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OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

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Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#21
post #11

Im not well versed in game programming, however I have some knowledge on how to properly structure your software architecture in other domains. In regards to third party dependencies I agree with what Uncle Bob says, which is to keep them as far away from your stuff as possible. Only introduce a hard dependency if you have to. In my current project I have been doing that and I enjoy the flexibility that this gives me…

The problem is that Unity is a game engine , not a game framework . That means that any code you do will be following their architecture and using their features. The game logic gets really tight to the engine. ...unless you are Brian Bucklew https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1703163364229161236.html Note: That is not the "normal" way to use a game engine.

Holy porting Batman.

Caves of Qud is definitely going on my watchlist now.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#22

Im not well versed in game programming, however I have some knowledge on how to properly structure your software architecture in other domains. In regards to third party dependencies I agree with what Uncle Bob says, which is to keep them as far away from your stuff as possible. Only introduce a hard dependency if you have to. In my current project I have been doing that and I enjoy the flexibility that this gives me…

Can you abstract away your website so it can run on node.js or angular? Game development is typically very tightly linked to a mess of proprietary tools and products and platforms. It is the game engine itself that abstracts away for example) the payment/subscription api. If you were to write your own game abstraction layer we would call what you did a game engine. Secondly, performance (frames per second) is key in…

> Can you abstract away your website so it can run on node.js or angular?

This is an excellent point. At that point you'd need so much abstraction that you'd basically be building something as complex as the underlying engines.

In rare cases that works out, like for Caves of Qud, but mostly because of the nature of the game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37548720

The best most folks can dream of is decoupling some of their game logic or mechanisms from the engine somewhat, like what Captain of Industry did:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31588018

That said, I'm surprised that engines like Stride or NeoAxis don't try to imitate the Unity API more - making porting from another engine easier, or being able to reuse some of your existing skills would surely be a good selling point!

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#23

Im not well versed in game programming, however I have some knowledge on how to properly structure your software architecture in other domains. In regards to third party dependencies I agree with what Uncle Bob says, which is to keep them as far away from your stuff as possible. Only introduce a hard dependency if you have to. In my current project I have been doing that and I enjoy the flexibility that this gives me…

It's not really possible because a game engine works differently from a library.

A library is a component that you add to your application. While it might be opinionated in the way it presents its interface, you can typically build some kind of abstraction layer on top of it and swap it out with something else in the future.

A game engine basically is the application, and your game builds on top of it, filling in the game logic, assets, level design, etc. The earliest game engines like Unreal Engine 1 were basically just the game Unreal with all the game-specific bits stripped out.

An engine is more than just opinionated. It determines the general application flow and structure, how each component is conceptualized in the architecture and how things connect. It even determines which programming language you can use. You also just use a lot of components from the engine: rendering, input handling, physics, animation, networking, parallelism, asset processing, etc. Things of that scale would probably be separate libraries for most other types of applications.

Beyond programming, much of your work will be in engine-specific formats that simply cannot be automatically converted to another engine: project files, level design, component connections and settings, graphical programming and shaders, animation state machines. You could design all of this in your own custom formats and build it programmatically, but why would you take that development overhead when engine's editor already does it so well?

That's not to say that porting from one engine to another is impossible. Assets like graphics and audio can be moved with no or minimal adjustment. Game design is still the same, and typically most concepts are similar enough between engines that you can do a line-by-line conversion for most of your code. And some games really do use Unity more like a rendering and input library, Caves of Qud is one example. But those are rare and most games will simply require a lot of elbow grease to shift engines.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#24

Im not well versed in game programming, however I have some knowledge on how to properly structure your software architecture in other domains. In regards to third party dependencies I agree with what Uncle Bob says, which is to keep them as far away from your stuff as possible. Only introduce a hard dependency if you have to. In my current project I have been doing that and I enjoy the flexibility that this gives me…

I don't feel like an expert, but I'm a full time Unity dev with experience on non-Unity AAA projects.

There are the obvious advantages of having a pre-built editor, standard environment, fantastic build tools, and generally handling a lot of the complexity of managing a project, particularly in the early stages.

It's possible to limit your use of the engine to these time-savers, and essentially use it as a front-end for your game, however many workflows within the Unity projects make heavy use of engine-specific features which become an integral part of the game over time.

Rewriting scripts to not make use of the Unity engine's C# features isn't necessarily major challenge, depending on how reliant you are on engine-specific features. But when you've set up dozens of entities and items using Unity's animation state machine UI, laid out your levels in Unity's editor, and saved hundreds of different reusable assets as Unity-specific "prefabs", setting up all the relationships in your project which aren't determined by code would be a massive time sink.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#25
post #14

Missteps implies accidents. This was not accidental, it was an attempt at extracting rent - retroactively.

Purely conjecture, but somehow I suspect that private equity has crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.

They are making a billion dollars loss a year. So with no vc cash available they need to get profitable if they want to survive. You can argue this is wrong way to go about it but they do need to get profitable.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#26
post #14

Missteps implies accidents. This was not accidental, it was an attempt at extracting rent - retroactively.

Purely conjecture, but somehow I suspect that private equity has crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.

Milk dry, or try to start making money?

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#28
post #14

Missteps implies accidents. This was not accidental, it was an attempt at extracting rent - retroactively.

Purely conjecture, but somehow I suspect that private equity has crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.

They can only get anything from it if the stock price goes up though. So far this isn't helping. Also it won't be several quarters until the additional revenue kicks in, by the time they might already be losing significant numbers of customers which the market won't like even if the financial start looking a bit better.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#29
post #20

Sad for Unity devs' predicament here, but happy to see Godot gaining increased interest. It's still not as mature as Unity, of course, but they're making steady progress, it definitely seems to be headed in the right direction.

This rather dampened by enthusiasm for Godot: https://sampruden.github.io/posts/godot-is-not-the-new-unity... It's carrying a lot of performance baggage and there seems to be no sense of urgency in fixing it.

Yeah, it's true that raw performance doesn't seem like a major priority for the Godot community. If it was, GDScript probably wouldn't be the default language. There also seems to be a lot of defensiveness around GDScript's weaknesses.

Personally, I found that signals were very slow for communicating node to node, was dropping information because it could take longer than a frame.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely conjecture, but somehow I suspect that private equity has crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.

They are making a billion dollars loss a year. So with no vc cash available they need to get profitable if they want to survive. You can argue this is wrong way to go about it but they do need to get profitable.

Massive over hiring and random acquisitions are there main reasons why are they here. If they hadn't increased their headcount by 5k and continued focusing on their core products the company would already be profitable (even if revenue would be lower).

At this point it's too late to significantly cut costs, so yeah seems like they pushed themselves into a corner.

The sad part is that it was already perfectly obvious where were they heading after they IPO'ed.

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