What the heck is ironSource?

Mergers come with restructuring and restructuring is not just expensive but often comes with pretty substantial layoffs.

 

Yeah but they're not doing that, pretty much most of their acquisitions have been related to their business and/or the engine. Unity Connect was not quite a social network, more like a tool to facilitate for example hiring freelancers or just people to work with for your project. But it clearly didn't pan out so it was shut down, thus not wasting anymore resources. Again, nothing unusual in the business world, take a look at how many side projects Google has killed...

One thing I can agree with is that I hope to see more actual innovation in the engine space, similarly how Epic did with UE5, solving actual problems that devs face every day. One of such problem was Realtime GI, Epic clearly did a lot of research there and put it all into the engine, same with mesh compression and streaming technology. And similarly with character creation tools or free scanned asset pack - this was definitely great step in the direction for democratizing gamedev, which is/was ironically Unity's mission but what can be more democratizing than giving out free AAA content creation tools in the hands of everybody? I'd love to see some improvement in that area...

 

Megascans on UE is one of the most useful things I have ever seen. Unity definitely has a run for their money with that feature.

 

Been using Unity for 15 years as a hobbyist. The smart people that have helped me to learn through their expertise by reading unity answers / forums etc. are the real heroes of this engine. Not the theives that are all about money. Parasites feeding off this community is depressing.
I wish we had a consortium of devs and enthusiasts to bring that technical knowledge to something more open like blender is. We would atleast have a path to a more stable future and one which would be aligned for us creators.

 

You literally just described Godot.

 

Is Godot anywhere near Unity though. I'm using HDRP on my project at present and reliant on volumetric lighting especially. Can Godot deploy to as many platforms like unity are just a couple of things off the top of my head i can think of.
I'd be happy to jump ship. But I'm not the smartest guy out there and to learn a new language etc. quite frankly terrifies me. I will have to look at other options like Godot as you mentioned though. I just can't see a future here anymore. Even as a hobbyist like myself.

 

So even bigger company now, and shifting more focus away from the core engine. This isn't good for people that just want a good engine. Just historically you rarely see innovation come out of what Unity is becoming.

Great time for other engines to break into the market though.

I had some small hope that their engine rewrite and DOTS would come together. They had a good start when it was a small core team doing the work and then as soon as it started to merge into their larger culture things just slowed to a crawl and started going sideways.

RIP Unity as a great engine for indie developers who want to do more then take monetization to the next level.

 

No, but the thing is that Unity has been around for over a decade and Godot in its current state is still very new. The thing you just described, however, is how Godot functions from a development perspective.

 

Why Godot and not Xenko, though... I mean stride 3d.

 

Because people have actually heard of Godot and there's a wealth of learning resources for it?

 

If that's what matters then we still have unity.

Regarding decade, Godot has been in development for 8 years. Also, Stride 3d has been in development as long as Godot. And before Godot we had Ogre3d.

Actually thinking about it, why doe "people heard of it" and "wealth of learning resources" even supposed to matter? Isn't it supposed to be about "best tool for the job"?

 

It would help if you considered the angle this is being approached from.

Godot in anything resembling its modern incarnation (see: reasonably capable of 3D at all) is only around 4 years old. And, again, resources matter. Barely anyone has even heard of Stride 3D because of this. On top of that, Ogre3D was always little more than the most basic definition of a game engine, one that has long since become antiquated: an SDK collection built around a specific goal.

Because you're viewing it the wrong way around: the reason it has people hearing of it and a wealth of learning resources is because of its applicability.

 

I understand the business sense, and I do believe their revenue took a hit because of new privacy changes. I've toyed with UE a bit, but has anyone here actually developed a mobile app with UE? I see that it has templates, but Unity is so focused on mobile that I imagine it's performance and ability to build to Android/iOS still sets it apart from any competitor, i.e. Godot/UE or other. Am I wrong?

 

I hope it can get close to parity with unity in few years. I'm guessing that would be too optimistic thinking. It does sound ideal though in respect of being an opensource engine.

 

The point is that "independent free open unity alternative" does not exist.
Either it is free and open, or people heard about it and there's wealth of resources about it. Ther's some sort of sliding scale between those two point, but you can't have both.

And if the idea is to find a unity replacement to ship a project with it, then how well known it is shouldn't matter, as it is the case of "the right tool for the job". Maybe the right tool for the job is irrlicht with openscenegraph and ODE bolted on, who knows. cocos2d is still around, sfml is still around, libsdl is still around, idtech engines are still around (if you can handle GPL license), and you're writing your own engine, I believe.

If the idea is to spend the next decade doing unpaid work in hopes of building a unity replacement, then it is another story.

The reason why people heard of godot is actually because of the "godot prophets" that kept trying to spread the word on other forums, due to feeling strongly about it. Such behavior is a major red flag for me, and those people are the reason why I'm not planning to touch this particular engine for at least the decade. Personally, due to that behavior I believe that investing time and paying attention to another engine that is not Godot would be a good idea. Hence the mention of stride3d.

 

So basically you've just ignored how people have been doing that with Unity for 13 years now? For a while Unity even had a dedicated evangelist thing going on.

 

I'm unhappy. I can see a company that laid off game dev staff with the explanation that it was for priorities. Turns out their priorities include malware and ads.

And it's a merger. Unity already did do a merger with an ad company before. This will mean most of Unity will be focused on ads not tech.

When asked for explanation by everyone, the response was an investor blogpost.


PS. some people that have been here since 2006 are leaving.

 

I have not run into many unity prophets. I have run into single unreal prophet. I have run into multiple godot prophets.

Compared to number of games shipped and users, godot has the most prophets. Hence it is the red flag.

 

What are you talking about?...
1. A wealth of available resources is highly important as it improves productivity. The theoretically best tool for the job is useless if it is hard to learn and thus cause cost due to slow development.
2. How is "free and open" an opposite of "people heard about it and there's wealth of resources"?
No component of the other has an immediate influence on the other.
Of course on the actual market that may be the case.
3. Thought Godot is free and open and yet fairly well known with sufficient resources.

However am surprised that Godot is already 8 years old because indeed its feature set is far from Unity unfortunately.
Guess similar to the good old GameMaker (Studio) which I personally started with, the aim is simply something else (more oriented towards 2D and Indie).

 

You're trying to justify entirely irrational behaviour and then pointing at something with lacking resources to actually learn how to use the engine you are advocating.

That's because Godot was pretty much just released as an open source project that long ago but didn't even have PBR materials until the 3.0 version (see: what we know Godot to be), which released in early 2018.

 

I've seen a lot of ups and downs with Unity, but I admit this latest news is giving me a moment of existential panic.

 

Welcome to being human.

It is not. I only need docs. I don't need quadrillion tutorials describing how to move a cube. Docs for godot are not good.

Because money drives development and opensource project will not have a lot of money. A commercial engine will be advancing at faster speed, which is demonstrated by your next statement.

See Unreal Engine progress, for example. Funding matters, because funding allows you to hire talent.

Unity engine was launched in 2005. Unity 5 was released ten years later.
So, if you want feature parity, Godot has two years to make a replacement for unity 5, documentation included. Do you see it happening? I don't.

 

I don't know much about IronSource but it doesn't sound very exciting to me. Still, for now, I feel like Unity as it is is still a good, but for the future, I feel a lot of people will have a look at the alternatives at least.

 

ironSource SDK for Unity is actually very good. It's much easier to integrate than some other ones out there like Facebook and Google

 

Not a good few months for unity.
Unity answers, Gigaya, and now this.
I especially have a problem with Gigaya.


The issue is that this shows unity is tone-deaf, at an extreme level. Honestly it shouldn't even be possible, but they really have a knack for it.

It paints a very clear path of what unity, as a company, cares about and plans to focus on.
to this day, HDRP/URP teams are much smaller than most people imagine..

 

The issue isn't the SDK, the issue is the company, their history, and UT's priorities.

 

That was around the time i started learning unity, programming, animation, 3d modelling etc. etc. I have a lot to thank unity for. Before that i was a DJ and producer but lost my hearing. Going from such a transition of lifestyle was tough to say the least. But unity was a light in a very dark place for me. It's so sad to see what this has become.

 

I believe Unity has announced that serving people wanting to make games for mobile, like yourself, is a top priority. And I do respect that.

It's just not for me.

 

Try Flax Engine instead. It's 3D renderer is much more advanced than Godot. It'll even get dynamic GI soon - that one feature Unity has always refused to implement.

 

Godot's community, contributors and funding seem to be way further along. Never heard of Stride 3D before.

I can see that happening, actually. There's enough funding and manpower behind it. Godot 4.0/4.1 will be out by then and it'll have stuff like automatic mesh LODs, and manual HLOD integrated on an engine level and not abandoned in some random Github repo.

While Unity are merging with ad companies and firing engine/game developers, Godot people are solving actual game developer problems. Given enough time and Unity's neglect, Godot could very well take a significant piece of Unity's game developer pie.

4.0/4.1 will show if the engine will truly take off.

Godot is getting a new Vulkan based renderer with a new Signed Distance Field Global Illumination which is also dynamic. Can't comment much on quality though, it doesn't seem to aim for the HDRP crowd but the pre-alpha footage some people have captured looks decent:

 

They called blender a joke once, now it's behind most films and games in some capacity or other. That's a large chunk of revenue indeed.

 

You can if you like. Last I tried Godot I wasn't impressed with it thanks to how behind everyone else it is, and UE5 is a completely different experience due to everything being non-standard.

 

didn't godot get a lot of funding from epic?

might be great project for programmers with the chops to contribute. instead of waiting for unity killer, you could help create it.

what is non-standard? Or rather, what is standard?

 

Well, standard is to program via a comfortable programming language, not blueprints or C++

 

C++ is extremely standard.

 

There are two main coordinate systems in the industry and neither of them are used by Unreal, commonly named concepts like raytrace have a completely different name, etc.

 

Godot is definitely not there yet, but in 2-5 years it could be. Do you suppose Unity will refocus on game development in that time? I doubt that.

Mark Brown said his piece on Twitter which I have to agree with it: https://twitter.com/gamemakerstk/status/1547313023236427777

Epic gave 250k Megagrant to Godot. Kefir Games gave them 120k. Meta (Facebook) Reality Labs gave them a grant as well for an undisclosed amount to improve VR support. There were a couple of other grants from companies and they got their Patreon going as well. They're not swimming in cash, but it's enough to keep things going.

While Unreal is not competing with Unity directly, they are funding the competition lol.

 

anything else?

certainly more than self-explanatory names right?

 

Nothing that immediately stands out to me but then I still have a ways to go in learning the engine.

 

Yeah not for writing games. It's a "system language", aka you use it for software that can get close to the bare metal. Common in embedded software and similar industrial fields.
In Games you do only need its benefits occasionally (when you'd use a C++ compiled DLL or more recently, Burst in unity) because most of the time, developing in C++ is simply slower.
Also from what I heard, due to the general design towards blueprints, it's not as easy to switch to it in Unreal like it would be if you'd start with visual scripting in unity and then switch to C#.

 

i see.

i think it may be easier for somebody who doesn't already have preconceptions/notions. i came from unity but didnt have any real programming experience so to me everything seems perfectly reasonable. but when i need to ask programming questions i still have some unity programmers i ask and usually whatever they tell me, it's not hard to translate to unreal. But i only do baby stuff.

 

...how old are you?

C and C++ both have been extremely common in gamedev for ages. Aside from modern engines like CryEngine and O3GE both using it from dev perspectives and Godot as well through GDNative, C and C++ were absolute long running standards for gamedev. Every engine was likely written in either and developers would also use it for specific classes through API use. Most game engines, in fact, were often just C and C++ APIs you would make your own tools on top of. The only thing other languages like Lua were used for were very basic scripting.

Hell, Quake even had its own specific, limited C-like called QuakeC that was eventually replaced by... C and C++.

 

Am surely of the younger generation (though coincidentally using C++ as my day job in non-game industry).
"Aside from modern engines", well, game development has changed. It is not standard today anymore to use a bare metal language for games-development.
Sure there used to be a world where C and similar ones that require memory- and pointer management were the standard for almost everything... Then java came along, showing that there's a more comfortable way of doing things, followed by NET\C# and Python.

 

With all these acquisitions they might as well just buy a game studio.

 

This is a severe misrepresentation. You will see C and C++ both used to great extent in a lot of engines. It is a core part of many of them and loads of development because many other engines, including loads of in-house ones, justifiably separate coding domains. Loads and loads of internal behaviour is still using C and C++.

Just because you don't use it does not mean it isn't standard.

 

They could, but they won't. Mark Brown listed Unity's acquisitions from the past 18 months: https://twitter.com/gamemakerstk/status/1547313023236427777

My sleep deprived brain counts 18 non-game related acquisitions and 3 somewhat game related acquisitions. The writing on the wall is clear. We are not Unity's target audience anymore.

EDIT: Unconfirmed but believable:



EDIT: I don't know how I stumbled on this one but the CEO man himself talks about the merger:

 

Just going to take this moment to share my thoughts, perhaps as a form of closure:

A month or so ago I made a tough decision to switch the Unity project I've been working years on to Unreal after seeing the direction the company was taking Unity in. I reached a breaking point dealing with multiple competing systems and the render pipeline mess. I definitely could've made some better decisions in this regard.

I wanted to use Unreal for future games after seeing how Epic was really focusing on their tech, how they dogfooded their own engine, and how their acquisitions were geared towards helping their devs make better games. I was a little afraid that all the years I spent learning the ins and outs and quirks of Unity would be wasted time (sunk cost fallacy), but I'm seeing now that all that knowledge is translating well to a different engine.

Unreal really seems like it has a lot of solid battle-tested tools built in, although it is taking a good amount of time to get really familiar with the engine. While I love C#, I'm currently learning how to use Unreal C++, and finding that while not exactly intuitive, it's not as bad as I thought it would be so far. I'll probably be picking up a Jetbrains Rider subscription to make things slightly easier. I still can't get over x-axis is forward though!

One thing that I miss from Unity is the large amount of knowledge you find on the internet when you search for a particular engine problem. When I look for the solution to a problem in Unreal, I often find forum posts by Unreal users asking the exact same question I have with no replies. I also noticed that the Unreal forums don't really have participation from the devs in subforums like the Unity forum does, although it seems that dev forum participation seems to be lessening here also as of late.

Even though I'm switching, I feel gratitude for the following:
- the Unity engine for helping me get started with game dev
- developers at Unity who cared and listened to feedback
- the community for the countless blog posts, forum posts, and videos showing how to do things in Unity
- the Asset Store developers, whose products I learned a lot from
- the forum regulars, from whose endless arguing I've gained some valuable advice.

It's been interesting (and very disheartening) watching Unity's leadership take the product in a different direction than what I want. It's also been a great lesson for me in terms of not being attached to the tech, even if it's something that I'm building my business on and have invested so much time, energy, and money on.

All the best to those of you sticking with Unity!

 

Guys, this clip is full of corporate mummblemuck about vertical integrations, audience synergies, and of course $$MONEY$$. It also includes gems like this (@ the 13:20 minute mark)...

"The only medium I'm aware of that the audience, the player, the user, actually thinks ads are POSITIVE... is gaming." - Dear Leader

H o o o l y f o o o k w e a r e s c r e w e d

 

AI was no longer needed by the monolith Unity. It was time to shed the scales and ascend to the pinnacle of ad revenue. A company so brainless that it could only react and grow toward the gross incandescence of capitalism. At this point, the users had left long ago. It didn't matter there was no soil from which to grow from, because it had devolved to some kind of lichen, capable of merely existing by what it had already consumed.

 

My friend, Unity is written in C++. Almost every inhouse and open source engine is written in C++. C++ is the standard in game dev.