Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

I feel like any piece of software that's widely applicable to a whole industry of users (3d modelling, image editing, game engines, etc) is destined to eventually solidify on an fully production quality open source solution that everyone contributes to.

It's already happened for 3d modelling (Blender) and digital painting (Krita), and it feels like gamedev is an even better market for this to happen in than those because all the users are also going to be capable of contributing to development of the engine.

From the outside Godot looks like it's the closest to ready for building proper AAA quality 3d games.

I've also actually used Bevy and if you're a fan of rust and ECS based development it's really nice for building procedurally generated stuff that doesn't need a level editor, or for building 2d games and relying on a 3rd party editor like Tiled or LDtk. However there's plenty of places where it's still a bit rough around the edges, like dealing with more complex multi stage asset loading pipelines.

You give couple of examples, but we have counter examples. Office, Windows, Photoshop are monopoly for more than 2 decades.

Windows has Linux and Photoshop has Krita. the open source equivalents aren't neck and neck competitors, but they grew to a point of influence where you can't ignore them. They have sizeable communites, and various professional usage.

Office is the rough one, though. There's LibreOffice, but it never seemed to improve on its UX. and in the meantime Google docs came and became the big competitor.

I don't think it's true, Blender happened to work and is now used by professionals, but some tools like PhotoShop or Adobe Premiere, Ableton, or even Word/Excel for that matter, don't have an equivalent that could replace them anytime soon.

The 3D modelling industry is bifurcated. The "low-end" of town (like hobbyists or indie studios) uses blender, and the high-end of town (like the sfx shops that do hollywood movies) uses things like maya.

In games Blender is used at all levels. From indie to AAA. At most studios as a 3d artist you are able to use any package you want and for newer artists Blender is increasingly what they know. Sometimes there are custom toolchains that require Max or Maya but often then artist still use Blender for most of the work, export fbx and import that into another soft just for final steps.

I'm now at AA level studio and for this category Blender is eating competition super fast!

fair enough. Blender's penetration in game development has been very high in the past decade. There's even a nice game engine called Armory3D which is in fact a blender "plugin" (it's quite a good engine i hear - never really used it properly in anger to know fore sure tho).

This sentiment/state you describe used to be true in the past, but it's no longer true.

Blender has really come a long long way!

Photoshop is an interesting one. I used to be a power user for years, but have since mostly moved to Krita. For a "I don't know what I want or need" type of manipulating images, Photoshop is great. For painting, it's not even close to being the best (I agree with the parent comment that Krita is much better).

The reason it's so popular is because there wasn't anything else for a long time, and also probably because it's still lobbied to unis.

AAA quality? No it's not there, but it's certainly been improving on a number of fronts.

Yeah I'm not saying Godot looks AAA ready, just that it's much closer than every other option.

Although I would love to see how far a code only engine core + separate third party level editor tooling model could go, it appeals to my intuitive feel of what the "right" way to build software is.

I have casually evaluated Godot so I am moderately aware of its capabilities. The thing I did not evaluate well though is how well structured its data and asset pipelines are. The big thing a AAA engine needs (aside from rendering, console support, and perf and all that) is the ability to scale production to hundreds or thousands of programmers and artists. The ability of an engine to scale in this way is generally learned painfully by doing, and I'm looking forward to see how Godot fares on larger scale projects over time.

There's hardly any AAA titles that use Unity, the most well known ones are games like Hearthstone, Cuphead, Beat Saber. These are great games but they're not exactly GTA 6 or Call if Duty.

Yeah it's a historical difference, and Unity literally kicked out its best chance to compete in that space with DOTS.

But on mobile it is king, and mobile is starting to get games that can rival AAA studios in presentation. Genshin Impact and the rest of Hoyoverse's games are all in Unity, and while not confirmed I wouldn't be surprised if Project Mugen is also running Unity (given that most of NetEase's portfolio relies on it). So it has the capability to handle AAA games, even if no one in the west is utilizing it.

As someone in the industry, those games don't actually fit my traditional mental model of what "AAA" means. AAA doesn't directly correlate with revenue for example. The general rule of thumb I kind of go by is that a game is likely to be "AAA" if it uses motion captured skeletal and facial animation sequences.

By solidify do you just mean "a feasible option"? Maya is still very popular if not moreso than blender.

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