Can free software stop bleeding market share in video game development?
>2014+10 and Godot still doesn't have a fraction of the games Unity has
>O3DE is still very much dead
>Papers, Please (one of the most famous Haxe/OpenFL games) has switched to Unity for the mobile ports and now even the PC versions
>Young Horses ditched Irrlicht Engine after being done with Bugsnax
>Kenshi 2 will use Unreal Engine instead of OGRE like the original game
>Torchlight III uses Unreal Engine instead of OGRE like the two previous games
>Apocalypse Studios ditched Open 3D Engine in favor of Unity for Deadhaus Sonata
>Lizardcube ditched SoLoud in favor of Wwise in Streets of Rage 4
Unity, Unreal and FMOD are the present and will be the future of gaming.
 Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
 DMT Has Friends For Me Shirt $21.68 |
Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
Cool, I'm still gonna make my own engine
Writing the engine is the funnest part of gamedev.
The issue is and continues to be that game engines need to be stable. They need to be well documented. And they need teams of people who understand how to work with them. If a studio could get away with using free software instead of paying massive licensing fees, they would. But as it turns out, training people on how to use a questionable engine costs hundreds of thousands of dollars more. So it's just not that feasible. There's no deep secret as to why we use unreal for example.
Companies swapping engines after a project is completed is incredibly common as the business grows from being some guys in a shed to an actual company. Want to hire additional game devs? Chances are most of the applicants you'll get only know Unity or Unreal. So if you want to continue using your niche/in-house engine, not only do you have to onboard these new employees, you also need to dedicate additional man hours to teach them how to actually use the engine you're using, and this is all before you work out whether they're a capable fit for the company.
Besides, licensing fees for Unity and Unreal as they stand right now aren't incredibly oppressive, especially if you're an indie dev (of course they may always alter the terms of the agreement in the future).
As long as Godot continues slow and steady development, things will change. But it's still going to take a long time to get there.
Unity made it very clear to to all their customers not long ago that they are one bad day from fricking everyone in the ass. Unreal has so far avoided a similar controversy but knowing timmy it's just a matter of time
I'm somewhat of a freetard myself but I don't see the point of using a FOSS engine if you obviously won't make the game open source (you do want to make money, right?). Also for best performance and feature support you'll want to run said game on proprietary hardware and drivers anyway.
>I'm somewhat of a freetard myself but I don't see the point of using a FOSS engine if you obviously won't make the game open source (you do want to make money, right?).
Releasing the source code is always a possibility, and there are people who did it decades later because they were able to. If you use a licensed, proprietary engine, that door is instantly closed, forever. Look how many games from the 1990s and earlier did it.
Gimping your development process by using a FOSS engine, just so 5 guys get to toy with your source code in a decade or so, doesn't seem like it's worth it.
In my mind the most useful part of OS is establishing trust, and that simply can't happen with software you want to make significant money out of.
Look at dwarf fortress, always been FOSS until v50 steam release where it dropped the F and made millions betwix two dudes, best part: it's still free on their site!
FOSS can make you bank, just stop thinking of selling code and start thinking of selling binaries. A baker makes bread from a well known recipe with easily obtainable ingredients, this does not mean no one is buying his bread.
Unity sucks ass in the long run though
who gives a shit what AA/AAA use?
their games are going to be designed like shit despite the engine, big companies only care about having someone to pay, call and blame when something breaks in the engine
you never played the one in op image i see.
that would be considered aaa during those years.
one of the best games ever made, nobody can/could replicate saber fights (including pvp) that jk outcast has.
their own engine i presume.
>their own engine i presume.
it's literally quake 3
still an underrated choice
it was quake 3 and it was the unreal engine of the mid 2000s
>pure c
>very small LoC
>no memory allocation at runtime, all on stack
>compiles to like 5 meg distributable
...
>like unreal
have to disagree anon, unreal was the unreal of mid 2000s ut2k4 was like 3 gigs even then
but who even used unreal engine in mid 2000s except for epic themselves?
>cumreal
>poonity
I was hyped for Godot, but even with 4 that can do some serious graphics, the community is still shitting out retro-looking hipsterpixel games
for fricks sake, Godot will not get anywhere if community remains full of homosexuals
Ganker has the opportunity here
we could try to provoke those safe-space snowflakes into getting mad and making some more violent games
or
we could lead by example and revive the dream that WE had 10 years ago
Grand Theft Gentoo or GNU Theft Auto
we take Godot 4 and make a free and open source GTA clone
I want to see someone make an extreme version the 1st person Postal games, since the devs have pretty much pussied out on Postal 4
I tried making a Chinatown wars clone in godot4 but seeing that the 3D path tool still to this day lacks a gizmo for placing points in 3D it made creating a traffic and pedestrian system a huge fricking headache. I know I'm moronic but this feature has been requested for at least 4 years now and instead of someone non-moronic adding it they added fricking point ROTATION gizmos. Who gives a shit about a points rotation when you can't accurately place it in space!!! FRICK. Also I know you can manually enter vectors for each point now but when a path has 10+ points its too much of a headache.
>retro-looking hipsterpixel games
weirdly enough getting godot to output pixel perfect graphics is still an annoying process, there's still no native pixel perfect camera setting
Do you have a source on Apocalypse Studios switching to Unity, or did you make that up?