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  • nul9o9@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They should honestly just move their engine anyway. Unity has played their hand, and showed they are willing to make changes to their pricing retroactively.

    • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yep, they might roll back the changes this time but they’ve shown where they want to be and now we know. They’ll work their way slowly towards it instead of a sudden change now and it will be less noticeable and harder to fight legally when they do that

      • slumberlust@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They’re cranking the bad PR to 11 so they can dial it back to 9 and point to it as a compromise.

      • Godnroc@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think most developers can see the writing in the wall there, but switching mid-way through a project will be costly and time consuming. If the changes were fully rolled back, I would still bet many would finish what they working on and then switch for their next game.

        • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Problem is that if your current unity game is successful this year, and then they reimplement the retroactive charge next year, you’re still screwed. If you can afford it then it’s best to change now in order to avoid that mess that might mean you have to delist your game

          • frickineh@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I’m not sure it’s legal to implement it retroactively. I’d be very curious to get an attorney’s perspective - seems a lot like trying to unilaterally change a contract after both parties have signed. But I have a hard time imagining anyone being willing to develop using Unity going forward.

    • Gamey@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I bet they will do so for their next game but reimplementing a entire game is FAR easier said than done, something like that could very well bankrupt a smaller studio!

      • dog@suppo.fi
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        1 year ago

        I mean it’s easy to reimplement entire games if you’ve built it modularly. Just swap your core game logic to run on another library and the game works the same it did before.

        Edit: 'course, exceptions exist like if you wrote everything using their proprietary coding language, instead of using something universal.

        Edit 2: It MAY still be possible that a translation/compiler exists that’ll run as a plugin in a proprietary engine, and converts it into something universal.

        • Overwrite7445@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Game Dev isnt just code. Remaking a project from scratch is a massive undertaking. Porting the code could be difficult too especially if relying on core unity libraries.

          • dog@suppo.fi
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            1 year ago

            Not downplaying the effort, it still takes time. But not impossible.

            How you made it all matters in situations like this.

        • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          It also depends on how many engine unique features you used, and what optimizations you applied. It’s certainly possible, but doing it without changing any game logic will require very complicated translation layers which will likely cause performance issues. It might very well be easier to treat it as a porting and refactoring project. You might not even realize which behaviors are unique to each engine if you don’t regularly develop in multiple engines.

          • dog@suppo.fi
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            1 year ago

            This is true, and I vouch for gamedevs to first test other engines to see the differences.

            Calculating for the future is extremely important in pretty much everything.

            Also I wouldn’t say there would be performance issues, unless you somehow completely screw up coding and compiling said code.

            Projects should work on top of a bottom layer, or translation layer as it’s sometimes called; game logic calls for functions from there, instead of directly from the engine. This is also important for code security.

            _move_entity might be calling the proprietary unity_move_object with a different reg stack, but when compiled the performance should be +/- 0.

            • bane_killgrind@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              The things you are suggesting are adding complexity and therefore cost.

              It does take a higher level of expertise to adequately abstract away engine specific limitations and requirements.

              It’s again an even higher level of expertise and therefore expenditure to account for performance issues with these abstractions.

              • dog@suppo.fi
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                1 year ago

                Not untrue, but it helps to adapt your future projects if done in such a way.

                It does require more expertise, and it takes more time, thus it’d have to be the first thing done for the project, not something you do after everything’s done already.

    • darkeox@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      This. It’s not easy or trivial but as a long term strategy, they should already plan investing efforts into consolidating something like Godot or another FOSS engine. They should play like you calm down an abuser you can’t just escape yet while planning their demise when the time has come.