Curse of Unity

Curse of Unity

Postby dulsi » 14 Apr 2021, 13:29

Gaming on Linux mentioned a source available game. I watched the trailer it looks interesting. It is released under CC-BY 4.0 so that's ok. It uses Unity. Arrgh.

This is not the first time I've hit this. If I had the time I would learn Unity and write a compatible layer to some other 3d engine but alas I don't have that time.

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Re: Curse of Unity

Postby Julius » 14 Apr 2021, 23:36

I think there were some efforts to make a compatibility layer for the C# version of Godot, but I don't think it got to a usable state. Didn't check in a while and forgot where I read it, maybe even on this forum.
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Re: Curse of Unity

Postby PublicLewdness » 15 Apr 2021, 08:06

dulsi {l Wrote}:Gaming on Linux mentioned a source available game. I watched the trailer it looks interesting. It is released under CC-BY 4.0 so that's ok. It uses Unity. Arrgh.

This is not the first time I've hit this. If I had the time I would learn Unity and write a compatible layer to some other 3d engine but alas I don't have that time.

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Unity is one of my most despised engines. I'm not a coder, just a gamer but between them not fixing Mesa bugs for years on end and many games having poor performance I haven't been a fan of theirs in a long time.
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Re: Curse of Unity

Postby Technopeasant » 05 May 2021, 02:54

Yeah, I immediately get less interested in a game once I see it uses Unity.
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Re: Curse of Unity

Postby smcameron » 05 May 2021, 07:31

Yeah, I've been watching Unity (and also Steam, and also Unreal) more or less destroy the open source game ecosystem since its inception. The main problem I think that Unity causes for open source games is that it sucks up all the new talent. Back in the day, when games were programmed more or less from your basic rocks, in C or C++, or even Java, the choice of whether or not to make the game open source was mostly orthogonal to other considerations. Unity comes along and now you don't have to build a game starting with rocks. You've got all this infrastructure just lying there that you can build your game on top of. If you're a kid who doesn't know anything about anything, and you've got the choice to start from rocks, caveman style, or to start off in a Lamborghini traveling upon a network of superhighways, what are you going to choose? And, oh, do you want to strike it rich on Steam (even though that really doesn't happen anymore)? Are you going to choose to be a caveman? No, you're going to choose the Lambo. But the Lambo means the game cannot be open source. So, over the last 15 years or so, we watch the open source game scene wither. Just take a look at this forum. Used to be a pretty lively place 10 years ago. But now it's comparatively dead. I suspect that most of the people that remain are old timers who remember the 80s and 90s when open source stuff was the plucky idealistic underdog fighting Microsoft and Apple, "free as in freedom", not thought of as "free as in crap" as sometimes seems to be the case nowadays. yeah, get off my lawn, back in my day, we wrote our own texture mapping triangle fill routines in ASM *and we liked it*!
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Re: Curse of Unity

Postby Julius » 05 May 2021, 15:30

Yeah, pretty accurate assessment, however I think the Indie boom did more to divert people away from FOSS game dev than Unity itself alone.

But we have Godot now, so things are looking slightly better these days.
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Re: Curse of Unity

Postby PeterX » 05 May 2021, 16:21

smcameron {l Wrote}:I suspect that most of the people that remain are old timers...

I think so, too. And I think among the reasons already mentioned, there is: Most young people nowadays use smartphones for internet and gaming, not desktop PCs nor laptops/notebooks. There isn't an easy and free way to develop Android apps. (Or if so, at least I'm not aware of it.)

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Re: Curse of Unity

Postby Julius » 05 May 2021, 20:19

Developing android apps is easy and the tools are free, but you still need a regular PC for it.

But smcameron is right, there still are plenty of young (wannabe) game developers, they just end up less often at the FOSS corner of the community.
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Re: Curse of Unity

Postby PeterX » 05 May 2021, 21:50

Julius {l Wrote}:Developing android apps is easy and the tools are free, but you still need a regular PC for it.

But smcameron is right, there still are plenty of young (wannabe) game developers, they just end up less often at the FOSS corner of the community.

I hope you both are right and there are lots of young game developers out there.

If that's true there should be an advertiizing campaign or so. I mean, several organisations advertize for free software in general and there is the campaign "Public money public code". So there could be something similar for libre games.

But what would attract developers to the decision to make their game open source/libre?
- Maybe the engines can be turned from a disadvantage into an advantage. Like an engine which is GPL or AGPL, so game makers have to release their game open source?
- Good showcase games which show that open source is cool?
- Code snippet exchange webportal? Maybe with a simple and permissive license?
- Maybe an adventure which story is about software freedom and unfreedom?

Those are just some thoughts...

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