Fenris Creations (formerly CCP Games) has open-sourced Carbon, the 23-year-old game engine powering Eve Online, releasing it on GitHub under the MIT License. Senior development director Ben Hunter explains the motivations: building community trust, enabling third-party contributions, and benefiting from more eyes on the code for security. The engine is available in full across multiple modules with permissive licensing, allowing anyone to build their own MMO or fork the project for free. Fenris consulted Godot on governance models and is moving toward a plug-in architecture. Contribution guidelines require disclosure of LLM-assisted code, which will be subject to additional scrutiny. The team is also developing an internal LLM tools gateway for game teams, planned for future open-source release. Hunter envisions a large Eve-centric community building apps and experiences around the engine within five years.
