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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

#121

I'm still not fully convinced that Unity's new pricing is unfair. The retroactive aspect of it is certainly troubling and I've seen some fair points about how policy implementation will likely be messy. Moving onto the pricing itself, I've only seen it brought up on a couple occasions that the actual stores these games are being sold on are taking a way larger cut in most cases then what Unity is asking for (For refe…

The App stores provide distribution for software. This is network, storage and eyeballs.

Unity doesn’t provide any value for the marginal install that it is charging for.

A better comparison would be to Unreal which charges a royalty after $1M of revenue. Kind of sucks that it is percentage based but seems more sane to tie it to revenue than installs.

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

#122
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In other words, game engines are frameworks. Porting from Unity to Unreal may feel like porting from Rails to Django: not an impossible task, and you can keep some key bits, but you have to rewrite and rethink a lot. (Ruby and Python are even closer than C# and C++.)

I would agree with the parent poster that game engines are more than frameworks. They often begin with a platform abstraction layer, contain a framework on how to structure your tools and data, often contain an embedded programming language, have custom data formats, and determine the syntax and semantics of how you build the rest of your game.

Then in order to move between one engine and another it is a far bigger task than just switching programming languages and frameworks (which in web development are very similar). You will need to do things like:

Re-import all of the external assets that you have created in external editors. Things like meshes, rigs, animations, textures, sounds, music, etc. These may require changes to adapt them to the new engine, and it assumes that you still have the original data for all of these (which is often binary and very large in size).

Then re-create all of the specific in-engine assets that you don't have external sources for. These are things that game designers often create and describe the elements in the game, like character, vehicle, item definitions, loot tables, experience curves, etc. In addition to these being engine specific they're also fairly manual to create.

This of course assumes that you can easily bring over the world/level data from one engine to the other. At best it will require sufficiently skilled programmers to write an exporter for the old engine and an importer for the new engine. At worst it will require designers and artists to recreate the levels by hand.

Then the last thing mentioned would be changing all of the automated processes to the new engine and educating everyone in the studio on how things are meant to work.

The web based analogy for all this would be rewriting the code in both a new language and framework, changing the frontend from HTML/CSS/JS to Latex (or something), moving the data in the database to another style of data storage, and converting all the images from PNG to JPG.

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

#123

I'm still not fully convinced that Unity's new pricing is unfair. The retroactive aspect of it is certainly troubling and I've seen some fair points about how policy implementation will likely be messy. Moving onto the pricing itself, I've only seen it brought up on a couple occasions that the actual stores these games are being sold on are taking a way larger cut in most cases then what Unity is asking for (For refe…

Its the install tracking and fees related to non revenue metrics that really has people super mad. The install tracking will be borderline malware based on Ironsource's reputation. All they needed to do was take a cut of revenue. Without that, people wouldn't be as mad.

Indeed. As a user who has played Unity games in the past this change makes me want to stay the hell away from games built on Unity in the future. There has been little transparency on how they're tracking installs and what other data they're harvesting while they're at it.

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

#124

I'm still not fully convinced that Unity's new pricing is unfair. The retroactive aspect of it is certainly troubling and I've seen some fair points about how policy implementation will likely be messy. Moving onto the pricing itself, I've only seen it brought up on a couple occasions that the actual stores these games are being sold on are taking a way larger cut in most cases then what Unity is asking for (For refe…

>The flat pricing model will disproportionately effect cheap mobile games, which I suspect was on purpose. Even then, I hardly see this as a problem. Just scrolling through the top games on any mobile store, most of it looks like low quality crap produced by large companies that figured out a successful formula for virile games.

The point was for unity to make money off hugely profitable free-to-play games (like falls guys, among us, genshin impact, and pokemon go). Unity is not aiming to make the quality of games go up.

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

#125
post #35
post #33

Had an audible chuckle the other day when I saw humble bundle's current massive Godot sale. Hopefully with this increased attention we can draw new programmers to gamedev with an approachable language like python.

> approachable language like python Python doesn't really scale though and it's fine only for simple games/scripting (on top of a game mainly built with another language). If you're serious about game development you'll have to switch to C# or C++ eventually. Also I don't see how C# is not "approachable" (C++ is another manner). If you're serious about programming you'll have to figure out static typing at some point…

> Also I don't see how C# is not "approachable

C# is powerful and performant. I wouldn’t call it approachable though unless your background is Java or C++

It suffers from the same problem as Java: verbosity with endless choices for syntax. Why is this a problem? The “paradox of choice” is debilitating for most people. Also, since there’s no universal consensus over style, you’re going to inevitably have convention wars.

Python has many problems, but it’s easy to see how it became so popular with its one way to do one thing

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

#126
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but somehow I suspect that private equity Unity is publicly traded: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U Can’t blame private equity for this one. > crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry. More realistically, they crunched the numbers and saw that they aren’t making enough money to keep the company going forever. It’s not a secret, because it’s a public company: They need to make more money to…

Most of their losses was in the last 1.5 years. They actually could have been profitable. They are not sustainable because of mismanagement and massively failed bets. “We got greedy but don’t worry, you’ll pay for it” doesn’t have the best ring to it.

They were profitable from 2013 until around 2016, beginning the buildup to IPO...

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

#127
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sample of apps larger than 70mb on my android device: - The built in Contacts app - Degiro (investment management) - Doubletwist (music player) - Sony Headphones Some apps above 150mb: - Element (chat) - Kindle reader - Pocket Casts (podcast player) I don't have too many games installed but layton and the curious village, a point and click DS port, is 700mb (10x larger than on its original platform of the DS). I gu…

I know. I was pointing out the app size since he said that it's 70mb, and that's absolutely not good compared to Unity (10-20mb). To be fair I don't care about the app size either (Though once you reach a threshold, you'll have to care, since extra config is involved in the stores), I just wanted to point across how much work you have to do in Unreal to reach what Unity does by default, and app size is just an easy u…

> To be fair I don't care about the app size either

> Jesus christ. You say I'm absolutely incorrect, yet you're happy with a default package of 70MB?

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

#128
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> approachable language like python Python doesn't really scale though and it's fine only for simple games/scripting (on top of a game mainly built with another language). If you're serious about game development you'll have to switch to C# or C++ eventually. Also I don't see how C# is not "approachable" (C++ is another manner). If you're serious about programming you'll have to figure out static typing at some point…

> If you're serious about game development you'll have to switch to C# or C++ eventually. Were the creators of Undertale, Hyper Light Drifter, and Hotline Miami not "serious" because they chose to use GameMaker? I understand the pitfalls of using lightweight scripting languages, but not everyone is trying to create Doom Eternal.

For a certain type of game GameMaker is fantastic. If you know that the game you’re making is going to work with it, or if you’re just starting out, it’s a great choice.

However, you will run into limits that have nothing to do with AAA graphics, and most people are going to eventually want to expand beyond those limits. Clearly not everyone, because there are plenty of people who’d be happy making pico8 games till they day they die. But most people in my experience.

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

#129
post #61
post #7

https://nitter.net/OSSInsight/status/1703087927763542305 Which just links onwards to https://ossinsight.io/collections/game-engine with a screenshot: https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FF6KVDQPb0AAi4Lj.jpg If you click through to pull requests or issues created, the trend is between modest and potentially not statistically significant (there's also a lot of red digits). The stars graph from godot is vertical since la…

Godot actually has a bit of an issue with too many PRs. Lots of them are just small changes, usability or documentation changes, but they still have to be reviewed. They need steady funding to have a team of capable full time devs. Their fund seems a step into this direction.

Wait until Hacktoberfest

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

#130

I'm still not fully convinced that Unity's new pricing is unfair. The retroactive aspect of it is certainly troubling and I've seen some fair points about how policy implementation will likely be messy. Moving onto the pricing itself, I've only seen it brought up on a couple occasions that the actual stores these games are being sold on are taking a way larger cut in most cases then what Unity is asking for (For refe…

Its the install tracking and fees related to non revenue metrics that really has people super mad. The install tracking will be borderline malware based on Ironsource's reputation. All they needed to do was take a cut of revenue. Without that, people wouldn't be as mad.

I think the core reason for how intense the outrage is is the installations are completely unpredictable for developers. If Unity had went to a revenue split it simple royalty per sale people would be upset but ultimately it would have died down. It's the unpredictabilty that is really the problem.
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