Xenko game engine developer buys Geomerics, developer of Enlighten

Interesting acquisition for sure...

Since Xenko is a direct rival, what does this mean for the future of Enlighten in Unity?

 

Yeah, that is an interesting development.

I doubt they would try to strong-arm Unity, as Unity is likely one of their bigger licensees, but I guess you never know.

 

Never heard of them, are they small enough to hope for Unity to buy them now?

 

It's fresh out of beta. I hope you're joking.

 

lol
It's far from what Unity proposes, if you add Unity Asset Store Xenko is years behind in terms of features and tools.

 

While this is very true and will continue to be true for quite some time, they've come a long way since they were called Paradox engine. If you look at their roadmap they still have years of work left to catch up with many engine features, but at the same time big things like being set up heavily for multi-threading both in the engine and your scripts was in from the very beginning.

When they do get an asset store off the ground it's also a lot simpler to port since both engines use C# and their API is very similar to Unity's.

 

I totally hope this doesn't happen. I'm sure Xenko would get killed off if that were to take place and while it's still early it looks to be a good start at something fresh. Unity is getting pretty old at this point and it's approaching that moment in most software where a complete rewrite should start to be considered but yet it has so much invested in it that I doubt that will ever happen. This happens in all software that has been around long enough, I'm not knocking the work Unity has done.

 

Really weird! Never heard of Xenko.

Looks like they have tried to basically emulate Unity's business model and Editor structure. Seems awkward that they own Enlighten and are responsible for maintaining it for existing customers (Unity) - if its something Unity even needs maintenance from or is even entitled to. Maybe they have a one-off license.

Dunno. Unity always seems to work around these sorts of things - if its even a thing.

 

Yep, i think Unity is already moving away from Enlighten with Octane and new stuff.

 

can not wait for OCtane!

 

OMG: Nested Prefabs

http://xenko.com/features/

 

Best to tamper your expectations. For everything that is awesome built into the core (async scripts, nested prefabs, C# 7, Lists/Dictionaries supported in inspector, etc) there are going to be things not yet implemented that will be missed (no editor plugins, no custom inspectors, no movie textures, lack of platforms, etc.). It's a good start but is at least a year away to do much more than prototyping. If they hit their roadmap targets though things could get interesting in 2018.

 

Any idea what commercial games have been created with Xenko? I checked their website, but couldn't find any info.

 

It's worth noting Xenko is owned by Silicon Studios, which is currently porting a beta of their Yebis post processing to Unity. I think they understand there is money to be made with Unity even if their own engine is being constructed as a competitor.

There's something about Xenko that makes me want to love it, and I don't know why.

@Peter77 Off the top of my head Bravely Default and Bravely Second. Children of the Galaxy is an indie title on Steam built with it.

 

As far as I know the Bravely games were made with orochi 3 and 4 (I think there was a gundam game made with orochi 4 as well). Their Yebis post processing was in a lot of stuff as well (substance, modo, etc.). I'm sure a lot of the tech that made up Yebis and Orochi made it's way into xenko but I'm sure there are tons of differences from their earlier tech as well.

AFAIK, the indie title Children of the Galaxy (early access) is the only one so far. I'm sure more will pop up but it's early days for the engine with a lot of things you'd expect to be there still not implemented.

 

I think you're right. I tried to look up a source but everything is titled "Bravely Default Dev releases Xenko" which got stuck in my mind as Bravely Default as a made in Xenko.

 

My understanding is Octane will be for offline rendering, not realtime?

 

Perhaps it will be able to bake premade lighting or bake maps to simulate real time lighting like Enlighten is doing, and i think Unity is already on something new, CryEngine will not be the only one proposing some real time GI without baking.

 

In addition to this, the biggest challenge will be community and 3rd party vendor support.
As it is, most 3rd party vendors, ad networks, etc have a Unity SDK, but it would take market validation and time and effort to build a 'Xenko' SDK for their product.

It's a bit of a catch 22, vendors will only support the engine if it is widely used, but developers will only use the engine if there is reasonable 3rd party support.

 

Everyone has been focusing on the buyer but no one seems to be interested in the reason behind the sale. ARM originally purchased Geomerics to advance their console and mobile graphic department. If ARM no longer saw value in holding onto Geomerics what does that say about the future of Enlighten in general?

 

I agree with there is a catch 22 but to me 3rd party asset developers is more important than the big vendors, especially since Xenko is .NET/mono based. Ports of sdks are a lot easier to do to Xenko than to other engines. Same catch 22 when the market is small, but we'll see how it goes when they launch their store.

 

I think that the writing has been on the wall with that for awhile. In mobile VR one of the first things you learn is to not use precomputed realtime enlighten for performance reasons. It seemed to be a bit of a stretch for mobile running higher than 1080p at 60 fps even on flagship phones. Even not for VR you want to target a good swath of phones not just flagship phones and enlighten seemed a bit too resource intensive. Xenko is probably buying it to jumpstart their GI efforts since they currently don't have any GI even on desktop and ARM wants to sell because it was a bit of a stretch for mobile.

 

I don't really get why companies are working on these engines that look and behave just like Unity (Xenko, Atomic, etc). What's the point of trying to compete with Unity by creating a product that's a less-developed clone of Unity?

 

When I put a prefab into a prefab within a prefab within a prefab and in the child of a child of a child of a root prefab make a change, which one of the prefabs stores it?

Spoiler

That's basically the reason why there are no nested prefabs in unity. Sounds cool in theory, but it is a bit awkward to use in practice.

 

It's not that complicated, It's essentially just like inheritence in code. Xenko prefabs have this concept built into them.

https://xenko.com/blog/feature-spotlight-archetypes-prefabs-and-nested-prefabs/

I do agree that Unity didn't have this inheritence concept from the start in prefabs so introducing it after the fact could be problematic since you have to wrap your head around that. Once you have that down though, it does provide a bit more speed especially in building large environments.

 

I think it comes down to the fact that Unity is seen as the king of usability. There are other areas where Unity isn't so great but when it comes to getting off the ground quickly there isn't much debate. Even AAA studios often use Unity for prototyping and switch to their in house engine once a proof of concept is done. Most of this ease of use is in regards to how the editor is laid out so it's natural for the competition to reuse those concepts. This occurs in a lot of areas of technology, the GUIs for most desktop OSes are very similar, it also happened very rapidly in mobile OSes in the last 10 years. Google and Apple would each come up with things that were unique and good ideas only to see the competition essentially clone those ideas.

 

I don't want to turn this into an X vs U thread like all of those Name That Must Not Be Said vs U threads... but out of curiosity I just had a look at Xenko... again. I had checked it out previously (when it had a different name or else I checked out something else lol) and thought "ah great... it's Unity with a different name". But something must have happened somewhere along the way because this seems to have improved greatly since I first checked it out. And from what I can see many things seem much more logical and easier to use. Especially for 2D games. The Sprite Editor doesn't appear to be something quickly cobble together but an actual useful tool.

I will probably end up regretting it but in fact I am now downloading it. One more thing to waste my time playing around with a bit here and there. I guess mainly I was just thinking maybe this is kind of made to be like a Unity for the rest of us. The folks who are more like me. I will find out once I dig into it a bit.

 

It's still very early days for the engine, it's not there yet, fun to mess around with but I wouldn't do anything commercial with it. It does seem to be improving rather quickly though which makes sense coming from a company with a good amount of experience (versus say godot or atomic). Maybe in 2018, but currently it's still just mostly to play with.

 

Which is not a good thing. In essence you've convinced me to stay away from xenko.

Scene assembly is supposed to be a simple straightforward thing similar -> smashing blocks together pretty much. Unity works great for that. Wiring hierarchies into this process is moving in the wrong direction.

The point is, I'm supposed to put few things together, make a change and hit "apply" to store it in prefab.That's how it works in unity. When I need to analyze the underlying model and build an inheritance graph for features, this is a wrong approach.I mean, there are people who do not want to learn to program and someone expects them to deal with object inheritance?

 

Depends on what you are using it for. The example given in the link is straightforward enough room -> house -> village. Just like in code you don't have to use inheritence if you don't want to you could have no relation between them or you could it's not like it forces you to define inheritence. When things are tangible in the real world I don't think the concept of inheritence is really that hard even for non programmers and it's not like they have to write code to do it. I think when you drag the room prefab into the house prefab most do realize the connection there. Environment creators in Unity stumble upon the problem of not having nested prefabs plenty and it's highly voted upon for Unity.

https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/editor-nested-prefabs

 

I checked it out. The thing I found most interesting was a forum post where someone asked if you could develop entirely in Visual Studio just using the API and completely bypassing the Game Studio (the Editor). And the answer was yes.

Although there is something about it that I do find somewhat interesting the actual implementation of a game is more involved than I want to get into (or need to get into). I mean yes I could spend the time to write wrappers around everything to make it more of a rapid game dev environment but what would be the sense in it when I can get the end result already simply by using AGK2? No sense that I can see.

Still it was interesting checking it out. Their community seems extremely tiny compared to Unity's (or even AGK2 for that matter).

Anyway @greggtwep16 I think your description was pretty much spot on.

 

It's inexistent.

Posted a question. Had to wait for a week to have one of the DEVs to respond with a workaround.
I hope documentation is outdated because in the opposite case it's completely useless.
1 guy has an hour's worth of basic tutorial on youtube. 1 guy.
If you want to do anything that isn't just an alteration of whatever is in examples, you will suffer.

When I download 2.0 I couldn't start it because I was connected to team server in VS.
Also some examples didn't even work for me. Go figure. Might have been a fault on my end.

 

Definitely agree there, there is almost no community. Forums have few users and even their gitter chat takes about a day for someone in the community to respond. Documentation seemed ok at least for what I needed to look up though.

 

This will be any engine newcomer's biggest challenge... building a solid community and knowledge base around their tools. I think its safe to say Unity's is second to none.

 

Atomic or godot are free and open source, they are not competing with anyone, they are progressing well and trying to reach today 3D engine standards, they have been successfully used to make and sell some games.

While Xenko is trying to make is own market, see the new pricing.
Many people are interested to use alternatives to Unity/UE4 with different licensing or different features.
Why should everyone use exclusively Unity or UE4 lol ?

Yep, i don't understand their pricing knowing the engine even out of beta, is still a big work in progress.

Another big issue is the coding that is not as streight and short as Unity.
It is still too low level Api, you have to code a huge amount of code to control and blend some character animations, while in Unity you just set some Mecanim variables to launch some animations and blending is visually adjusted in Mecanim.

 

Interesting article!

Just a side note - Did anyone point this out;

OP's thread title is not completely accurate.
No one bought Geomerics, according to linked article.
Article title itself said that Silicon Studio bought *Enlighten tool*.

I doubt a game studio would buy a part ARM, which is a pretty big microprocessor manufacturer.

 

Being open source doesn't eliminate competition. At the very least open source projects are competing for developers out of a finite pool and the time they're willing to invest in projects they choose. Then there are competitions to be included as part of an organization's benefit program like Google's Summer of Code.

 

I agree it is a little odd but on the other hand at some point most software will typically become convoluted and bloated with old features still floating around, backwards compatibility code everywhere and stuff that just generally would be good to just get a fresh start from.

Not saying thats whats happening, but formatting your HD and just reinstalling what you're actually using nowadays is such a better experience than that 6 year old windows install that was taking forever to boot up for no reason.

I think the goal is generally to simplify things, keep what everybody likes and scrap the dead weight. They're clearly not doing anything particularly innovative.

 

I don't know, it just seriously sounds like a poor choice of paradigm. But then again, this is my opinion.

Reading their faq, it looks like they finally got rid of opensource license (which was a deal breaker), and overall impression is that they're trying to make a unity replacement. There are similarities (pay tiers, logo displays, etc).
https://xenko.com/faq/

Overall I'd say right now I'm not interested in it. I would be interested in Unity with C++ api for components, though.

 

It was enlighten that was purchased yes. It's unclear even how many of the ~25 employees that used to make up Geomerics were even still working for ARM since the purchase, internally there might not have been much still existing of the old Geomerics, especially if they decided to sell it off months ago.

That being said Silicon Studios has a lot of experience in the field so not getting the employees probably isn't that big of a deal breaker.

 

I had same impression... actually my impression is "trying to make a better Unity" but definitely intention of making an appealing Unity alternative. This section of the docs is a great indication...

Xenko for Unity Developers

 

Xenko looks interesting, but where most game engines are lacking is SDK integration. Unity has enough momentum to have most providers create a Unity version. A new game engine needs a simple solution for using any SDK, especially for mobile adoption.

 

Trying to make a "My Own casino with blackjack and..." is a dangerous path, though.

Either way, time will tell how it goes.

 

Yep. They need way more examples. And even then for the code-oriented approach wrappers need to be written. As someone else mentioned above the api currently is a little too low level. That won't support rapid game dev "out of the box".

At same time I do like it being lower level because it means more detail more control over things. But also means writing wrappers around a batch of few to several lines here there and elsewhere.

I suppose in time it will lean heavily on using the Editor for that kind of thing. Ah well it was interesting to check out. I'll get back to one of my projects tonight. Probably the 3D SI-inspired game.

 

For mobile there is lot of apis and many other engines already.
But many people need to go faster to production, they need a complete editor with tools, they don't have time to spend a year building a better editor , better tools , better features or they simply need a prooven 3D engine like Unity with better support.
Open source can't match thousand people developping everyday Unity or UE4, when you go open source it's because there is many things or tools you don't need for lower scope projects.

 

For sure. I actually don't understand why so many people chose Unity. I suspect it has a lot to do with the Asset Store. But for all of the people using Unity there are surely many more who are doing game dev and not using Unity. Although I am quite sure none are nearly as massive as Unity's there are some pretty big user bases out there and there are hundreds of different game engines, apis and languages. Point being you're right there are always valid reasons for people choosing something else. Could be api, editor & other tools, graphics capabilities, language or other things.

 

I only have skimmed through their documentations, but it seems their C# API looks a bit more organized than what we have with Unity, at least. Honestly, I can't help but feeling that Unity's API looks like it was written by C/C++ programmers who are not really accustomed to C#'s conventions, or its common design approaches.

I know that such things don't really bother most other people. But for me, if Xenko had continued to provide their product under an open source license, and if they had a Linux editor, I'd probably have seriously considered switching to their platform.

 

I would challenge you here. In terms of number of developers actively using the engine, Unity could easily have more then a 50% market share.

Anecdotally, about 80% of developers I interact with at local game development meetups are using Unity. The rest are split fairly evenly between Unreal and in house proprietary engines. And there is one guy that uses Game Maker. I know our local stats are skewed, Melbourne tends towards small 2-10 person indie studios. Unity has also been pumping lots of sales resources into the area, while Unreal was essentially ignoring us up until a year ago. But its still an interesting data point.

 

It's possible but I just would be surprised if it was the case. I have spent a lot of time looking around just to see what people are using to make games and sometimes seeing a game I check out the dev's website or twitter to see what they are using and man there is a lot of stuff.

I completely get that Unity has a lot of developers and I do think that for whatever reason Unity seems to attract more of the loud game developers. By that I mean the ones making a lot of noise about their games, attending the meet-ups and expos and so forth. So I think this is another reason we hear and see so much about Unity all over is these folks seem to be making videos, writing articles etc they make a lot of noise and basically fill up the Internet with Unity Unity Unity. lol

Seriously... I know here it seems like everyone making games is using Unity but it is far from the case.

Again, I do believe that Unity is #1. What I am saying is there are so many engines, languages and apis out there for making games. Some have very large user bases, some have tiny user bases and most somewhere in between.

The only metric off the top of my head to show just a fraction of the true scope here as well as provide some idea of the reach was Twitter.

At the top we have these main players... there might be one or two more at this level. But still even right here Unity is surpassed almost certainly probably 2 to 3 times over.

What I am looking at here are the number of Followers.



The next level... and surely many more at this level then what I captured here.


The next level down for user base size... of course, as we go down on user base size the number of alternatives increases significantly. Again just a batch of them here.



And finally further down. There are masses of these scattered all around with maybe anywhere from a couple of dozen to hundreds of developers using them... but I got burnt out at this point so this is what I grabbed. Not to mention that most of these don't even have a Twitter account.



And then on top of that we know people still make games (even for Steam release) in Blitz3D, BlitzMax, DarkBasic, XNA, Allegro and so forth. There are many people building their own game engines and apis.

Unity has the single largest user base but I don't think it can possibly be more than 5 to 10% of all game development at the max.

 

Twitter stats are pretty unreliable for this. Many game devs will follow multiple engines, just to keep up with the news, and independent of the day to day engine they use.

Not saying that I disagree with your conclusion. Just that the numbers you have shown are about as valid as my anecdotes. Which is to say neither of us have an especially valid evidence base.