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The Death of Unity

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Re: The Death of Unity

#111

Post by marcosdumay »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #73
sydbarrett74 wrote: post #41

IPO's are usually the beginning of the end as far as a company being responsive to its customers and producing quality. From the time an IPO is made, the company is responsive only to its shareholders and that's it. Thanks, Bork and Friedman!

A thought occurred to me a few weeks ago... it was another Hacker News thread, forget which, but someone had mentioned the specific case law which cemented this fact. Maybe it was Ford himself? The details escape me, but afterwards, companies were forced to prioritize shareholders above all else. But legislators aren't exactly forbidden from creating new types of companies. As ignorant as I am of most things business…

> companies were forced to prioritize shareholders above all else

Publicly traded companies have to state what they prioritize. It's as simple as that. If they don't, they must prioritize profit, but not short-term profit.

That rule is usually blown out of proportion, it just can not explain the modern companies behavior.

(But yeah, they must prioritize shareholders. That means that the shareholders are the ones that decide that stated priority, into whatever they want.)

Re: The Death of Unity

#112

Post by kevingadd »

outworlder wrote: post #100
kevingadd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minecraft's engine wasn't remotely revolutionary, it was basically a 1:1 riff on an XNA game called Infiniminer that predated it. And its engine wasn't especially good. Minecraft's success is almost entirely due to its accessibility and the fundamental strength of its design - both things that are possible in any game engine. These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the origina…

I am not sure I would even call Minecraft as having a "game engine". An engine is usually generalized so it can be extracted and used for many games. > And its engine wasn't especially good. It was good enough. It's non trivial to do, despite appearances. > These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine. But is the B…

We would need to know how many Minecraft installs are on mobile and console, where Java isn't an option. I would expect it's a large % of the overall userbase, but I don't have access to the numbers. Switch and Android both open Minecraft up to a huge number of people who either don't have a PC or can't install Minecraft on it.

Agreed that mods are a big part of the experience and would only really have flourished using technologies like Java (what Notch chose), C# or JavaScript, not C++.

Re: The Death of Unity

#113

Post by dgb23 »

qayxc wrote: post #18
ghostzilla wrote: post #7

About time. What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine.

There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine. Every minute spent on re-inventing the wheel for the umpteenth time is time lost on actually writing and polishing the actual game. Tools like Unity were a godsent for small teams and solo devs who just wanted to write and publish games. While libraries like SDL can lighten the burden somewhat, they are…

You can appreciate the utility that unity provides without making false claims in the first paragraph.

There are ofc many successful games that were not built on top of a third party engine.

Including one of HN’s darlings Factorio for example.

Re: The Death of Unity

#114

Post by pjmlp »

kkukshtel wrote: post #22
pjmlp wrote: post #3

The biggest issue, unfortunely is that all the other engines that offer C# support as the main language, lack the AOT compilation toolchain (including game consoles), the graphical tooling including debugging and profilers, asset store with people living from it, and above all, being fully endorsed by all major game platform owners and VR/AR hardware. So anyone that wants to replace Unity, despite their missteps, has…

The .NET ecosystem has recently added "NativeAOT" compilation as a first class feature, and Unity's gall-bladder relationship to Mono (instead of migrating to Dotnet Core, they continue to work off their own Mono fork) has opened up a space where anyone programming C# now has the once-hard-to-reach AOT holy grail for consoles now just behind an XML flag. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

Native AOT is still WIP, behind .NET Native, and someone has to implement the consoles backend, and runtime support.

Re: The Death of Unity

#115

Post by outworlder »

qayxc wrote: post #18
ghostzilla wrote: post #7

About time. What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine.

There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine. Every minute spent on re-inventing the wheel for the umpteenth time is time lost on actually writing and polishing the actual game. Tools like Unity were a godsent for small teams and solo devs who just wanted to write and publish games. While libraries like SDL can lighten the burden somewhat, they are…

> There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine.

Probably a true statement in a way that's difficult to verify. Nobody is keeping track of never released games, specially those that didn't really get started because so much work went on the 'engine'.

That said, there are some examples. Like Minecraft and Factorio. An existing engine might not have benefited those titles as much as they would a standard FPS game. They could be probably made using an existing engine, but the benefits might not be that apparent if you have to fight the engine and twist it to do what you want.

Going to larger studios, Elite: Dangerous has its own engine too - could they have used, say, Unreal? Probably, but then they would not be able to use many features, like the Unreal's terrain system, for their planetary landings and such(not without ugly hacks - or making it work like Starfield) and would likely have to code their own. If you are doing that, might as well skip the whole thing.

I'll still agree that in 95% of the cases there's an existing engine that will handle most of a game's use-cases. If one has access to the source code, this figure probably expands significantly.

Re: The Death of Unity

#116

Post by bluescrn »

dgb23 wrote: post #107
tschellenbach wrote: post #80

Tricky, company is losing money it seems. -192M last quarter according to google.

With such an incredibly popular product and rich ecosystem? I don’t understand…

They went on a company-buying spree over the last few years

Growth of Unity but of questionable benefit to the core product.

Re: The Death of Unity

#117

Post by pjmlp »

kevingadd wrote: post #50
pjmlp wrote: post #3

The biggest issue, unfortunely is that all the other engines that offer C# support as the main language, lack the AOT compilation toolchain (including game consoles), the graphical tooling including debugging and profilers, asset store with people living from it, and above all, being fully endorsed by all major game platform owners and VR/AR hardware. So anyone that wants to replace Unity, despite their missteps, has…

C# has had multiple non-Unity AOT solutions [1] for a while. I worked on multiple shipped C# games for the PS4 and PS Vita that didn't use Unity. 1: BRUTE, Mono AOT, and CoreCLR NativeAOT among others

Yeah, with various levels of tooling experience I would bet.

Re: The Death of Unity

#118

Post by pjmlp »

__loam wrote: post #90
sydbarrett74 wrote: post #41

IPO's are usually the beginning of the end as far as a company being responsive to its customers and producing quality. From the time an IPO is made, the company is responsive only to its shareholders and that's it. Thanks, Bork and Friedman!

And with OSS alternatives like Godot available, it's getting harder to justify using Unity.

Game consoles.

Re: The Death of Unity

#119

Post by kilolima »

Thaxll wrote: post #16
all2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Godot is a "mature" toy engine. This does not seem to be related to this: > There is not a single quality / money maker game that shipped on Godot. There's some missing context in the middle. I'm curious how one implies the other? I'd be game for chains of logic going from first -> second or vice versa. I'm specifically curious, what is Godot missing?

Godot is missing the game that shows this engine is a viable alternative to Unity at large. I mean look at the showcase: https://godotengine.org/showcase/ It all looks amateur. All the mobile dev work on Unity so you better have good reasons to change the entire pipeline.

Maybe having a game engine that is universal for mobile, console, and PC is the problem. I'm not interested in playing mobile or console games or the type of gameplay they encourage. I'd like a PC game engine for PC games.

Re: The Death of Unity

#120

Post by dingdong33 »

dgb23 wrote: post #99
MenhirMike wrote: post #38

I believe it when I see it. I would like to see it, but I doubt that a significant enough portion of developers are going to jump ship. For smaller indie studios, there are definitely better alternatives, but when it comes to the big packages, there's really just Unity and Unreal.

Many of my favorite games aren’t built on licensed engines.

Yes, xbill and tuxracer are my favorite games too.
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