progress. These docs describe Spawnite at launch, and some parts are still being built.

License

The engine, the tools and the development room are free to use under the Spawnite License 1.0, whose full text is at spawnite.com/license/1.0. Every @spawnite package on npm carries the same text in its LICENSE.md, and "license": "SEE LICENSE IN LICENSE.md" in its package.json. This page summarises the terms in plain words. It does not replace them: where the two differ, the license text decides.

  • You accept the terms when you build, test or publish a game with the engine, or when you accept them where Spawnite’s tools or website show them. Installing a package alone does not.
  • Your game’s code, art, sounds and story are yours, and so is what you write yourself inside a plugin you copied. So is your share of what the game earns.
  • Build, run and test your games and their tools as much as you like, on your own machines and through the services and agents that work for you, including local multiplayer with the development room.
  • Games that use the engine are published and played through Spawnite. To publish one anywhere else, ask at dev@spawnite.com. Each request is decided case by case, and a yes comes as a written license that says what it covers.
  • Testers you choose one by one may play a game before it is published. A link anyone can open makes the game public, an unlisted game’s keyed link included, and that is allowed because the game is public through Spawnite.
  • When the engine ships a plugin as readable source, in the package’s readable folder, you may read it, copy it into your game and change it. A copied plugin keeps its Spawnite License header and stays under these terms, and the lines you write in it yourself are yours.
  • Everything else in the engine ships closed: its compiled code, its type declarations and its documentation. Closed names what the license lets you do with a file, not whether you can read it. You and your agent may read it, format it, step through it and patch your installed copy to build and fix your games, but not rebuild it in source or use it to build, train or test anything that competes with the engine or with Spawnite.
  • Your game’s source may be public, such as on GitHub, as long as it holds no closed part of the engine or the tools, such as their compiled code or a copy of their type declarations, and every copied plugin keeps its header.
  • Don’t repackage the engine or the development room, run them as a hosting service, serve a published game’s players from the development room, or build a rival engine or platform. A rival is a game engine that stands in for Spawnite’s, or a service that publishes or hosts other creators’ games. A game does not compete because players choose it over another game, and a plugin or a tool that works only with the engine does not compete either.
  • Templates and kits carry a license per file. Most are MIT-0, which asks for nothing, not even credit. A file that names the Spawnite License stays under it.
  • Suppose that for 90 days in a row Spawnite accepts no new games or versions from creators, or makes no other creator’s game available to play, or that it announces it will stop either for good. Then you may publish your own games elsewhere and run their room server, on every version released before then. No later version of the license can take this away, and a ban on one creator does not open it. If you leave, or if Spawnite stops gives the exact triggers.

Each package also ships a THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES file beside its built files. It lists the code from other projects that the package bundles, such as three.js, React, koota and Rapier, with each project’s own license, which governs that code.