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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

#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.

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

#62
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++.)

More than port, I would call it conversion.

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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" Perhaps this was a mistake.

Or may be not. People commit to use a tool, so why not doing it fully so you get the most benefit from it?

It makes everything harder if you want to use a tool without really using it so you can move to a different one if needed.

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

#64

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.

Unity had 7000+ employees before layoff.

Valve maintains one of the biggest platforms, and their own game engine. Valve also developed CSGO, TF2, and Dota, all popular online games that need constant maintenance (and even big content updates sometimes). Valve also invested in VR and sells hardware.

Valve has 1200 employees.

To me it's easy to see why Unity lose money.

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

#65
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…

This is often said, but is it really true? Im thinking of libraries like torch, tensor flow, or pandas. I'm not sure rewriting torch client code from python to c++ would typically be that much faster as most of the work is already being done on the GPU and is highly optimized (much like a game).

It's true right now though there are a lot of people working on different ways to get python to have near native performance. I'd say it could be a fixable problem.

I was listening Lex Friedman's podcast featuring Chris Lattner a few months ago. He's is working on Mojo, which is basically a fast superset of python that can be fast (if you opt in to a few things) and worst case just falls back to being as fast as regular python. The intention is to give people enough means that they can optimize such code to be actually fast or just run it as is.

I'm not much of a python developer myself, even though I do have to deal with it occasionally. I liked the point that he made that, for whatever reason, there are just a lot of people using python and getting access to that community of people is a good way to get traction for your tool or technology. He was talking about machine learning specifically. A lot of the experts in that field are using python. Of course all the difficult bits and bobs are outsourced to native libraries. His vision is that a lot of that stuff should be written in mojo/python and that there are no good reasons why that should be any slower.

Probably removing the gil will help (everything blocking is not cool). And the language could use some better primitives for dealing with things like co-routines. They are kind of nice to have in asynchronous code bases like games or UIs. But those are things that could be fixable and might benefit the rest of the ecosystem.

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

#66
post #36
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Trying to run a publicly traded company like a VC bonfire - what could possibly go wrong.

Why would they even IPO if they are bleeding money as fast as they were? Was it one of those SPAC pyramid scams just to get fresh money from people?

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

#67
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it retroactively? Publishers are only charged for new installs from next year on.

They used to have a clause that you could use the old terms of service from when you published your game. But it was removed in favor of even games developed under those terms of services needing to pay. That is very much a retroactive change.

I still don't see how that is retroactive. The TOS changed, but I only accepted the TOS how they were when I paid my license. So the new TOS do not apply until my contract ends. That is the law (at least here in Europe)

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it retroactively? Publishers are only charged for new installs from next year on.

It's retroactive because the publishers originally signed a contract that didn't have any per install fees for that version of unity they're using. Now, they will be charged, despite not changing the unity version, as if next year. Retroactively applying the new contract terms to the old one.

I don't think what you describe is the case. My company works with Unity and is not worried about any change until the license runs out. Only then will we form a new contract and accept the new terms and conditions. Changing a contract one-sided is not really legal in the EU https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...

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

#69

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…

> Is it not possible in game development to also structure your architecture that way ? Is the extra work not justified if you have deadlines ? Or is there just a lack of common interfaces that can serve as proper abstraction ?

The simple answer is:

Yes, you 100% can, if you code it like that from the very begninning.

No, most people don't, because most game engines are not desiged for this so it's extra man-hours with no visible value.

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

#70
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.

"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 a public company at this point. Not a fan of PE but no need to blame them for everything.

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