Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

It's Unreal that they're being silent right now.

 

it is yeah... because the community is talking really bad and that is now a trend, i'm been watching forums from other engines because i'm trying many of them and all i can see is people porting their games to those engines, the exodus is real man and big, is sad, but those communities are now bigger = more help on those engines = faster changes

 

Requoting for visibility!

 

They don't need to talk. They are sitting and watching the download counter skyrocket.

 

The timing was reasonably good because, while I had one Unity project under active development, it was in place where a re-implementation in Unreal would help more than hurt.

So, I had been working a bit off-and-on in UE4 for a while in parallel with the Unity version, just to get my old, old Unreal chops back, and as part of evaluating the potential jump. Then, with the announcement and preview release of UE5, I made the hard decision to make the full commitment to Unreal.

My experience in moving full time to Unreal has been overall very positive. Things that just work out of the box include networking, easy look-dev, a rich post-processing stack, built-in data-driven tools/editing and more. Plus, that one, single render pipeline! Even fundamental new lighting and materials features are interoperable within the existing pipeline, most enabled or disabled with a toggle. Incredibly refreshing.

Downsides for many devs are the things everyone knows about: not as suitable for 2D/casual, reliance on Blueprints, compiled C++ vs C# scripting, and a bit of a learning curve. And Unreal isn’t really roll-your-own gaming toolkit friendly like Unity. I will say, I normally intensely dislike visual scripting in favor of coding, but mixed Blueprints and C++, once you get your head around it, is quite productive and I find that I can blaze through a lot of development with the hybrid. It grew on me and now I enjoy it.

There are very specific Unreal ways of doing things, and one ignores that at their own peril. Once you grok that, you find that it has you covered for almost everything you fundamentally want to do. But be prepared to spend time learning all those ins and outs of the Unreal way. There is often ONE was of doing a certain thing, but thankfully, it is usually the “right” way in the context of Unreal. When I let go and accepted that, things just opened up for me and my development flow. On the flipside, I am happy to NOT be developing so much raw code from the ground up or buying plugins for systems that are missing in Unity. With Unreal, it’s a bit like that old Ragu sauce commercial: It’s in there!

Note that I spent years and years of my career developing game engines, developer tools, and more, so I know in detail how the sausage is made. My experience switching to Unreal is going to be very different than someone without equivalent experience. That being said, I recommend that devs give UE5 and other engines a try, see what resonates and has the elements (technical, workflow, business case, etc) that would work.

And gaining proficiency in more than one engine/tool set has many, many advantages.

 

This situation is unreal.

 

This is a really good overview of the SpatialOS incident:

Quick summary of the video commentary: Back in 2019, Unity had changed its terms of service to effectively forbid the usage of SpatialOS, a middleware solution for online games. The community's response was negative, and Unity eventually had to walk back some of their changes.

--

Also, I find the commentary at 6 minutes and 20 seconds to be very interesting.

At 6 minutes and 20 seconds the narrator references a blog article authored by Joachim Ante:

https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform

"Over the last week there was much confusion, and untrue statements were raised which we refuted. But most importantly we listened to you, our community that felt that the End User License Agreement (EULA)/Terms of Service (TOS) was too restrictive."

Notice the phrasing: "confusion" and "listened to you"

Sound familiar?

Unity was gaslighting us then and they are gaslighting us now.

 

You really are just making things up as you go, aren't you?

The entire Godot code base on GitHub is managed through an organization account. You can see that even from the URL: https://github.com/godotengine/godot. It is not a privately-owned repository. The code base has over 2000 contributors. It is no more uncertain in its future suitability than Unity, or Unreal, or any other engine. At any time any of the companies making engines for profit could go belly-up, or decide to stop producing their product, or do what Unity does and just completely self-destruct. Sure, if it doesn't meet your needs now, you probably shouldn't count on it reaching suitability for you by the time you need to release your game, but you shouldn't be doing that with any engine. Don't make plans for a Unity game based on unfulfilled promises either (and there have been plenty of those over the years).

If you want to switch to Unreal, or ride out the storm here because you're an asset store creator, by all means feel free to do so. But I really wish you'd quit trying to FUD up the conversation about Godot. There have been plenty of legitimate concerns raised about the engine in this thread, and so far none of them have come from you.

 

Wow. 14012 messages in this thread in a little bit over a week. That's > 2k per day on average. ~84 per hour. ~1.3 per minute for a week.

 

Is this considered a downside as your post relates to the migration from Unity to Unreal?

 

of course, it's a free forum

 

They announced new fees too late. 4 months is not enough to switch to a new engine/write your own engine/make some other decision. A great gift for the New Year.

 

Sorry if this has already been posted but I've found some really important info that Unity needs to see. It clears up all "confusion", maybe @Mike-Geig can look at it and get inspiration for his calculator.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16nfdxs/never_gets_old/

 

Not for me, especially since for my work, so much logic coding is in Blueprints, and C++ is reserved for mostly modular BP exposed code and performant enhancements, as well as some networking/server deployment customizations. Plus, I have years of C++ and lower-level coding experience. Not a big stretch for me.

But those who have invested years exclusively in heavy Unity C# scripting will likely have some extra effort transitioning, and just may not like it in general. But it is worth a try to see if it clicks.

 

FYI. Stock down 1.86% today. On similar volume than yesterday.

 

Can anyone recommend a real and credible alternative to Unity for webgl? I would need an engine relatively optimized in terms of size and performance with a dynamic asset loading system (asset bundle style). I also need a decent editor, because I work with a lot of graphic designers who don't have any programming skills. PlayCanvas seems like a possible choice to me, but I don't know anyone who has used it. Some advice?

 

Irregardless of your chosen language, visual scripting is a huge readjustment, and a fundamentally different way of doing things. Many people just plain don't like it. I realized it when I tried Unity's Playmaker for a while. Great asset, great developer, but I just didn't like it, never will. I'm far more productive with traditional scripting and it's far easier for me to problem solve with it. So Unreal will never be a viable alternative for someone like me.

 

Exactly. Unity is still a great editor and dev tool. You can have a separate runtime build, but it becomes difficult to maintain both. It's certainly possible, but whether or not it makes sense for your game is the matter to decide.

 

They are reading this thread and eating pop-corn.

 

Any company should know any attempt to make money fast will only result in it's failure in the near future..
the ideal solution is find a fair middle place between the needs of the customers and their needs..
nothing exceed one another.. then maybe.. this business relationship will survive longer..

 

We desperately need that.

We should keep ownership of the last version of we disagree with the new TOS.

We should also be protected against tied products. Unity sells a game engine, that's what we should get. They shouldn't be allowed to use it to force us to subscribe to other services at the expense of users who don't want them or competitors with a better offer.

There is no reason for a company to be against that unless they have a weak product that wouldn't sell without anticonsumer practices.

 

Juan is the maintainer right (decides what code gets merged or not) - basically the most important position in the project (regardless if he doesnt code himself)

 

maybe construct3 . but it cost money

 

The Godot community is indeed infamous for being quite cultist:

https://waiting-for-blue-robot.gitlab.io/cult/blue_robot_cult.html

 

Hoping that they will read, I take this opportunity to advise them to sell everything to a credible company and change the CEO. It seems to me the only way to regain trust

 

This is a really great read, but for different reasons than you might think.

 

that's not unusual though and many great FOSS projects are massively political - same as companies, just everything is out in the open for people to see (common misconception is FOSS is all sunshine and rainbows actually its mainly egos and politics)

 

You seem to know your stuff about Godot... I have heard one guy convincingly explaining how it is built on bad code/foundations and so will never become a Unity replacement and another convincingly explaining how it is now basically all new code and the sky is the limit for the future. Who do you think is right?

 

Thanks. Construct3 is good, but I need a 3D engine

 

Do you have any other must have features?

 

If nothing else, you can move to Unreal 4.27. Unreal 4 had webgl support AFAIK. (I'm not targeting web, so you will need to investigate for yourself)

 

I know nothing about PlayCanvas, but it's a 3D WebGL game engine. Good luck!

 

Just thought of another "exploit" of this silly new unity monetization :

Continue using unity, deliver your game, and if successful, pay one of the numerous porting companies to port your game on something else - if it makes sense financially of course.

But the craziness of the whole thing is that it could actually make sense financially.

 

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. The guys and gals who checked out Godot's code and then wrote blog posts somewhat cherry picked their examples and then extrapolated that to the whole engine. They also self admittedly weren't familiar with the engine so might not have used best practices and posted a lot of presumptions, not all of which are correct. That said, Godot's performance, especially 3D performance is far from Unity's or Unreal's and it won't get there anytime soon. There is intent to fix some of the valid shortcomings but these are not easy or simple. It'll take awhile.

It all depends on the kind of project you're making in the end and it's pretty trivial to benchmark various options for your use cases. Godot can be way faster than many here will ever need, and it also can be so slow it's unusable for just as many users who are doing high end 3D at scale. I'd wager Godot is good enough for the vast majority of indies making indie games.

 

My recommendation is just to try it by yourself and do not relay on other people opinions. Godot can be the best solution for you or the worst nightmare depending on the type of game you want to develop. We tried Godot 4 for a 3D game with realistic art it and it simply does not meet with our requirements at this moment. We didn't tried Godot 3. Some people say 3D is more stable in v3.

 

Disclaimer: I am primarily a unity dev, so take this with a grain of salt, this is just my analysis based on reading about godot recently.

Guessing you are referring to that guy who did an API teardown and noted that a lot of godot APIs are less performant than they should be due to triggering allocation and other reasons.

This is true today. It matters for some games more than others. (battlebit might be more difficult as a result, while hearthstone would be fine)

I expect over time those APIs will get fixed by someone. Some APIs will require users to switch to a newer API which would require some work on their part if they wanted to upgrade.

TLDR: Example of a way that godot isnt there yet today, but not a hard blocker for the future.

 

Looking at how nearely the entire ecosystem is against Unity your post shows that you're just talking crap.

 

Just to give you an idea, the app is a sort of metaverse for virtual events and trade shows. The UI is an HTML layer and the logic is half js and half c#. We build modular 3D environments, so we need asset bundles. I also need to load textures dynamically to brand various 3D objects.

 

Godot 4 was a massive overhaul of Godot 3

 

What I'm really seeing out of this, is that Unity took some effort, but not an extensive amount of effort to get really good mobile graphics, and the no effort graphics were good enough for many. Unreal doesn't really have that since their pipelines aren't set up for it (disclaimer: I've not used Unreal in several years) since they lack something like URP which is focused more on efficiency than fidelity.

Open source engines are going to better handle efficiency, and you can build something similar to what Unity had, but you're going to have to build it up from what's there.

So if you're not spending a lot of your available development time on graphics programming, you're either going to have fewer features or less efficiency if moving off of Unity.

I could be off here, like I said, I've not used Unreal in some time. But that's how it's coming across to me.

 

Cool. Thanks a lot. I am planning to go with it. It should be ok for my needs from what I have seen. But I can't say I don't worry about hitting a wall months down the line and finding out I wasted my time

 

Thanks. Yeah I am tinkering with it during this s*** show and I really like it and my instinct is saying it'll do fine. Just scared to waste time (again ha)

 

Unreal definitely read unity's forum, when they started the whole unreal 5 nanite lumen super punch out marketing roll over, they specifically used lingo that was used in this forum to criticized unity, such as "we dog food our engine" and many more, it was so laser focus that was scary. I follow unreal's youtube channel, so the shift in language was very notable. The only they didn't addressed is running on low hardware, which is why I couldn't shift.

Hi to the unreal guy who is reading this, your work is seen and appreciated

 

UUU Hi Unreal guy reading the forums, pls give me an Epic Games Store exclusive deal for my game, k thx <3

 

No matter where you intent to go: benchmark first
e: Most of the time it's pretty clear what the hot path will be so it's reasonable in my opinion to mock that hot path before jumping in and hoping for the best.

 

What the hell, man


we told you

when you have the Infinite Forkuyomi jutsu:

you just can't be stopped!

For all time!!

 

Check out haxe.org/blog/shirogames-stack/ Not bad.
I also tried out cocos creator but it wasn't great in my view.

 

2D would be no problem at all, 3D would be a little more limited for now.

The Godot devs have said that they are working on more 3D performance and replacing the built-in physics with Jolt which will vastly improve it.

Just be sure to optimize, optimize, optimize. But don't plan on a large open world yet.

 

Yeah that was him ha. Thanks a lot

Good thinking thanks. I'll throw lot's of testing at it

Awesome thanks

 

you want to say the same thing about blender for 3d modeling or...?