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The Coming Game Engine Inflection Point
- karmakaze 4y agoOT: I find myself more and more closing pages that use bad font, text color, or layout choices. I could use Reader mode, but like with paywalls that protect nothing of value, choose to simply not read them. My life is not diminished in doing so.
- Finnucane 4y agoThe font they've used on this website should be a little lighter. You can still almost see it.
- klodolph 4y agoIf you've been working in Unity for a few years you'll also notice a trend about Unity's future: - New versions of Unity offer more configuration options for your game or app, which make it hard to figure out which option to select. Choosing the wrong option will often result in incompatibility or other headaches down the road. Things like the proliferation of render pipelines, the new input system, etc. - The experience of using the Unity editor itself has gotten much worse. The editor presents you with a progress bar much more often. IMO these problems look like symptoms of a company culture where developers are rewarded for adding new features but not incentivized to work on things like editor stability, editor performance, or UX. Kind of a classic problem at lots of larger software companies.
- l3uwin 4y agoBeen using unity since 4.0 and it's problem is it wants you to treat the engine as the operating system and enforces that with walled-gardens and a deluge of bad programming and systems-design advice that leads to some of the most unscalable spaghetti imaginable.
- BoorishBears 4y agoI used Unity for years, starting in the 2.x days when their moving off Mac was big news. I agree with Unity having a lot of issues, but disagree with this being one of them: Unity doesn't really encourage anything that ECS doesn't encourage. ECS is a very ergonomic abstraction for games: that's the only reason it's even put up with over data oriented models like DOTS which are much more performant To me the spaghetti code thing is in part because games are just a really hard architecture problem if you're not used to it. It's like trying to build the design, frontend and backend of a CRUD app while also feeling out the business plan as you go along. Before you know it, you have the bones of a few wrong turns sticking out of the foundation, there's huge amounts of coupling between everything, and you essentially can't change any side of the puzzle without breaking a ton of stuff. Realistically I think Unity is often picked up by people who could make spaghetti code in any engine. And for the same reason I still contend that the asset store should never have allowed primarily code assets. You need a certain level of engineering rigor to not end up with a brittle buggy mess to slog through by the time something as open ended as a game. The asset store is full of just awful code written by people who don't know better, picked up by people who don't know better, resulting in a gnashing of teeth for everyone involved.
- sounds 4y agoBlender gets a small shout out at the end, for completeness. In my opinion Godot and Blender are symptomatic of the future, and also need healthy competitors.
- Mikeb85 4y agoThe nice thing about OSS is if they start making poor choices you can fork.
- yrgulation 4y ago
- dleslie 4y ago> If possible saturate the market so that games reach 0$ pricing. Ha, that shipped sailed on mobile many years ago now, and PC and console are slipping. Even now, the best value is to pay for one of the major subscription services.
- yrgulation 4y agoWell then, people shouldnt complain when their private lifes get monetised in lieu for cost or when kids get hooked on loot boxes. Let alone when of the last standing indie software dev markets dries up thanks to oss cancer.
- l3uwin 4y ago
- dleslie 4y agoSomehow I own hundreds of games on Itch, through charity bundles, but I find it impossible to play them because quality filtering and discovery assistance just aren't available. It's like walking into a used bookstore that has shelves upon shelves of Harlequins and a handful of copies of true literary classics.
- culi 4y agoitch.io's filtering/sorting story is truly uniquely terrible. I have no idea why they still haven't invested more work into it. It's really the only thing that kept me from using it as my main game organizer back when I played games
- yrgulation 4y ago
- ehnto 4y agoI am gobsmacked that the market share for Unity and Unreal is "only" 61%. I am interested to know if the remaining 39% is made up of other third party engines or independent engines predominantly. Godot is definitely a positive light in the future of game engines, and I am hopeful for its future. At the very least, even if it all goes wrong, you could still use the standalone godot executables for years to come without any SaaS nonsense.
- deaddodo 4y agoProprietary and commercial game engines.
- HWR_14 4y agoIIRC, all the major EA titles use the same in-house engine. At least all the FPS and similar games do. That's only one example of how maintaining your own in-house engine makes sense - because it's used across multiple teams.
- jesse__ 4y agoAs mentioned, a lot of EA games use Frostbite. A lot of other EA games (sports) use another engine. id has an inhouse engine Valve has an inhouse engine Riot has an inhouse engine CDProjekt .. NaughtyDog .. Ubisoft .. Guerrilla .. Activision/Blizzard have at least 2 .. ... Shit even Amazon has an engine these days
- maxbond 4y agoCDProjekt Red Is switching to Unreal, no? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/cd-projekt-red-seems-to-be-abandoning-the-redengine-for-ue5-and-that-s-a-good-thing/ar-AA14Nc1E https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/cd-projekt-red-see...
- jesse__ 4y agoOh damn, I didn't know that.
- 4y ago
- phendrenad2 4y agoI'll bet $5 this inflection point never happens. Godot is good but it's no Unity/Unreal.
- andrewflnr 4y agoThat's what everyone says right before they get disrupted[0]. So your bet might not be wrong, but your reason probably is. [0] I feel like The Innovator's Dilemma is one of those things everyone should at least skim, so they know where the hype around a term like "disruption" came from and what the word originally meant. agilemanifesto.org is another one.
- phendrenad2 4y agoI've read the Innovator's Dilemma, and it's not relevant unless you can point to something that Godot is innovating. It's just an also-ran to Unity and Unreal at this point. When people talk about Godot, they don't mention it's cool features over Unity/Unreal, they mention that it's free or libre. And there have been a million free and open-source game engines in the past, so that's not an innovation.
- gamblor956 4y agoMost "disruptors"...fail to disrupt, largely because they misunderstood what the market wanted and "disrupted" the wrong thing. Being "indie" isn't enough for Godot. Unity and Unreal are the market leaders because they provide a single-solution multi-platform engine. Godot does not, and a significant amount of work is required in order to make a Godot game run on multiple platforms. Until Godot can do multi-platform natively, it will be relegated to the sidelines.
- Doxin 4y agoWhat are you on about? It's trivial to get a Godot game to run on a bunch of platforms. In most cases it's just a matter of setting up the export template and hitting export.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
- andrewflnr 4y agoThis really makes me want to try making something with Godot. I have too many projects already, dammit.
- dleslie 4y agoBetting on Godot is appealing from a philosophical position, but there's not much indication that it won't be the Firefox to Epic's Chrome. Likewise, Blender didn't and won't kill commercial 3D suites. In practice, Unreal is source available enough to satisfy the needs of commercial developers, and it's backed by a billion dollar incumbent that shows little or no sign of slowing down. Without serious revenue generation to fund its developers, Godot will struggle to attract the top talent. It will get great talent, like Firefox, but not in the numbers and dedication that Epic can pay for and so won't be able to take the same risks with development time. And then there's professional level support. Who can you pay six and seven figures a year to in order to acquire the services of a team of industry experts who work with Godot?
- krapp 4y ago>Who can you pay six and seven figures a year to in order to acquire the services of a team of industry experts who work with Godot? Why would you need to? It's an open source engine that uses straightforward C++, You can add PRs and requests in Github or contact the devs on Twitter or wherever. You can fork it and make whatever changes you like. FFS, Undertale was made in Game Maker of all things. A game engine doesn't need to compete against AAA studios to be successful.
- ethbr0 4y ago>> And then there's professional level support. Who can you pay six and seven figures a year to in order to acquire the services of a team of industry experts who work with Godot? > Why would you need to? It's an open source engine that uses straightforward C++, You can add PRs and requests in Github or contact the devs on Twitter or wherever. This is such peak HN, and misunderstanding why companies pay for professional support, that it hurts.
- pjmlp 4y agoMost of HN doesn't really get the games industry anyway.
- 4y ago
- soup10 4y agoIf you were hoping for an insightful article or analysis about game engines, you won't find it here. It's just FUD about Unity and Unreal then surprise turns out it's an advertisement for Godot.
- amatecha 4y agoEr? Not really? It's pretty transparent with direct criticisms about Godot, such as: "While Godot is supported by a rich range of plug-ins, this ecosystem is not yet mature, and is no match for the sheer size and turn-key potential of the Unity Asset Store."
- jay_kyburz 4y agoI've be enjoying Love2d for the last few months. I've been apprehensive about building a large code base in Lua but it has been OK so far. Love has a good feature set and rock solid performance. https://love2d.org/ https://love2d.org/
- generichuman 4y agoI want to use it for small projects but the lack of static typing is stopping me. Otherwise it was very nice when I played with it.
- FileSorter 4y agoBad article. This is an outsider's perspective looking in. Godot and Blender are no where near industry standards.
- Mikeb85 4y agoNot standard doesn't mean not good enough. Godot is where Unity was in 2010... Unity used to be considered "only for indies" versus the "professional" Crytek, Unreal, idtech, etc...
- BoorishBears 4y agoUnity is where Unity was in 2010 in that sense... Yes large money making titles have shipped with Unity, but Unity never quite broke into Unreal's level of AAA ubiquity. That's not to say some of those games didn't make AAA money despite that, but it's a very different development pipeline.
- amatecha 4y agoI think this is a pretty insightful piece. Godot is a pretty strong completely-free alternative to Unity and Unreal and seems like a solid offering that is continuously improving. It's already seriously impressive compared to how the earliest versions of Unity were, if you ask me. It's also far more accessible since you can literally do whatever you want with it and never have to care about what artificially-imposed limits you're going to hit and have to start paying to make the most of what you've been investing dozens or hundreds of hours (or more) into. Every time I look into it I'm impressed how much it has improved. There's serious potential and already tons of neat stuff I'm seeing devs sharing on social media that they're making with Godot. Oh, the other awesome thing? This engine is on OpenBSD! Mind blown.
- HelloNurse 4y agoSummarizing, both Unity and Unreal are damaging themselves with unsettling strategies and strategic partners, and if the trend continues other game engines, such as Godot, will replace them. It's the circle of life, not an "inflection point".
- Bombthecat 4y agoI'm still a huge fan of irrlicht 3d. Sadly it got less and less support and users. The engine was amazingly designed, I loved how you managed the game loop and entities.
- amitmathew 4y agoThis article is pretty shallow, but I agree with the broad strokes. I'm personally betting on Godot reaching an inflection point (I have $$$ personally invested in a startup betting on this), but I think it's totally a great outcome if the market is shared between Godot, Unity, and Unreal. I think the most likely scenario is that Godot enters in the indie/low-end market and moves up the ladder, Epic continues to dominate the AAA market, and Unity is squeezed somewhere between. With that said, none of this is guaranteed and will require significant commercial support to make Godot remotely competitive. Some problems are immediately obvious like the lack of tutorials and an asset store (that's what we're working on in the near-term), but it also involves more sophisticated multiplayer options, a better asset pipeline, and much much more, so it's going to be a long road. But I'm optimistic about Godot's future. I'm currently putting together a simple 2D RTS game with Godot 4 beta to use as a tutorial and template and it's been such a joy. Despite the bugs and the warts, I've gotten so much done in just two weeks. If you squint really hard, you can see an army of indies in the future making simple, but great games with Godot in half the time they do today and that gets me really excited.
- Jugglerofworlds 4y agoI've used Unity since around 2014 or so, for personal projects and also at work for a VR startup. The primary problem with Unity is: 1. The editor has become so slow and buggy, to the point where it is unusable, 2. Features are half-baked, like the new ECS which has failed to replace the old user scripts, lack of a networking solution despite years of development time, etc. My relatively small personal project causes the latest Unity versions to constantly freeze with loading bars that never complete. I think that peak Unity was 2019 or so, all versions since then have been worse. With the ironSource acquisition complete, I don't think things will turn around. Unity didn't have a cashcow like Epic, so some sort of acquisition was pretty much inevitable. The profits from Unity licenses and the Unity asset store just isn't high enough to sustain development.
- aschearer 4y agoMy advice to anyone setting out making games would be to pick any major engine with a trackrecord (can be broadly construed), stick with it, and just start pumping out games. Start small, like your smallest idea then cut that in half. Complete the game and ship it to Steam. There's a lot you'll learn in the last 20%. Grow the scale for the next game slightly. Repeat. If you're dying to build a dream game, don't. Save that for the next decade. Yes, decade. That's when you're skills will match your ambition. Ultimately, the tech isn't that important. Project management, scope, persistence, and execution are more important. Flipping around will drain your time, and reduce the rate you get better.
- sdwr 4y agoI started making a game last year (https://github.com/sdwr/UNDERLOD https://github.com/sdwr/UNDERLOD), and by now wish I had been half as ambitious. It's kinda nice to be getting fed up with it though, means it's not as precious anymore.
- bibanez 4y agoHey, nice concept! I would very much like to play it if it were in the browser
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- w4rh4wk5 4y agoSo, why not O3DE?