Unity signs “multi-million dollar” contract to help U.S. government with defense
gamedeveloper.com
gamedeveloper.com
I get the ethical concerns Unity employees have had, but can't any development environment be potentially used for ethically gray purposes? Personally, I didn't see myself as directly sponsoring war, especially since all American taxpayers are contributing towards the defense budget. I saw my work as being part of an ecosystem that could help save soldiers' lives. Soldiers will need to go fight either way for defensive purposes and they need to be trained. If the training process can be more effective and efficient by using game-like simulations, why shouldn't it be? The simulations also end up saving a lot of money, because it's not necessary to waste gas or ammunition taking a tank or a heavy artillery piece out for demonstration use.
"Defensive purposes" is one hell of a creative license. You know it when soldiers "need to go fight" on the other side of the world "for defensive purposes". Or when a random someone enters your home with a gun "for defensive purposes". When was the last time a US soldier was called to arms to defend their own country?
> can't any development environment be potentially used for ethically gray purposes?
Any development can and will probably eventually be used as such. But while Facebook's "gray area" is siphoning and monetizing users' data, the US military's "gray area" is invading countries and killing a whole lot of innocent people in the process. So many that they have to threaten everyone else in the world with deadly action if they even try to look too closely. That's one soft definition of gray.
Imagine the NSO Group claiming "software development gray area" to defend themselves. And with any military the moral/ethical objection will go far beyond that because no matter how the rules are followed, the main purpose of a military is to achieve things by threat or application of deadly violence. So a general objection to cooperating with the military complex will always have a solid foundation.
Or, you know, being by far the largest reason (outside of the Ukrainians themselves) that Ukraine is able to protect itself from an evil war of aggression and not face Holodomor v2...https://www.statista.com/chart/27278/military-aid-to-ukraine...
The Ukrainian "Saint Javelin" even has one of these training modes being discussed (I don't actually know if it was made using Unity, but it sure looked like it)
Gray area.
It would cost the US less as a society to have universal healthcare rather than the horror we have now.
Most US government spending, $10 trillion (federal + state + local), goes to social welfare programs and entitlements.
That $10 trillion is larger than the entire economies of Japan + Germany combined.
The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, by far. It hasn't given up anything.
The poorest 1/4 of the US population gets entirely free healthcare, and it's the most expensive free healthcare that you'll find anywhere on the planet. Another quarter of the US population receives directly subsidized healthcare.
Over-spending on the US military is a $200-$250 billion problem. The US spends $4+ trillion on healthcare every year.
Practically every full-time employee (32 hours or more per week) in the US gets paid time off. Your average retail store employee - working at CVS, Walgreens, Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc - earning ~$13-$17 / hour typically accrues 10-14 days of PTO per year (one can certainly argue it should be more; pretending it doesn't exist, or using "by law" to devalue its existence, is absurd).
I doubt it. When the budget is billions of largely unaudited dollars and a senate that will approve any budget increases what reason is there to save money? I can’t imagine the nepotism found in military contracts are saving the military money when these companies gaining the contracts want as much tax-payer money as possible.
I'm sure you believe you set something straight but you did not. Two things can be true at the same time and still not be in any kind of gray area.
Can you get out of a murder charge by saving someone else's life? Walk into a hospital and save one patient's life while stabbing the other to death? Rape someone but then give them a job that provides for everything? Pay for the preservation of an endangered animal only after you get the chance to kill some of the very same animals? You think Harvey Weinstein didn't pay the tuition or put a roof over one of his victim's heads? Yeah, think of him in the gray area.
Can you give me your example above and proudly proclaim "grey area" without sounding like the kind of person who thinks any wrongdoing gets wiped with a gesture of good will?
P.S. Gray should be the thin border where white and black touch and intermingle, not the whole damn thing except the white/black edges. That might ebb and flow and drift with generations and society but this moment is not it.
Are you aware of any case where the US went to war under pretenses known to be false from the start, or interfered in the internal affairs of another country to cause loss of life, or allied with countries that committed terrorism against the US and others, etc. and none of the initiators suffered any consequences?
It's bad enough that morals can be twisted enough to justify just about anything and in any condition, and education these days lets anyone think they can justify anything simply by the fact that they said it. Don't add hypocrisy to that too.
Of course, I do. Not to say I don't have biases, or that I'm always have an access to 100% correct information. Life's not that easy, of course, but it still doesn't mean that it's always blurry, relative, and let's do nothing as your nihilist approach suggests.
It only ends when one side or the other, and anybody who might have empathized with them, is completely annihilated or when somebody stops behaving, from their perspective, righteously. Neither option is probable, which is why society just keeps replaying history on an endless loop in history, with little more than technology offering a change of scenery.
If you want to see what will happen tomorrow, simply learn about what happened yesterday. The only trick is realizing what role you're playing.
The countries with potent military capabilities dictate how everything goes in this world. It was true a thousand years ago, it was true a hundred years ago, and it's true today. It will always be true, for very obvious reasons.
Given that they aren't, I suspect we'll find that US soldiers aren't technically involved in the fight in Ukraine. It is ironic that even now, US soldiers are only deployed for aggressive purposes.
That includes in Japan, South Korea and various nations in Europe (Germany, Italy, Poland, et al.). By the hour, those locations have seen the largest and longest-term US military deployments in its history. They're not there to start wars, they're there to deter the aggressors (Russia, North Korea, China primarily) from attempting to conquer their neighbors and annex more territory.
Ukraine then continued to align and train with NATO, the Minsk accords failed and Russia invaded. At this point, our best understanding is that they wanted to enact quick regime change and re-align the country’s position to Russia. As to your reference to Holodomor 2, there’s no indication that they wanted to commit genocide or force a large scale famine.
Russia’s actions in Georgia, Belarus or Crimea itself indicate the more likely fate of Ukraine. Of course the problem with an escalation spiral is that there’s no telling where it will end up. Still, considering that Ukraine’s allowing gas exports to transit their country and Russia’s allowing grain exports, the relation is not as hopeless as you make it seem.
As for the US’s contribution to the Ukraine war effort, paradoxically, the US support and NATO courting them were likely an important trigger of the invasion. And the US support which enabled Ukraine’s resistance means that it’s now trapped in a spiral of violence with Russia that is tearing both countries apart.
We can’t know what could have been, but looking at other neighbors of Russia’s an alternative reality where Ukraine remains corrupt, poor, in Russia’s sphere of influence but whole is not unlikely.
The right way to think about defending one's country is that it means "defends the interests of the country", which can include helping allies, keeping trade routes stable, etc.
Good read: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-importance-of-u-s-mil...
However, as far as I know, neither of those happened and the rationale I’ve heard reported is a mix of “that Land is really Russian land and Ukrainians are not a historically separate nation” or something like that.
I think what is truly immoral is the cynical and barbaric targeting of civilians, seemingly systematically and not isolated incidents.
My impression is that Russia isn’t doing this for defense reasons but rather for glory of the leader.
What do you think?
Are you against the U.S. military in particular or all militaries? This part makes me think the latter.
I don't think it's all that controversial or ethically dubious to believe, in general, that militaries need to exist and that they therefore need to train their members on how to operate weapons.
More specific arguments against particular militaries and particular weapon systems are more interesting.
At any rate, some of the "things" that militaries achieve are good, necessary and, arguably, properly achieved by violence and the threat thereof. Such as protection from external threats of tyranny (surely we can all think of one contemporaneous tyrant with a military?).
That means, I think, involvement in conventional weapons systems for some military can be fine. In the case of the U.S. military, I could see objecting in particular, but I wouldn't predict any real impact to U.S. foreign policy due to that sort of personal choice. The main benefit would be on a personal and, depending on the circles you travel in, social level.
And nobody here really has any solid ground to defend the US in those instances where they have morally slipped, but nobody has any right to say the US should not have a military because of those instances.
Of course not! Nothing I say here is aimed at influencing career decisions. OP's life choices are their own.
I clearly targeted 2 ostensibly objective statements. One was the creative interpretation of "defense" (attacking a country on the other side of the world even for reasons known to be fabricated cannot be called "defense"), and the second was the attempt to call everything "a gray area" to muddy the waters (thus homogenizing and conflating writing software that tracks the websites you visit with helping train the people potentially dropping bombs on weddings).
Your job choice is yours alone to make. I can only express disagreement if I were to make it for myself. But I can certainly have a strong objection to redefining or twisting facts to justify that choice. That's not only a transparent attempt of making the choice more palatable in the eyes of others but explaining it like that ironically has the opposite effect.
Imperial armies are both useful and immoral. It's not that it's american that makes it bad, its that it's job is empire
You can be upset by past actions of the US military (or any) without calling for GP to quit his job.
I would be happy in a peaceful world, but a world without defense capabilities is a world of helpless people, not peaceful ones.
And yes, there are certainly civilian deaths that are caused by the US military making the wrong decisions about how to achieve the objectives they've been given, but even then, they can't just refuse to do the job - that's the entire point of civilian control over the military.
Unfortunately, both left and right wing propagandists are agitating to make you think it was unjustified to eradicate these two groups. Don't believe that garbage. These organizations genuinely believed that the entire world has been corrupted, including much of the Muslim world, and deserved the terrorism their groups inflicted.
Yeah that’s why China is sending people to camps out in Xinjiang.
Also I’d love some cuttings on people defending ISIs and Al-Qaeda. The Taliban I could maybe believe, but ISIs is almost universally hated.
Arguments against Isis are that they lost. Israel is doing the same thing, and is beloved by the west for it
Indirectly, US deployments in - Taiwan, Korea, now Poland, NATO itself as an alliance, as Ukraine proves beyond any doubt - maintain peace throughout the world. In this subject the populace is often misinformed while the political and military elites in the US are quite clear - US commitments all over the world maintain peace that allows for US hegemony in trade and other areas to dominate the world's economy.
The US used to think it could be the world's most powerful country and "not get involved". That led to World War 2, and the idea died there. If the US "doesn't get involved", it will end up with another hegemon taking over Europe/Asia and lose its position at the top of the food chain. If that's what you want, go for it, cut the military budget. But when China and Russia turn the rest of the world into autocracies, you might find you made the wrong choice.
The alternative to a strong hegemon that maintains peace is clear - it's chaos and wars of domination. The relatively small slippage in power that's happened in the last 20 years have led to an imperialist war in Ukraine. If you want to have that all over the world, go for it, cut the budget and complain about all military power being "wrong".
WW2 didn't happen because the US got in late. It was much more complicated than that and driven by fascism and imperialism across the globe. It's hard to say whether anything could have prevented that war.
We should be forever grateful for the people who fought back the fascists, internal and external. But you picked one of the few instances where it made sense for the US to go to war. Wars since the last century have become so destructive and violent that people will almost never support them except they are deceived or oppressed. The solution should not be "we do the killing for you under false pretense" but to put processes in order that are based on mutual agreement.
Give it 20 years and see. A close reading of world history seems to tell me - without a strong military dominating hegemon keeping the peace, you get war and chaos.
The only war of aggression I can think of was Iraq. Vietnam was a war against an ideological enemy, wrong headed as it might have been, based off a flawed theory. I don’t consider the other wars as aggression because I don’t consider policing the world to mean you’re an agressor. The world needs policing.
I am not american so maybe I am wrong but I believe it was Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 no?
The justification, weather correct or not, was in both cases exactly what you said. To “defend their own country”.
In Afghanistan to prevent further 9/11 style attacks from being committed against the USA and in Iraq to prevent WMDs from being used against the USA. The famous/infamous “do you want the proof to come in the form of a mushroom cloud?” bit.
Again, weather the justification was correct or not is not what I am pointing out. I am pointing out in both cases, the USA called soldiers to fight “to arms to defend their own country”
Having a justification doesn't mean it must be a good justification. The WMD that didn't exist? Being the close ally of the country that actually supported 9/11?
Let's not keep going on the same beaten path which will not suddenly give us a different answer. For more than a century the US has been involved in affairs everywhere else in the world long before everyone else in the world was involved in any US affairs. Both 9/11 and the subsequent invasions (or the acts that came before) were just as much terrorist actions but if you creatively draw the line you can arbitrarily erase any inconvenient action that came before. If you draw the line at 2002 the invasions look unprovoked. And if you draw it in the early 1980s then 9/11 looks like soldiers defending their country against further attack. Who would you say first meddled with whom to trigger the chain of escalations that came after? But no need to dig, ask yourself as a decent human being: should you bomb a wedding and call it defense?
If you had heard as often as I have people justifying the unjustifiable (then and now) you'd understand what's the problem with arbitrary lines and pro forma justifications. I apologize if a comment box cannot support any better explanation despite the unshakeable foundation for what I said.
You know, the irony is that as long as the US and the West in general had an interest in keeping an even bigger enemy (Iran) in check, they had no moral objection to providing Iraq with all kinds of assistance, financing, equipment, materials, and training on developing the very same WMDs they later invaded Iraq for having, even if it was known they were destroyed.
But you'll always get exactly the story you need to hear to support the conclusion you should support. And you will support it because people care less and less about critical thinking, collecting available info from both sides. It's so much easier to just get the conclusion in predigested bytes, ideally just a punchline. If this kind of "thinking" is enough to make people storm the Capitol of the US, it's enough to get the to support the invasion of a dusty corner of the world most of them couldn't even point at on the map.
With your justification the Russia invasion is actually to prevent a future war with NATO. I am pretty sure one can justify any war that way.
NATO is a defensive organization. How does going to war with the Ukraine help Russia avoid confrontation with NATO when invading the Ukraine puts NATO members and arms length reach away dramatically increasing the chance of a full scale conflict with NATO? This argument doesn’t make any sense.
Justify != right. Anyone can justify a war from their POV, see Russia -> Ukraine, US -> Iraq. It doesn’t make it any more right.
There is a major difference in scale.
NATO is kinda a for ensuring Ukranian independence. Minus NATO, NATO countries could get involved to help Ukraine, whereas they're currently limited by MAD
This is however entirely critical to the whole thing. Pretty much every country which has ever launched an aggressive war has claimed along the way that it was defensive or in response to provocation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declaration_of_war_agai... : yup, that's Hitler claiming that it was in response to US provocation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_declaration_of_war_on... : yes, after history's most famous surprise attack there's a declaration with "Our Empire, for its existence and self-defense has no other recourse but to appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in its path" on the end.
This is something that was proven to be a lie. There were no WMDs, and Bush knew that there wasn't enough evidence that they existed.
Exactly. You worked on a training environment for the M777 howitzer. Better training means less chance that they hit the nearby friendly unit or civilians. If they can deliver accurate fire more quickly under pressure that means less time for the enemy to kill friendlies as well. Better trained soldiers is a win for all parties that are not the enemy.
I would like to live in a peaceful country and world. A peaceful country is one that chooses not to fight. If you cannot fight, you are not peaceful, you are helpless.
Yeah, a lot of mistakes have been made. Many of them will continue to be made. The hope is that we still leave the world better off than it was before.
Inaction can lead to just as bad a result, if not worse, than taking an educated action at all. It’s simple to sit there behind the desk reading articles and history when you’re not one making the decisions, good or bad.
We are participants in those decisions, on both sides. We are part of the targets of those decisions (eg domestic spying, provision of military equipment to local and regional police forces), as well as tacit supporters of those decisions (or do you think an American civilian can travel the world without being blamed for those mistakes? I have heard of a lot of Canadian flags being added to travel luggage...).
Our tax money pays to kill children in deserts. Our tax money pays to destabilize governments. Our parents and children and brothers and sisters who ARE veterans directly participate in executing those bad decisions. And then many of them commit suicide. My father shot himself three years ago, near his 50th anniversary of shipping out to Vietnam, because of the mistakes he was part of there and later which stayed with him for so many decades. I don't think our second-guessing of those decisions taken in our name is at all inappropriate.
> Yeah, a lot of mistakes have been made. Many of them will continue to be made.
There must be a threshold of "too many" or "too heinous" mistakes at which point one stops trying to improve an organization and instead withdraws support, right? Otherwise it may as well be a religion.
> It’s simple to sit there behind the desk...
Most of DoD employees, including enlisted men, sit behind desks most of the day.
The military is an excellent welfare institution. One of the limited forms of socially celebrated welfare in a lot of the United States, like the South.
Theres a lot of Palestinians subjected to war crimes that aren't very excited about the same US military action
There have been several successful actions, but we’re talking about the net impact not specific instances.
We outspend every other country by a lot, including China and Russia combined... and then the next three added on top. We are not the only world power who has a moral obligation to keep the world safe, if that is what you say we are doing.
I say this as the son of an Army veteran who died to 5 different cancers caused from agent orange, only 3 of which would the VA cover after we fought (hard) with them. And the cousin to a Navy admiral whose almost up to his 25 years.
The fact of the matter is the US is one of only 3 powers that can help maintain a stable world order, that reduces piracy, stops things like ISIS, and helps keep megolmanical dictators like Kim Jung Un in check.
You can argue other countries should be willing to contribute to that, but they don't. So those are your options China, Russia, or the US. You let me know which one you'd prefer, because as much as you don't like it those are your choices.
As for the EU, why would they meet their obligations when they could spend their money elsewhere? They're the fat 30 year old bachelor playing video games in their parents spare bedroom because they were never forced to leave. The US needs to take a step back and make them pay their own check at some point. It's time for the adults in the room to start adulting.
Unless you think China should regime change North Korea and risk the death and displacement of millions of people?
If they could get Kim out without massive disaster then they would have done it yesterday. He causes them a lot of issues and they have been very reluctant to help him - they would have been well within their rights to, for example, veto all sanctions against North Korea.
N. Korea's population and military would have broken away long ago under such conditions without some outside support.
It's very very well documented that the Chinese are incredibly displeased with Kim Jong Un. Plenty of retired generals talk and write about it.
NK's population and military breaking away without outside support is far from guaranteed to bring a better outcome for anyone. It's not clear to me a military dictatorship is going to be less brutal or repressive than the Kims and it's not clear either that the population could ever break from the yoke of the military should the Kims lose power.
Among those purposes is to ensure that dictators maintain power and can torture their citizens, to ensure that american companies have control over said countries natural resources and pollute the environment with impunity.
To like the American military is the same as to like the american police. Sure, beating up random black people is good for somebody, but that doesn't mean that there isn't good in not beating up random black people.
Otherwise the actions of the US Military and intelligence services would be much different, with longer term consequences thought through and impacts on peoples lives taken into broader consideration.
To me, it looks like the hope is actually maintaining financial control of the resources of other nations. Every action I see indicates that.
But the US is hardly alone in this respect either, just the most recent example.
Those damn soviets would have won if we didn’t torture US citizens.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-2022-2-beta-feature-hi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/f9awdv/microsplat_...
The thread
https://forum.unity.com/threads/can-unity-please-try-documen...
Go read the latest comments on page 3, from may 11, 2022
I develop with Unity, this is not good, microssplat is actually an infinitely better out of the box third party system than what UE5 has, but everything around it rots away not because of lack of care from Jason, but because lack of care from Unity's leadership and management. It takes Jason upwards of a month to two months to have his microssplat updates approved, Unity does not have a white gloves system to handle high value third party providers like him
I evaluated their tech early on, and it struck me right away at how poorly thought out some decisions were. Very basic things, too. One distinct issue I remember is not having any sort of an "Application" object or app-state pipeline interface/object that I can place my non-component logic into, stuff like checking various timers, handling app-level event hooks, and so on. Turns out, people attach this sort of logic to the Camera component. How the fuck did you get to that point without thinking about any of this?
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/RuntimeInitializeOn...
Edit: Alternatively just have a main scene and load/unload the other scenes as sub scenes, and put the application level objects in the main scene. Or use the above attribute and spawn the global objects and mark those object as "dont destroy on load" to make them survive the simple scene transitions. Or use normal C# static objects. There are so many ways to handle this, unity doesn't really block you from doing things, just code whatever you need.
It's a shame to see Unity supporting something like this just to increase their revenue.
The US funded the Mujahadeen (now the Taliban) to remove the Soviet aligned government
The US supported the Shah in Iran as an absolute monarch until a popular revolution removed him
The US funded Iraq to fight the newly formed republic of Iran, partly since Iran wanted to keep the oil for themselves
The US invaded Afghanistan to remove the extremists they propped up in the first place and spend trillions in taxpayer money to enrich US contractors
The US invaded Iraq later on because of their oil
US indiscriminately funded 'rebel' forces in Syria and Iraq, knowing many of them were extremists and would cause chaos in the region.
The US props up the Israeli state with funding and weapons, where they impose rule over Palestine despite the fact Israel do not allow them vote in Israeli elections
The US is currently stealing oil from Syrian oil-fields
The US is pumping weapons into Ukraine only to weaken Russia and force Ukraine into a deeply submissive vassal position where they owe the US hundreds of billions and must act only in the US's interests.
Does this sound like a military-industrial complex that is interested in peace or just in making money from chaos?
Tell me you don’t know geopolitics, without telling me…
I mean, why write so much and get such a biggie wrong.
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-I...
- People in suits give presentations for each other for 6 months
- The budget is used up
For traditional battlefield sim, Unity has hard competition from systems such as VBS that have extensive asset libraries and multiple training solutions delivered to western militaries over the last decade or so.
Getting upset over this is akin to yelling at Xerox for selling their machines to the IRS because you got audited. Or because counterfeit currency can be produced. It's just a tool doing its (neutral) job. So long as we want our society to invent progressive tech this is the exhaust of it; people you don't like might use the tech.
In the same way that I should be glad that the military takes advantage of poor kids and sends them to war by giving them college tuition? No thanks.
I know that some might dislike this on ethical grounds, but then again, I guess I couldn't really be opposed to something like Blender being used for 3D modelling for all sorts of domains, so my views of Unity shouldn't be that different, either. From a business perspective, that's just securing a lucrative deal for a high profile client.
That said, Unity still is one of the better options for 3D gamedev beginners: good workflows for assets and level design, lots of plugins and assets that are available, great platform support, good scripting with C# (performant enough AND reasonably easy to use), one of the best amounts of tutorials and guides available. Of course, the downsides are the instability of... pretty much everything in the last few years: the editor getting slower with each release and especially for large projects, VCS support with Git/LFS can be sub-optimal, URP/HDRP/legacy render pipeline split and problems with assets, DOTS being incomplete, multiple UI/input systems, new package management functionality and problems opening/upgrading 2-4 year old example projects, networking being deprecated and even the organization itself being a bit controversial.
If I wanted to make a game to sell without being skilled enough to grok Unreal, I'd probably still go for Unity. But personal projects? Godot. The open source nature allows me to dodge all of the above, even if something as basic as terrain support must come in the form of a 3rd party plugin in Godot and I probably wouldn't ship anything good anyways (at least until Godot 4 is stable with better 3D support and 5-10 years pass and there are enough assets to use as a crutch). Regardless, it seems to have reached enough of a critical mass to remain a viable option even in the future and get more love than something like Xenko/Stride (which I've mentioned before), or jMonkeyEngine (although that is lower level) and avoid situations like happened with Machinery altogether.
Back to Unity, though, I hope they stop implementing half baked functionality and spend 2-5 years fixing everything and working on consistency and stability instead. Which probably won't happen, much like in enterprise software rarely you get months/years to address all of the technical debt, but rather mostly keep implementing new features for direct business value.
Unity: allow me.
There's a huge amount of investment to make a game engine, and while public alternatives to everything is great, it's not necessarily cheaper than using already-existing solutions.