You'd think people would be wise to Unity's antics after they acquired malware pusher IronSource.

Well, I don't need to repeat it, but There are at least 70 unique open source game engines.

Because building an engine is difficult. Kinda like asking to start a taxi service, but you don't want to buy a car for it, so just build it... go ahead, back yard, get to it....

I don't know about you, but writing using trigonometry to get 3D graphics, adding textures, as well as bounds checking, writing your own interrupts to handle sound and music, then attaching that to work with Vulcan DirectX and OpenGL, then on top of that making a game to go with it, aka sounds, music, models, animations, and then the core logic, AI reactions, etc. And if you really want to build from scratch, write your own compiler and own language(s) to go with it, and your own libraries and toolkits.

These common 'engines' are at this point considered part of 'the wheel' i would think at this point. They say don't reinvent the wheel. Even in the mid 90's there were software packages including 80% of basically the DOOM engine to get your started to make your own FPS games.

edit: You know i'd agree with you if it was back in the MS-DOS days. You didn't need special hardware drivers to switch to graphics modes, or anything to handle timing. It literally set a few registers, call specific interrupt, the BIOS would take over and switch graphics, then you are given an address (B0000-CFFFF if i remember right) and you write your pixels onto the screen memory buffer and it would automatically copy to the screen on the next refresh. You set a timer to go off on a counter which would be your timer, which at it's slowest was like 16hz (i'd have to check).

Most models like in Mechwarrior likely had mech models with like 30-40 polygons, and checking if a hit had to be considered was just a box around the mech before getting into more detailed checks. And you could forego or include some textures and it wasn't a big deal.

I think you seriously underestimate what is needed just to get the framework working, before actually working on a game. And if you have to spend 1-2 years building an engine before you start on your game, you likely will get burned out LONG before you finish it.

Depending on the game you want to make, you don't have to implement all of this yourself. For example, if you're making a 2D game, you can just omit the 3D stuff.

One game of mine even, in its current form, omits asset loading, as everything is done procedurally, much of it in shaders.

Well 2D games would be far easier to make, and then you primarily use the SDL library. (I'm sure isometric is a little more difficult than say platforms, but that's another topic, one of which i wouldn't have any experience with)

But if you still have to write all that from scratch rather than relying on someone else's engine (or libraries) is still another matter.

I'm aware. So is being a surgeon. Not everyone should do it.

Also a lot of what you are saying is kind of nonsense.

And no we have no wheel. We are super far from having a wheel for game development. The games today make the games of 20 years ago look like a joke and the games 20 years into the future will make today's games look like a joke too.

We need more people who actually know how to make engines so we can have something approaching a wheel someday.

This is precisely why I encourage devs to switch to an open source engine like Godot. Sure, right now, it isn't QUITE as advanced as Unity in the 3D department but it's progressing fast. For indie devs, it's more than enough. Given time, the Godot Foundation will gain attention and likely receive more donations from larger entities when they see it has grown in popularity.

Unity has been scum, in my opinion, ever since they changed their business model to subscription past a certain revenue point. It loves to advertise itself as the best engine for indie and AA studios but it really isn't when its business model is all about milking its clients dry once they reach a certain amount of success. Shoot, even Unreal's model is infinitely better, only charging a royalty fee past a certain revenue point, which is far more reasonable: when the game succeeds, Epic succeeds, thus benefiting every party involved.

In general, Unity has overstayed its welcome. I've used it a bit in the past two years and while it is still very feature-rich, I'd much rather support and use an engine that respects me, respects studios and respects gamers. Ideally, an open source engine like Godot but there are others, I'm sure.

https://unity.com/pricing-updates Hmmm, time to load up wireshark and share out a Firewall CLI command to block. ;)

Human greed seems to know no bounds.

If *they* could sell you a fork and charge you for each time you put it in your mouth, they would.



*they* being the sort of people usually referred to as 'great visionary entrepreneurs'.

Unity has long been known to contain spyware, it is hardly anything surprising.

This is just them putting the tech they built and acquired to new use.

gonna guess the limits of your creativity end with spewing gobshitedness online kid.

You just said that those making games should make their own engines, rather than relying on one...

Probably less than 2% of people are inclined and able to do programming, And among those 2%, probably another 2% of those can do that level of work. I'm pretty sure those that are good at making engines, have made engines... and those engines are for rent/sale.

Last i checked, games 20 years ago (That would be PS2, though i'd go back to SNES, because i like Megaman X) look beautiful and are awesome. Oh sure there's hardware limitations making them very limited in size, but they worked, and worked very well. The NES/SNES games were all written in assembly for speed purposes.

Again i think you underestimate the value of games 20+ years old. Hardware design made the PS1 3D graphics janky, but otherwise the games were perfectly serviceable, which i can't say is the same today.

Listen if the think tanks at Bethesda can make Starfield sell on the scraps of the engine they licensed in 1997, then I think most anyone could build a game engine just like you or I could build a basic steam or ECE.

Is there a list of GOG games that use Unity?

Any more numbers you want to pull out of the air as if they are facts? It doesn't matter how many people can do it. Not everyone should be doing it. If you are not inclined to do it you should not be doing it. If you can't do it you should not be doing it. Just because you want to fly a plane doesn't mean you are a good choice to be piloting people around. You have to actually be able to do the job.

When tons of games are being made by people not interested in the tech and then the games are broken, is it really any surprise? I don't think we need as many games as we have now. I'd be fine with less games but games that were not all made to fit an existing engine. I'd prefer unique stuff. When you make a game to fit an engine it's inferior to an engine that was made to fit a game. It's a backwards design if excellence is what you are aiming at.

And the value of a 20 year old game has nothing to do with it being a "wheel". A wheel is something that can't be improved upon. You can't really improve upon a circle. You sure as hell can improve upon the engines of 2003.
Not that I'm aware of. But OwlCat comes to mind as a current developer that does.