If you have any sticking points, let me know, or post in the most popular Godot community and myself and other experienced peers will be more than happy to help!
Awesome thanks! I have some experience with Unity so I expect I should be able to pick up the basics fairly quickly. I’m currently slogging my way through a 10 hour intro to v4 on Youtube.
Pretty excited to start out with a new and open engine. Is there any way to extract my paid-for assets from Unity and use them in Godot?
Hmm, that isn’t something I have personally encountered. This tool looks promising even if it isn’t under development anymore, but it might be worth a shot.
On a sort of unrelated note, I always hated unity as a game engine anyway.
Many years back we had this big 2 month long project for a class and we had decided to develop a game.
We settled on a spinoff of advance wars with some additional vehicles and mechanics.
We decided to try unity since it was reccomended by literally everybody.
After 2 days of using the crappy UI, getting flashbanged by the free light mode, and pulling our hair out over scripting, we said screw it and just made a bespoke engine with SDL because no one knew opengl or vulkan and we didn’t want to try another engine.
That was also the day we realized how much nicer C was to C++ lmao. Objects were nice, but we were so ready to redo the whole thing in C with structs and functions.
That was also the day we realized how much nicer C was to C++
Absolutely. I went through a whole process of using less and less C++isms that everyone was recommending me as they just made everything so much harder, longer to compile, produce more unreadable errors, harder to organize… Until I eventually was just writing C but structs have functions.
Eh, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. As people have said above the infinite free money is drying up. That’s a fact that all these corporations have to contend with. The only difference between Twitter and Facebook or Unity and Google is that Twitter and Unity have made their dumb decisions already. Facebook, Google, and others have navigated this fairly well so far. But they are feeling the same pressures that Reddit and Unity did and eventually they will bend to them too.
Shout out to Postman who this week decided to depreciate their local (secure) credential storage scratchpad, to force people to use their API and store everything on their cloud platform
For the VS Code enjoyers, there’s the Thunder Client extension. It’s pretty good but I hate that you can’t commit your queries on the free tier anymore
Yes, very much. Unity has an army of highly-paid developers, some of which are behemoths in the industry and built other highly-regarded technology. It could be done, I mean, I don’t think Unity was particularly efficient spending its internal resources, but it is gonna take a while for other open-source engines like Godot to catch up.
For now. They’ve raised prices, next step is cost cutting. Lot of those devs might l could find other work and end up pushing a branch or two to Godot.
It is difficult though. Godot has been in development since 2007. It was not FOSS until 2014. It is still way behind Unity and Unreal Engine in many ways, which have been around since 2004 and 1995 respectively.
yes, game engines are highly complex programs with decades of development, problem solving, and bug squashing under their belt. Fortunately there’s about to be high demand for a foss engine so I imagine Godot will get pretty good, but it’s got a long way to go.
As an avid godot dev, the only gripes that I’ve had with it are a) merge conflicts can be a nightmare (but you can use git unlike unity sooooooo) and b) it lacks some deep control, but I was just able to fork it and implement it myself lmao.
It’s actually really polished imo. It’s sleek, minimal (compared to the others in its weight class), only 100mb, and development is just accelerating.
Things like oblique clipping planes for the camera’s frustum. Basically something so specific and niche that it’s kinda understandable that it’s not a focus of the main engine.
I’ve been using git with Unity for 6 years and it works fine. Merge conflicts with scenes are painful, sure, but I guess that’s just the way it is. In my use-case there weren’t many conflicts.
As others pointed out, alternatives already exist. Besides Godot and ebiten, there’s also Stride, which focuses on 3D.
Now, an Open Source alternative that is compatible with Unity, similar to what EnigmaGM offers as a counter to GameMaker (and, in a similar vein, FPC Lazarus vs. Embarcadero Delphi), would require a fuckload of work and people with the skills to make it work.
Others did it and faced no consequences. No government step-in, no mass customer loss. When there are no consequences for greedy monopolistic behaviours, greedy monopolies act greedily. Welcome to market capitalism without proper regulation.
Are they just hoping that literally no publisher will legally challenge these terms? You can’t just change the terms retroactively without consent and start charging people whatever you want. They’ll lose the instant someone takes them to court over it
Especially when there’s a lot of high profile clients who’s business literally relies on them. They will absolutely have a ton of lawsuits coming towards them. Good, fuck them for thinking they could, or should, ever do this.
I’m sure if this actually pushes through they’ll change the terms for those clients just to keep them happy (and paying what they do pay, which likely dwarfs all the smaller players). And they sure as shit won’t fight for the smaller creators when they get theirs.
My question is what sort of “support” does Unity provide to these legacy engines. If the old versions are unsupported, does that mean they will be hard or impossible to use, or does it simply mean they don’t get feature updates?
You can’t just change the terms retroactively without consent and start charging people whatever
They can, if you don’t like it you quit using their product that is the alternative they offer if you don’t like the new license. If you want to continue to using it you have to accept and pay. It is not illegal, they can change the conditions anytime, the initial conditions 100% said that already as most terms have.
Not saying it isn’t terrible tough to be clear.
EDIT: They hated Jesus downvoted the user because he told them the truth.
I dont know if thats true. however, somtimes for whatever reason it goes out of your control and you cant revoke access to the game binarys (foss, public domain, pirated, etc…). Unity still wants someone to pay.
You’re right that a lot of Terms of Service documents and similar agreement documents have language that reserves the right to modify those terms.
At the same time just because something is in the terms doesn’t mean it can stand the test of adjudication and terms as well as changes are often challenged in court with success.
Unity is in a particular tricky situation because the clause that governed modifications in their last ToS explicitly gives the user the option to pass on modifications that adversely affects them and stick with the old terms:
Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a modification is required to comply with applicable law, the modification will apply notwithstanding this section. Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or version. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to Prior Terms.
I agree that it seems like a problematic part. That said… even if devs are allowed to stay using that version, for a lot of devs is not practical, so the end result is basically the same, they cannot afford to stay on the old version and would need to pay to continue using it.
Except for old games not being updated or similar that they don’t need updates to the tools/engine.
I pose you this, I open a book store. I say my terms of service is say, all non racist books are allowed to sit on the shelves. I then later say, “I now own the copywrite and that physical copy of any book placed on my shelves. The new ones, the existing ones, and the future ones.” You’d be scrambling to get my books back before I pretend a contract you never agreed to is on effect and illegally steal them.
It’s a book store you wouldn’t own the copyright that makes no sense. Plus wtf is on with the non racist part at the beginning what has that to do with anything in the rest of the text.
And in any case yeah that would illegal because you don’t own the copyright neither those books. You own the book store and the shelves you could decide one day to charge them another fee if they want their book in your store and use your shelves, that would be an equivalent. And yeah any existing ones, and future ones would require the fee, of course, it is your fucking book store, maybe people won’t like it and look for s different store to put their books but that’s it.
A different thing is if you have a contract with the book store saying x year you will never have a fee. Or similar. Yeah that would be breach of contract and you could do something about it but this is not the case.
Their terms clearly indicate that they can be changed. If people didn’t try to or couldn’t get another terms/contract that specified otherwise is unfortunate but it is what it is.
Plus wtf is on with the non racist part at the beginning what has that to do with anything in the rest of the text.
It emulates the stuff they put into a TOS.
for s different store to put their books but that’s it
My original comment was trying to say the recource legally allowed is to be kicked out, however that isnt possable with how unity qants fees and by its nature intertwines with the copywrited work, witch is hard to impossable to un-publish.
You are right in terms of in-development and future games. But unity is also trying to enforce these terms on already released games. This could potentially bring a challenge to their subscription model, which essentially states you must continue to pay as long as your game is available. I don’t know much about the law, but I do know that there are legal limitations on how rented/subscribed products work. These limitations are to prevent straight up scams from stealing from you and making it technically legal with some fine print. Which isn’t too far off from what unity is doing now.
This is comparable to you renting a drill from someone to make a table. You agree to the terms that you must continue to pay a subscription as long as the table exists. Then unity drill co. decides you must also pay a fee every time someone sits at the table. Even though the table is already made, and you already had an agreement to pay for the drill you had previously used. Your only alternative is to destroy the table.
Just because the terms said they could modify the deal doesn’t mean they can force anything on you as if you had already agreed to it.
What a bunch of maroons. 99.9% chance someone else mirrored that git repo.
EDIT: And this is yet another reason everyone, everywhere, should immediately mirror any git repo for a project they are even remotely interested in.
github giveth, and github can (and does) taketh away. Say NO to centralized source management platforms – exactly the antithesis of what git was designed for in the first place!
Say no to centralized platforms altogether. I don’t want to be that person, but things like these are exactly why open-source is (and should be) superior. It’s unfortunate that OSS has had so little traction in the end-user side of things
That’s changing, imo. For years, closed source software built by companies was just superior in I’d say 80% of cases (Image editing, DAWs, 3D graphics (remember, blender may be getting up their in age, but it only recently hit parity with other major softwares)
I feel like now I’m using more open source software than not, not out of a personal belief, but because it’s actually better now than some of the closed source alternatives (price is not an issue with me, I’m gonna pirate whatever I want to use anyway)
I feel like it’s hitting a wider audience, too, nowadays.
True, maybe, but in this case entirely pointless. If Unity didn’t host their repo on git, they would’ve hosted it on their own solution. They would’ve been able to delete the repo just the same. Furthermore, if they hosted the solution on their own, it would’ve made it harder for others to mirror the repo. At least harder as git makes it.
Users are bound by the version of the terms they agree with when they start using the product. There may be a term that says ongoing usage when the terms change constitutes acceptance of a change.
Unity are trying to say they can make the change retroactively, but the 2022 (and prior) terms apparently included a clause saying that if future changes were detrimental to the user they could stay on old versions of the software and remain bound by the old terms. That’s one angle Devs could use to tell them to get fucked There may be others.
My question is how much support does Unity provide or need to provide to the old versions, or I guess any version. Will they still be usable a few years down the road?
Mirror a git repo? Do you understand how git works? You clone the repo, and it’s effectively mirrored already, especially for something that doesn’t change much.
If you want the commits updated, then put git pull in a daily cronjob. Boom! Mirror.
True, every git pull is a ‘mirror’. Bad phrasing on my part. I was thinking more of when I set up my local gogs instance to mirror an outside/upstream git (such as from github), which really is just their term for pulling again automatically every time upstream changes.
Every website hosted in the US is subject to DMCA (or directly getting sued for copyright infringement). Even if you host your own website and refuse to comply with DMCA requests, they’ll just send them to your hosting provider instead.
“Oh no, Microsoft DMCA’d my project! Whatever will I do with this fully intact git history that I have mirrored by design on every single development machine?”
I’ve gotta say, this doesn’t strike me as a particularly substantial issue. I’ll admit that it becomes harder to find contributors when you’re trying to operate outside of the $MAINSTREAM_PLATFORM, but that’s going to be a perpetual problem in the world of “Forge-likes” until someone figures out how to federate the social-media aspects of it (sidenote: why hasn’t anyone tried doing that?)
EDIT: Of course someone was already working on it. Why did I even think of assuming otherwise? Godspeed to the ForgeFed project!
The more I read about this mess, the more I believe this is the work of one or multiple CEOs who have absolutely no clue about the field they are in and started giving orders.
You know what kind of boss I mean. That kind who can’t handle a NO and throws a fit every time they are proven wrong. But you still do as they will, because they are disgusting human beings and you are already in talks with a new workplace.
What’s weird to me is that CEOs should know all about accounting and financials. He should have realized that this pricing model is unsustainable for most Unity developers, because many make less than what he’s asking for per install themselves.
It’s clear that professional CEOs don’t know anything about tech, but this isn’t a tech issue.
They absolutely do know. They’re well aware of the impact this will have on small devs. That was their goal. They want to price out those free or low cost games that use Unity and never make a profit to avoid paying royalty fees.
This wasn’t incompetence. It’s straight up malice.
They don’t want to price out small devs, they want to get them onto their ad platform. They’ve said games that use their ad platform will have the fee waived.
The problem is, I don’t think the CEO would be in anyway getting the consequences of their actions. Of the company is sinking, they will just “be fired” and get those extra money (like huge amount of money). The company will close and announce bankruptcy. The “person” isn’t punished.
Their CEO is the guy who was leading Electronic Arts when it was voted the worst company of the year, implemented first lootboxes and who was openly suggesting to charge people real money per reload.
I don’t see how any of this would hold up in court. I’m pretty sure you can’t be liable for a new tos for what is essentially new software that you didn’t use in your project. This company is clearly run by fucktards who are hoping to prey upon devs that just don’t know better or can’t fight back.
The Unity Runtime (Basicallt the core of the engine) is technically licensed as a subscription. So when the free license renews, this is included in the new ToS and it’ll be a lot harder to fight.
Obviously not a lawyer, but I’m not 100% certain that the billing terms would stand up to legal scrutiny. It’s been kinda hard to keep up with this story so my apologies if any of this is wrong, but I believe that they said they were wanting to use an “aggregate proprietary model” to determine downloads. What that basically means (I think) is “we’ll tell you how much you have to pay us but we can’t independently justify any individual charge”.
Again, I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know of anything off the top of my head that’d make that illegal, but it also doesn’t really feel like it’d square with how things work. I mean if companies could just make up a number and say you owe them that much without being able to say why or whether or not that number comports in any way with reality, then what’s stopping every company from doing that? What’s stopping a magazine for example from coming back to you and saying “Yes, you paid us for the magazine. But our proprietary aggregate model that totally reflects reality promise tm suggests that you might have shown that magazine to two or three other people after you purchased it from us. So that means you have to pay us three instances of the review licence fee.”?
I don’t know. Obviously this is all scuzzy and morally wrong. It’s just that even factoring in that this is a subscription service and that they are a corporation with an army of lawyers who’ll likely win any challenge to it, I can’t really shake the feeling that there’s something fundamentally legally wrong about that aspect of it in particular that wouldn’t hold up in court. Even for them.
You’re completely right, but Unity also has the money to get this to be stuck in court for ages. They’re counting on being able to win a war of attrition on it.
There’s just enough questionable tactics around it that it’s legally plausible they get away with it.
This fight will probably set some major precedent for how online services charge.
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