131–140 of 242 posts
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And with OSS alternatives like Godot available, it's getting harder to justify using Unity.
Game consoles.
Godot can't include game console-specific code because its open-source license is incompatible with the various game console API licenses. But that doesn't mean you can't have have your Godot game on a console.
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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. This is wrong, there are tons of finished games that use custom engines. For example one of the most recent indie games i bought was Zortch which was made by a single person and used a custom engine. EDIT: actually here is a page that collects some custom engines, ranging from big studios down to one…
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Sure there is: C# is substantially less performant than C++ code.
C# has a pretty good FFI system that can call into C++ code. Unity itself does that, after all, it's not entirely written in C#
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…
The fiction that a corporation's fiduciary duty to its shareholders means "profits above all else" didn't become a thing until the 1980s, when Reagan's "greed is good" became the driving mantra of capitalism.
A "B" corporation, for example, is just a C corporation that has voluntarily agreed to a set of governance rules.
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> Is it ready nowadays? What does "ready" mean?
"Can you develop and ship a non-trivial game with it, ideally on multiple platforms, without spending loads of time debugging the internals of the engine?"
Also what does "spending loads of time debugging the internals of the engine" mean? I have worked on small and large (AAA) games with both custom and 3rd party engines and all of them needed a lot of time both profiling (to make things faster) and debugging (to avoid/fix[0] bugs) the engine internals. Where is the threshold where that time is "loads"?
Without being specific on the requirements how can one respond with "yes" or "no"?
[0] "avoid" for the 3rd party engines that we tried to not change much as it'd affect engine upgrades later, "fix" for the custom engines
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> There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine. This is wrong, there are tons of finished games that use custom engines. For example one of the most recent indie games i bought was Zortch which was made by a single person and used a custom engine. EDIT: actually here is a page that collects some custom engines, ranging from big studios down to one…
Huh, I'm not sure the full intent/scope of the list but Bungie shipped a LOT more games with custom engines than just Destiny. Marathon, Myth, Oni, and Halo, to name a few.
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Maybe? It seems like Unity is charging the fee per install [0], not per unique user. So when I install my Steam games on my desktop, my laptop and my Steam Deck that's 3 installs. If I reinstall the OS, that'll be another install - or if I clean up my Steam library and reinstall later, etc. Maybe this is acceptable if your title has microtransactions because you may get some ongoing revenue stream for that user - but…
It's even worse according to the original announcement - it talks about a monthly rate per install.
Tricky, company is losing money it seems. -192M last quarter according to google.
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You beat me to it. I don’t understand the licensing changes unless Roccitiello isn’t aware of both the existence of Godot AND its new C# support. There will always be someone to say that an open source project can’t replace a mature, proprietary one since it doesn’t match all the features or ecosystem. Historically, this changes really fast once you make the licensing terms bad enough to make a large chunk of your cu…
IMO this move doesn't really hurt the hobbyists (200K installs + $200K over last 12 months). And Godot as an OSS still has to feed the hands that make it eventually.
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.
Or big studios can just build their own engine. Lots of big studios still do this. Once they run the math on how much licensing will cost them, they realize they can pay several inhouse devs to just make a bespoke engine for the same cost. And then further amortize that NRE cost over several titles.
Will this licensing change hurt big studios in the short run? Unlikely. Could it hurt Unity in the long run once big studios realize they can just build exactly what they want inhouse for the same (or less) cost? Much more likely.
As for small studios: small studios eventually become big studios. If they burn the small studios now, they won't have big studios buying from them in 5-10 years.