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Unity patents ECS

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Re: Unity patents ECS

#141

Post by vmception »

btilly wrote: post #86
hackthefender wrote: post #18

Patent lawyer here. There is a lot of dubious stuff already in this thread, so be careful with legal opinions from people on the internet. Some relevant claim language is below. Of course a lot of this stuff has been known for a while, but you have to have everything together--or an evidenced argument that combining things in this way would have been obvious--before you can conclude anything about the validity of the…

Not a patent lawyer here. But I'm unfortunate enough to have several patents to my name, owned by past employers. My impression of everyone that I have ever heard from, or dealt with, involved with patents is that you all are so firmly in regulatory capture that your heads are captured up your collective asses, and the tech industry is being hampered by the resulting legal quagmires. In a sane world, the entire descr…

Disagree with gone rogue except for some parts of East Texas

Re: Unity patents ECS

#142

Post by vlmutolo »

timmytokyo wrote: post #55

Ironically, Unity's ECS development effort has gone radio-silent in the last few months. Their latest versions of the Unity Editor (2021.1+) are no longer compatible with ECS, and Unity's forum reps have not responded to the many game devs left in limbo and begging for info or an update. Something with ECS development is clearly going haywire, and the silence from the Unity people is troubling.

It could be that they were anticipating filing this patent and they didn't want to publicly disclose the "new" methods they were working on. My understanding is that public disclosure prevents you from being able to patent something. (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice).

Re: Unity patents ECS

#143

Post by durbleflorp »

gentleman11 wrote: post #66
mabbo wrote: post #41

Setting aside whether or not this patent is silly or abstract or obvious or anything else, I have one important question: what does Unity plan to do with this? Most big tech companies have a constant stream of patent applications, many of which are granted. But they rarely sue over 99% of them. Sure, Amazon had one-click for however many years and they cared about it. But the other tens of thousands of patents Amazon…

Last year unity retroactively changed the license on assets from its asset store. Since then, you can no longer let freelancers or contractors use your assets while they do work for you, you end up having to buy them each a copy of everything in practice unless their work is really decoupled from the project. It’s a real killer for indies who are trying to collaborate who have not formed a company yet. This seems to…

Godot isn't quite as robust or mature as Unity yet, but it is open source and it has had the benefit of learning from Unity's mistakes when designing its own workflows.

I think most Unity developers find the switch incredibly easy because most of the principles and many of the idioms are the same (and Godot is also more intuitive and has better documentation imo).

Godot 4 looks like it should remove most of the last few pain points too.

I'd say Godot is the superior prototyping/game jam tool, the superior 2d game engine, superior for building UI, and you don't have to deal with any licensing bullshit. It's also like 300 mb as a base install compared to Unity's 7 gb clusterfuck of spandrels.

I'd say the only situation where I'd recommend Unity over Godot is if you already have a ton of Unity experience and want to build something quickly without learning new stuff, or if there is something critical in the asset store you can't find in Godot's (definitely less content and tutorials because of the smaller userbase)

Re: Unity patents ECS

#144

Post by kevingadd »

vlmutolo wrote: post #142
timmytokyo wrote: post #55

Ironically, Unity's ECS development effort has gone radio-silent in the last few months. Their latest versions of the Unity Editor (2021.1+) are no longer compatible with ECS, and Unity's forum reps have not responded to the many game devs left in limbo and begging for info or an update. Something with ECS development is clearly going haywire, and the silence from the Unity people is troubling.

It could be that they were anticipating filing this patent and they didn't want to publicly disclose the "new" methods they were working on. My understanding is that public disclosure prevents you from being able to patent something. (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice).

All sorts of products ship with 'patent pending' written on them. "Trade secret" doesn't mean that you lose it if someone finds out about it

Re: Unity patents ECS

#145

Post by timmytokyo »

vlmutolo wrote: post #142
timmytokyo wrote: post #55

Ironically, Unity's ECS development effort has gone radio-silent in the last few months. Their latest versions of the Unity Editor (2021.1+) are no longer compatible with ECS, and Unity's forum reps have not responded to the many game devs left in limbo and begging for info or an update. Something with ECS development is clearly going haywire, and the silence from the Unity people is troubling.

It could be that they were anticipating filing this patent and they didn't want to publicly disclose the "new" methods they were working on. My understanding is that public disclosure prevents you from being able to patent something. (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice).

Unity's ECS source code -- including the archetype-based entity-component model described in the patent -- has been completely public for several years now, so I don't think that's it.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#146

Post by cosmotic »

not2b wrote: post #108
cosmotic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a patent lawyer, can you explain what that claim means? Why does it seem intentionally confusing?

There is a strange rule that each claim in a patent must be one sentence. So they construct these massive run-on sentences.

It's not just the run-on, it's also the pointlessly verbose descriptions using words that aren't used in the industry nor common English

Re: Unity patents ECS

#147

Post by randmeerkat »

hackthefender wrote: post #18

Patent lawyer here. There is a lot of dubious stuff already in this thread, so be careful with legal opinions from people on the internet. Some relevant claim language is below. Of course a lot of this stuff has been known for a while, but you have to have everything together--or an evidenced argument that combining things in this way would have been obvious--before you can conclude anything about the validity of the…

What motivated you to become a patent lawyer? Do you like it? What was the process like?

Re: Unity patents ECS

#148

Post by robertlagrant »

BudaDude wrote: post #139
zubspace wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what ECS is and why it's needed for some games. But for a large group of game developers that transition was simply too overwhelming I think. Not just the nomenclature: ECS, DOTS, Burst Compiler, SRP/HDRP/LWRP/URP.... It's an endless list of confusing terms... But moreover those concepts are not so easy to grasp and to use in code by just looking at a few examples. After doing lots of small 'experiments' in Un…

The only problem with Godot is the 3D engine is nowhere near as good as Unity or Unreal . Godot 4 is a lot closer but given Godot’s history , it will take years to arrive . With all of this said , I am rooting for Godot . Long term , an open source game engine will be better .

Is Lumberyard decent as an open source 3D engine? Or did they tie it to AWS in some way?

Re: Unity patents ECS

#149

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

btilly wrote: post #86
hackthefender wrote: post #18

Patent lawyer here. There is a lot of dubious stuff already in this thread, so be careful with legal opinions from people on the internet. Some relevant claim language is below. Of course a lot of this stuff has been known for a while, but you have to have everything together--or an evidenced argument that combining things in this way would have been obvious--before you can conclude anything about the validity of the…

Not a patent lawyer here. But I'm unfortunate enough to have several patents to my name, owned by past employers. My impression of everyone that I have ever heard from, or dealt with, involved with patents is that you all are so firmly in regulatory capture that your heads are captured up your collective asses, and the tech industry is being hampered by the resulting legal quagmires. In a sane world, the entire descr…

It's unfortunate that any criticism of the patent ecosystem gets immediately shot down by 'You are not a lawyer', The impact of the flawed patent system affects everyone and so anyone can point it out.

I strongly believe that actual innovators are now left to 'innovate' within the boundaries set by the mega corporations with the help of their patent-pipeline and the patent trolls with the help of flawed legal systems.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#150

Post by anothernewdude »

hackthefender wrote: post #18

Patent lawyer here. There is a lot of dubious stuff already in this thread, so be careful with legal opinions from people on the internet. Some relevant claim language is below. Of course a lot of this stuff has been known for a while, but you have to have everything together--or an evidenced argument that combining things in this way would have been obvious--before you can conclude anything about the validity of the…

Patents no longer fulfill the reason they were created, and exist only to fill the pockets of big businesses and the lawyers they employ.

Patents do nothing to advance science or technology, and everything to prevent new invention.

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