Partnership between Unity and Google | Hacker News Reader

Partnership between Unity and Google

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73 pointsPhilipA18 comments

So Unity is moving their own infrastructure to Google Cloud, Google and Unity are collab'ing on a large open source initiative coming out this Summer, and Google is integrating Google cloud features directly into Unity.

I wonder if this will create a trap for new game developers to ONLY use google services for networking, by virtue of various plugins, frameworks, and tutorials, which abstract everything until you start to scale and your stuck with the bill and no viable means of switching to another vendor.

And by a sheer coincidence that would make it a lot easier to develop games on android.

Not really. Most of the services will be released open source, and they are not tied to the GCP, so you could use your own infra if that's something you would like. I think the first such service to be released will be matchmaking.

Multiplay is also cloud agnostic, although it uses Google by default.

Source: I work at Unity.

Hey funkaster!

I have a prototype MP game I am working on right now using HLAPI. I host a few other web games on GC already.

How easy is it to set up a dedicated server right now that I can run my game on? Documented anywhere?

Edit: to clarify, I don't need matchmaking at this stage, would be happy to hard code an IP:Port and have a button connect to it directly.

Hey! A lot of the connected games folks are in Berlin right now, for the conference. I'll ping them because they might have a better answer for you (I work at Analytics). If you want, shoot me an email: rolando at unity3d.com and I'll try to contact you with the right team.

Seems like a missed opportunity for Microsoft's Azure... afaik a lot of Unity games are in C# which seems like a stronger fit than Google. Maybe Google sees this as a synergistic move with games on the Play Store?

I'm kind of surprised Microsoft has never made a serious push to buy Unity. I know that I would be happy to be able to use Core and more modern C# than Unity's rather old version of Mono.

Well they still might. Nothing I've read so far about the Unity/Google alliance makes me think that it's impossible, just unlikely. The Microsoft M&A team will obviously be busy with GitHub but I would be surprised if no one there thought of it already. It does however seem to me like Microsoft know that Window's dominance is on the wane and they are pushing to be a software developer's 'tool' vendor. Considering how important Unity is to game development, from grass roots up to big triple A games, it does seem like an aquision target.

> afaik a lot of Unity games are in C#

Yep, actually by far most of them are C#. These days you would only use C#. (Boo was deprecated a long time ago, and their version of Javascript is following suit)

Especially as I seem to recall that Visual Studio is now the recommended editor in Unity 2018, so it would have made sense to pick Microsoft for this as well.

For those unaware, I'm sure this is in competition with AWS's partnership with CryEngine.

https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/

Which is a terrible engine but makes thing beautiful.

So now it's time for Microsoft to partner with Unreal I guess?

for reference, here's the announcement on the Unity side: https://unity3d.com/connectedgames

It's interesting they mentioned "...navigating 3D space in VR..." Because this leads me to think that Waymo's driving simations are written in Unity. As oppose to say Uber whose simulation appears to be written in Unreal from their demo in GDC.

That seems to be a pretty weak link? Literally every VR game involves some amount of navigating 3D spaces.

Is this tangential to what Improbable is building with Spatial OS, or potentially a competitor?

Unity editor comes with Google Analytics and you can't even disable it in the free version.

They're also collecting information from games built with Unity.

I feel Google just wants more data and Unity is already okay with that.

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