Terraria developer bashes Unity, donates $200k to open source alternatives
lemm.ee
lemm.ee
There is a PR shaping up to produce "libgodot"; Godot as a shared lib for embedding in other code. Users reporting use cases and what they are currently doing with that:
* embedding in .net to flip that script
* embedding in Blender so assets can be viewed in engine and a tighter integration created
* VR applications
* Miguel de Icaza's(yes that one!) SwiftGodotKit
* Image export, a UI system, 3d viewport, asset conversion automation, etc.
Really cool stuff!
Looks like it lost a little momentum in the past few weeks but it's working for people and there is a path forward to getting accepted by maintainers. It's also on the DotNet contributors meeting agenda for tomorrow..
But it's just an .so that can be used in any app through the C ABI I gather.
Don't even get me started on GDScript.
I still wonder how the discussions at Unity went, thinking that a per-install fee for already released games would be a great idea. Sounds like the result of a compromise.
"Can't we just pay the fines?"
"No. The fines scale as a percent of revenues."
Otherwise Facebook could've just founded Privacy Violation Inc and done all the bad shit there. There's just one employee, Frank, and he's paid minimum wage.
Now if, for example, Youtube fucks up the GDPR fines are calculated on the global annual revenue of all of Alphabet Inc.
You can always miscalculate.
I mean, how can you not see that? Or was the thinking, screw that market, we are only catering for AAA games now? Even then it makes little sense as the revenue share like Unreal does, would make more money.
It likeley was something along the lines of: "they need us, they will have to find a way to pay us, if they want to continue existing."
Indies are a necessary casualty in the eyes of Unity (or more accurately: they're just not considered).
Unity is the engine behind some of the most popular mobile gacha games. MiHoYo (Genshin/Honkai Impact) uses it for everything, so does Type/Moon (Fate Grand Order). They want a slice of that pie. That's where the real money is. Those games rake in hundreds of millions of dollars every month.
Hence also why the charge is by install and can be waived if you use Unity's adtech offerings.
For 90-95% if not more of their users the financial aspect is not such a big deal. The way they announced it and planning to implement (retroactively and how do they even track “installs”) is a way bigger issue.
I worked as a community manager for a free-to-play mobile gaming company in the US about 10+ years ago.
The gacha mechanic just absolutely ruined games for normal, everyday users. You had random moms and grandmas write in with the sweetest messages asking for features or reporting a bug.
For the most part, their feedback and requests went right into the garbage can.
Meanwhile, we had people from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore spending $40K USD per week on in app purchases.
Gacha is effectively gambling and exploiting users' propensities for addictive behavior. We would jokingly call it the "Gotch Ya!" mechanic.
Feature roadmaps, bug fixes and A/B tests were all about "optimizing the funnel" -- i.e., how do we get these whales to spend more money or more parts of the app.
Good god, it was so demoralizing.
China (and some other countries). They won’t declare their full revenue and you won’t be able to find it out, it’s expensive to admin and there is hardly any legal recourse anyway.
Also their biggest clients would probably hate rev. share even more than this.
Nearly all worthless trash games on steam, those that need more resources than anything else, those where you easily get stuck, those with generally no gameplay. Shine a very bad light at unity.
A unity splash screen is and always was a sign that the game might won't work on my setup.
Maybe this will drive away all these shitty games. That's definitely mostly just good for the brand, but IMO kinda necessary as the brand stands for shitty games for some.
but why?
when the cost scales per install, it shouldn't hit small trashy games harder, should it?
(or am i missing something like large one-time payment?)
besides, the rates only kick in after your profit reaches 200k so it wouldn't do anything
Go to steam, sort any 3d category by price and be amazing by the amount of reskinned unity shooters, RPGs, whatever.
Those engines might not be at the same technical level as Unity (yet), which shouldn't be a surprise given the way lower budget and man-power behind them. But they are getting better - and they do have some massive advantages over proprietary engines. One example for such an advantage would be that you can just fork the code, if they do something you don't like. They can't hold your game hostage to force changes on you.
That being said I'm pretty sure that Godot is about to close this gap before 2025, given the recent boost in popularity.
[1]https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/c...
My initial impressions are pretty positive. They moved to .Net 6 from mono with Godot 4. Support for deployment to Android with c# is coming in 4.2. There also seems to be interest and discussions around how AOT can be used in the future.
The engine is super easy to build and I think I actually built it with .Net 7 haha. Others are already using .Net 8.
C# is a horrible language, but if you must use it then you can in godot. You can use c++ too.
C# has certainly accumulated a lot of history. From being OOP heavy, Windows centric, closed-source, with mostly enterprisey frameworks/libs to more multi-paradigm, cross-plaform, open-source, with iteratively more sane frameworks/libs. A lot has changed (and is still changing).
Modern C# is getting more streamlined, but there are limitations to this due to backwards compatibility, and old boilerplate-heavy syntax is still supported, which leads to having multiple ways of doing the same thing.
While I really like the direction the language is taking now, the official documentation of the new stuff is often sparse or scattered all over the place and a lot of answers on Stack Overflow are dated. Diving into an ecosystem like that, which is in a middle of a big transition, can certainty be overwhelming.
The only tip I can provide is that if you ever try it again, try it in combination with a good IDE like Rider. C# is designed to be used in combination with an IDE. Rider can automate lots of things and analyzers can offer helpful guidance.
Rider is absolutely amazing. Among other reasons due to:
> Rider can automate lots of things and analyzers can offer helpful
I will give it another try but after some time. I really need to undo some of the damage it did to my brain :-)
Forcing people to contribute sounds like a great idea, until nobody wants to be forced and everybody prefers the other project that doesn't force them, and then they all go ahead and contribute to that other project anyway because they want to, not because they were forced to (in large part because the practical benefits of getting your changes into the upstream vastly outstrip any theoretical "my code is better" fantasies).
Faster adoption of non-GPL projects leads to faster growth of those projects in the form of more contributions as well. Other than a group of mostly quite old GPL projects the momentum and activity and success is clearly with more MIT-like licenses than GPL-like licenses, again in large part because the benefits to you of getting your patches into the upstream proves to be a powerful motivator that is not also a demotivator the way the threat of being forced to contribute is.
Yes, one can point out a newish successful GPL project here or there and a couple of pro-GPL ecosystems but the vast majority of recently successful project starters are using MIT-ish licenses for good reasons.
Let's be honest here, MIT-like pleases the almighty corporations and it is they that have the very good reasons, not the bootlickers.
if a developer sells a game they must then provide the code to build the game, then the person can distribute that code to everyone else, bypassing the need to pay for a game.
It literally makes the need for cracking unnecessary, which I agree with, but I'm not going to pretend like any game company is going to release their source code in the year 2023... intentionally
I was actually involved in an engineering software package that used XNA. It was resurrected a few years ago after close to a decade on ice. We were sure glad that FNA existed because Microsoft had dropped XNA like a hot potato. Yeah, I wouldn't trust them again either.
Having console support alone puts it in the top 1%.
Still waiting to see a WebGL game that matches Infinity Blade, released in 2011 alongside iPhone 3G and iPhone 4.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDvPIhCd8N4
Meaning, those graphic API are able to deliver at least PS 3 graphics, yet due to browser support, specially the way browsers blacklist drivers, download sizes, and lack of tooling on par with native, very few professional developers bother, hence streaming.
To answer sibling comments: Graphics aren't a limiting factor for indie games. And a Three.js game can be put onto Steam, I'm pretty sure.
0: earth.suncapped.com
that's a lot narrower than you think, I wouldn't even put it in the dozens. Maybe a few dozen if we include all the in-house proprietary engines. Being easy to port to console =/= native console support.
But yes, a few dozen out of hundreds of engines is the 99th percentile.
But loading an existing project with a valid Library folder and working interactively in the editor should feel pretty snappy.
The company management just totally sullied all that goodwill in a week however.
Bloated compared to what other game engine that does the equivalent exactly? Some of the biggest games today are made with Unity, for instance, Genshin Impact.
Unity isn't bloated, quite the contrary. It's fairly modular for a game engine and authoring tool.
It's daunting with how many tools it gives you but it doesn't force very much onto you and gives you a ton of flexibility.
I'm as happy as as everyone else about this momentum away from Unity since their business leaders clearly hate developers, but I really like the Unity game engine. From a software design standpoint, I didn't understand how powerful composition can be (versus inheritance) until I started working with Unity GameObjects.
Which has kind of always been the problem with Unity. Once you start getting into the meat of it there's always some issue. Most recently their obsession with DOTS and the fragmented rendering pipelines were really off-putting and enough to get me to switch to Unreal. I also found a lot of the features barebones for a very long time, like 2D tilesets, landscape editing tools, nav mesh, animation tooling, etc. None of this matters to companies with actual teams, but for indie development I've found Unreal to be a much better match for me than Unity.
That being said Unity has come a very long way in the recent years and the engine can be a joy to work with (as long as it's not crashing and misbehaving, which it does). But that's history at this point. There is no way I'll ever attempt to create a game in Unity again.
Unless you're implying a large chunk of the features aren't useful to anyone?
Ambitious OS projects have been lifting up entire software fields and provide a stable foundation.
Hopefully it gets some more funding and attention, but if you enjoyed Unity and are looking for a replacement then Bevy just isn’t it - it would be like swapping Microsoft Word for a html editor.