10 ms·

Game Development Post-Unity

149 points by generichuman 3y ago

jerojero 3y ago
I feel like, realistically, for a lot of the people that feel might be affected by this change they could probably do their games in an engine like Godot without much trouble. Though as it says in the article, Godot does lack proper support for consoles.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  Rewriting shaders, MonoBehaviors, animations, triggers, levels, and systems? Yeah, not too much trouble.
  - jayd16 3y ago
    I think they mean for future games. Ports will be pretty brutal unless the outrage remains high and someone makes some kind of porting toolkit.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      interesting, but I can't imagine someone battle-testing a proper unity scene porter that would be faster than simply re-importing your assets (easy?), re-writing game scripts (easy-ish, since Godot has c# support. but annoying and time consuming), and re-doing your shaders/materials (basically a complete re-write, unfortunately).
      - jayd16 3y ago
        Assuming C# support is rolled out to all platforms soon, its still a massive undertaking to port over scripts from Unity's lifecycle and libraries to Godots. I assume shaders are actually much much easier to port in an automated way. But also many assets are custom to Unity, like their animation system.
        gabereiser 3y ago
        Yeah, anyone who hasn’t had to rewrite and/or port will think it’s easy. Not knowing Unity has its own lifecycle for scripts and has its own APIs for doing things the “Unity” way. Want to create an instance of something? No, it’s not just new Thing()…
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        I say "easy" in a relative sense, since we're talking about leveraging the use of automation here (and we know how that ends: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/). And I'm assuming you have a decent engineer assisting in moving the scripts. they can learn the differences in the game loop and port over a lot of the high level scripts with a bit of thought. But not in a way that is easily automated. And to be honest, I don't know how easy asset migration is (hence the question mark). it's a surprising pain point when moving from Unity to Unreal even if you keep everything as the industry standard FBX. I don't know if it "just works" in Godot or can be its own undertaking. Histoically it does mess up a lot of texturing and animations, even if you manage to get the base model in intact.
        gabereiser 3y ago
        Yeah, even a seasoned engineer would take as long. The issue with porting C# code from Unity to <engine> is the different ABI. It’s like trying to port Win32 C++ code to MacOS with the minimal cocoa obj-c required. In the end, they are two completely separate ABIs that have to be targeted. There is no such MonoBehavior API in Godot. They have different lifecycle management APIs, so creating, destroying, and triggering code has different signatures and different calling conventions. You simply can’t transpile code from one engine to another simply because you’re using the same language.
- nodja 3y ago
  > Though as it says in the article, Godot does lack proper support for consoles. None of the open source engines do, or ever will as publishing to consoles requires that you sign an NDA. If you're a godot dev and want to publish on console look towards https://lonewolftechnology.com/ https://lonewolftechnology.com/
- hiccuphippo 3y ago
  Is the lack of console support a technical issue, it hasn't been added yet; or a political one, no permission to add support on open source software?
  - ensignavenger 3y ago
    There are commercial companies offering Godot-based games a path to consoles, so it isn't technical at all. It is entirely a matter of licensing with the console makers not wanting to allow open source support. But they don't mind 3rd parties developing proprietary extensions to support consoles and following their licensing restrictions.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Any references? Edit: This is the only one I could find, but looks more like a contract to port: https://lonewolftechnology.com https://lonewolftechnology.com
      - ensignavenger 3y ago
        Also mentioned in another sibling comment, coming soon https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-a-practical-console-porting-solution-for-game-developers/ https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-..., W4 is a company founded by Godot founders.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    mostly Political. Console dev kits from the Big Three are all under NDA, and you need to apply to get them. So we're talking about access to closed sourced code with use in an open source engine. Godot created W4 Games to get around this. So while Godot is open source, W4 can work on a fork that implements console-specific code that cannot exist on an open source repo.
- cridenour 3y ago
  Not for long on the console front - though costs have yet to be determined. https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-a-practical-console-porting-solution-for-game-developers/ https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-...
- pritambaral 3y ago
  > Godot does lack proper support for consoles. Sonic Colors: Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch was made in Godot[1]. From what I read elsewhere, console support code is usually protected by NDA, so the Godot devs setup a commercial entity to support consoles[2]. 1: https://www.destructoid.com/first-sonic-colors-switch-patch-fixes-some-bugs-adds-godot-to-the-credits/ https://www.destructoid.com/first-sonic-colors-switch-patch-... 2: https://w4games.com/2023/02/28/godot-support-for-consoles-is-coming-courtesy-of-w4-games/ https://w4games.com/2023/02/28/godot-support-for-consoles-is...
quchen 3y ago
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerenhance.com%2Fp%2Fgame-development-post-unity https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerenhance.co...
aschearer 3y ago
Didn't find this article especially helpful. Author admits to having no special knowledge so literally polls Twitter and shares the results. Doesn't really add much to the discussion. I'd really like to see how alternatives handle stuff such as: - Editor tools for non-artists - Editor API for customization/automation - Profiling CPU/memory - Integration with things like FMOD, Spine, whatever else - Tools for debugging - How does level editing work, what tools are present to assist with visualization, organization, construction
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Casey is a seasoned dev in the scene, with a decent resume of games and an even more impressive resume on knowledge in engine tech. Most notably, he's working on a new programming language called Jai that is tailored for game development. So he may not be the most appropriate person to ask for game engine advice (since he says in the article, he makes and rolls a lot of his own tech), but he will inevitably be asked for his thoughts and advice on the situation regardless.
  - badpenny 3y ago
    AFAIK Casey Muratori isn't working on Jai, that's (entirely?) Jonathan Blow.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Yes, you are correct, I was mixing engine programmers that both worked on "The Witness". Casey is known (among many other tools and research) for Handmade Hero[0], an engine he uses to teach very low level game programming concepts. Which he is using to release a full game with (and you can "pre-order" the game on the website which gives you access to the source code) 0: https://handmadehero.org/ https://handmadehero.org/
ldoughty 3y ago
I'm not really into this industry, but I've dabbled with Unity over the last month for some fun/expanding knowledge... I've seen 2 articles in the last day about this topic with clickbait misinformation from sites I would expect to be more accurate... Including talking about how a "free game" was going to cost a developer millions... and how "independent developers" will be bankrupt... But how? The fee page and FAQ [1] state "will apply to games made with Unity Personal and Unity Plus that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months".. If you are distributing a free game, by definition, you made no revenue for the game and you pay nothing to Unity. Key point: the metric is PER game... so it's not like your $5 game with 200k revenue and 200k installs will trigger your separate FREE game to cost 5 million in damages. If you are an "independent" developer, or even a team of 5, then the $2k/seat-year Pro license means the threshold is now $1million... pay 2-10k/year upfront to pocket an extra 800k? These seem like a no-brainer... Now, I can see this being an issue for studios that invested heavily in Unity with dozens or hundreds of developers.. and I appreciate discussion on this topic... I'd love to see more realistic reactions and discussions... and less "abandon ship" (like this article) and I-didn't-read-the-memo knee-jerk reaction stories for attention out there right now. (And I know some of the early concern was download-bombing, but they have addressed that, and most of the articles I read didn't cover that explicitly) [1] https://unity.com/pricing-updates https://unity.com/pricing-updates
- TylerE 3y ago
  "Free" games don't really exist any more on the mainstream platforms. "Ad supported" games though... and guess what? Unity is an ad company, not a tech company, at heart.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > Unity is an ad company, not a tech company I'm not sure that's true, their Ads business(es) is made up of other companies which they acquired over the years and is/was somewhat isolated from the engine/tech part of the company.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  I think the concern is that Unity is failing. Charging royalties is not going to save them, and is going to drive more devs away from the platform (as this article shows), so they are going to have to do more drastic things to raise revenue, which will drive more devs away, and so on into the familiar death-spiral. If they can't cut costs enough to get profitable (and history shows this is very difficult) then they're doomed to go through a series of increasingly more disastrous acquisitions (see Yahoo for details). Given this, then the details of this particular royalty structure don't matter. Yes, a freebie game may not have to pay any royalties now. But as Unity enters the death-spiral that will probably change. Or there will be mandatory malware shipped with the engine. Or some other craptastic revenue-generating idea will mess with the game. We can expect relatively frequent, drastic changes to Unity's licensing as it tries to escape its fate.
Macha 3y ago
It's interesting that Source doesn't get a mention here, when it used to be a rather popular engine. Given unreal is second, it's clearly not an objection to closed source engines
- hueho 3y ago
  Source is not easily licensable.
- mastazi 3y ago
  I follow indie games news and I don't remember seeing any recent indie release using Source. My guess is that it's no longer as popular as it used to be.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thisisonthetest 3y ago
  Actually Source was never a popular engine among developers. If you exclude valve we’re talking dozens maybe? And when 250+ games are released on every week on Steam it’s a very rarely used engine
- Freedom2 3y ago
  When has Source ever been "rather popular"?
  - teirce 3y ago
    The only time period I can even think of that _might, maybe_ qualify would be the Source mod era, but that came and went over a decade ago. And of course they were free mods, not standalone games with purchases or licenses. Some of these mods turned into games later (Chivalry, Black Mesa, Insurgency come to mind) but without investigating I'm not sure they even use Source anymore.
    - PrivateButts 3y ago
      I agree that it's barely used in this day and age but worth noting that Titanfall 1, 2, and Apex Legends are all heavily modified Source
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
This blog post points out something really interesting: > Less than half their revenue comes from game engines. Over half comes from advertising. That is to say, Unity makes most of its money from people PLAYING games made with Unity. The sales to the developers are secondary. Unity had to change their model, and that meant either making the engine cheaper to acquire more games to get more ads, or it meant raising the price of the engine at the likely cost of ads, and for some reason they chose option 2, which seems like a dumb idea. The best explanation for that I can think of is that almost all of the advertising money should be coming from smaller mobile games, and so this is a move to try and make more money from the desktop games and the mobile games that don't use Unity's ad networks, which probably look like big, untapped sources of income to dumber product managers. But now imagine that they did the opposite: they raise the maximum revenue requirements and "must show splash screen" requirements and generally make Unity more available for less. Engine revenue goes down a bit, but ad revenue goes up, which probably works out even better in the long run, but also solidifies the user base, garners good will, and generally leaves everybody feeling great about Unity.
- foota 3y ago
  I don't think there's anyone not using unity today that would use it tomorrow because of a pricing change (well, at least, for values of today and tomorrow from last week)
  - jay_kyburz 3y ago
    I wouldn't even care if they switched to Epics model and asked for 15% of revenue after the first 1M - For games making use of Unity 2024 of course.
    - nonethewiser 3y ago
      … do you have a game doing 1M in revenue?
      - jay_kyburz 3y ago
p1necone 3y ago
I feel like any piece of software that's widely applicable to a whole industry of users (3d modelling, image editing, game engines, etc) is destined to eventually solidify on an fully production quality open source solution that everyone contributes to. It's already happened for 3d modelling (Blender) and digital painting (Krita), and it feels like gamedev is an even better market for this to happen in than those because all the users are also going to be capable of contributing to development of the engine. From the outside Godot looks like it's the closest to ready for building proper AAA quality 3d games. I've also actually used Bevy and if you're a fan of rust and ECS based development it's really nice for building procedurally generated stuff that doesn't need a level editor, or for building 2d games and relying on a 3rd party editor like Tiled or LDtk. However there's plenty of places where it's still a bit rough around the edges, like dealing with more complex multi stage asset loading pipelines.
- ninepoints 3y ago
  AAA quality? No it's not there, but it's certainly been improving on a number of fronts.
  - p1necone 3y ago
    Yeah I'm not saying Godot looks AAA ready, just that it's much closer than every other option. Although I would love to see how far a code only engine core + separate third party level editor tooling model could go, it appeals to my intuitive feel of what the "right" way to build software is.
    - ninepoints 3y ago
      I have casually evaluated Godot so I am moderately aware of its capabilities. The thing I did not evaluate well though is how well structured its data and asset pipelines are. The big thing a AAA engine needs (aside from rendering, console support, and perf and all that) is the ability to scale production to hundreds or thousands of programmers and artists. The ability of an engine to scale in this way is generally learned painfully by doing, and I'm looking forward to see how Godot fares on larger scale projects over time.
empath75 3y ago
Games development is very hit based and most games make nothing. You might think, "oh if most games make nothing, then thos won't make an impact", but if you're removing the profit from the relatively few hits there are, it wrecks the incentives to take the risk of developing a game to begin with. If Unity wants a piece of the profits, they need to be investing.
webprofusion 3y ago
Godot is the most obvious answer from a long term non-profit perspective, but it's not without it's caveats. Rewriting is obviously difficult, starting new projects is somewhat easier. The main issue I see is the Unity asset store ecosystem is completely different and provides massive amounts of functionality for current games, which Godot doesn't yet have much of. I've tried Godot a few times and basic stuff like export to web didn't work at all out of the box, and it felt like alpha quality stuff. I would however like it to succeed. Unity also has extensive documentation and training and it's an established tool for game devs who then migrate to industry jobs like industrial process/environment simulations. I have a feeling Godot is barely aware of these scenarios as it's rarely the engine of choice.
- clnq 3y ago
  To put this very directly, Godot is a meme in the commercial games industry. Most of companies with above AA cash would rather write their own engines than use Godot, as the maintenance effort would probably exceed the effort to write the own engine to spec. Maybe Godot is more seriously considered by indies and open source fans. But then, Unreal Engine is also practically open source for any licensee, including ones that won’t ever pay a cent to Epic. So even in indies, it’s rare to see Godot. I champion all development in games. So I wish good luck to Godot. I’ve actually been thinking about contributing, too. I think in some ways, the ethics of Godot are a breath of fresh air. But contributing to UE looks much better on a resume. There are a lot of forces working agains Godot: inertia, economics, instability, lack of talent, lack of appeal to talent. No marketplace actually is the least of its concerns as we don’t use marketplace stuff much in AAA/AA. The engine makes a lot more sense on paper than in reality.
  - vvanders 3y ago
    I hope Godot/Bevy do well but there's a kernel of truth there as well. It was not uncommon for us to make significant changes to licensed engines to meet the needs of the game style/design. UE3 for instance was pretty awful for open world titles(gears was quite a rails shooter and the engine reflected that), there's a number of titles that took the renderer and re-did many of the major game systems. Once you make changes like that upleveling is a serious challenge. We had one dev who's responsibility was to pull latest, spend about a month getting to to compile, another 1-2 months fixing all the issues, checking it in only to them spend another 2 months fixing all the cases that weren't tested. With a ~6mo uplevel cadence it was just enough time to finish it in order to start the next uplevel. Once you've gone through that internal engines start to look appealing(although they have their own pitfalls, I.E. heavy dependency on MAX/Maya for editor support and other "fun" bits).
dham 3y ago
I've been enjoying Construct 3. Not the visual scripting but the Javascript portion. It's a really good Javascript engine at its core. For some reason people don't know this? DragonRuby has also been pretty fun and hot reload is nice. Godot is the main answer for Unity but web support is just better with Construct, obviously since it's built on web technologies. My main issue with Unity and why I never picked it up is, I have poor vision and the editor doesn't scale on Mac. You basically have to have perfect vision to see anything that's going on. A scalable editor is a must. Godot / Construct fit these. Game Maker looks so poor on 4k that it hurts my eyes.
- vunderba 3y ago
  Construct 3 moved away to a subscription model (I was a huge fan of C2 back in the day) and annual fee. I'd recommend checking out GDevelop, an open source 2d visual game engine which also exports for HTML5/mobile, and is completely free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDevelop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDevelop
pengaru 3y ago
This feels like blogspam trying to bring traffic to computerenhance.com. Casey has never shipped a video game of his own. It's not just an "I haven't used off-the-shelf engines" situation, he hasn't developed a game start to finish with any engine. AFAIK Handmade Hero is the furthest he's ever gone in shipping a game, which is a far cry from finished. He's not really qualified to speak to the matter of which engines are best for delivering and supporting polished, fun, finished video games. Please correct me if I'm wrong; what titles has he put out there with his own engine?
raytopia 3y ago
I know a lot of people recommend Godot because it's super good but if you want a more code oriented and batteries included engine I recommend Panda3D [0] it's open source, super mature (it's actually one of the oldest continously developed game engines), and can be used form Python and C++. Not sure why it's not more popular it's flexible and super fun to use. [0] https://www.panda3d.org/ https://www.panda3d.org/
readyplayernull 3y ago
10 years ago everyone believed Blender would become the new Unity, but it didn't, it's too difficult to make games with Blender, no one even mentions the idea or recommends it anymore, although its 3D editor is highly used and improved during the years. For Godot to become the favorite indie game engine they must focus on making its workflow straightfoward and simple. On the tech aspect Godot seems like Unity 5.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  10 years ago Unity wasn’t trying to shoot every developer that uses them in every organ that matters. That’s changed. Unity won’t be able to last this because it’s impossible to make the economics of it work. So even if the alternatives aren’t as good, people are going to have to use it. It’s not really optional.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    This is true, but it's not like Godot is the "best alternative". for a medium-large sized team, it's only the best alternative if you have overly rigid reasons to not use Unreal Engine or your 3d game (if you have a 2D game, you are probably better off using GameMaker. Or perhaps going back to Monogame).
- andolanra 3y ago
  Nobody mentions the idea or recommends it anymore because the game engine was removed from Blender entirely back in 2019, in favor of purpose-build game engines like Godot: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/Removed_Features https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/R...
  - readyplayernull 3y ago
    Sure, but at the time they showed real interest in becoming a mainstream game engine, showed some cool advanced projects, and had a few years to try out, why did the give up if there was hype?
fbdab103 3y ago
Selfishly, this will be a minor win for me. I occasionally like to try indie games from itch. For safety reasons, these are obviously run inside a VM. Unity games have always run like garbage on this setup, so the more developers migrating off the platform, the better for me.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Unity games run like garbage native, too!
  - olig15 3y ago
    I was once pulled on to a small unity mobile game that was being released by a small studio in the iPhone 4 days to help fix performance issues. After looking at the frame capture, I could see that the entire scene was being rendered about 5 times per frame from different angles. Turns out the team had a bunch of cameras enabled, but because they only saw the rendering from the last camera, they just edited that one. I sometimes think Unity makes making games TOO easy, and you end up with people that have no technical knowledge of the way games work so they can’t fix/diagnose the most basic things. Obviously the game runs slower when you render the scene 5 times, but they didn’t even think to open a frame capture tool. The fix for the issue that plagued them for months, was to uncheck the ‘enabled’ box for these unused cameras. Probably took 30mins to diagnose and fix.
Dban1 3y ago
Godot
codelord 3y ago
IMO Unreal Engine is the best deal available and fits >90% of use cases for game developers. Unless you are building something for the web or low powered mobile VR I wouldn't even consider anything else. For PC and console games UE5 provides incredible amount of tools and flexibility. It's also great for building 2D/3D mobile games. People who say complexity of Unreal has stopped them from using it have gotten it wrong. UE5 provides you with a lot of tools, you don't have to use them all. But if you are thinking of building something more complex than a hello world example, you'd realize that the additional tools that UE5 provides you greatly save your time. If you are a total beginner you can use Blueprints to write the game logic and use the existing out-of-the box tools. If you are a more experienced programmer you can use C++ to build custom components/plugins to get more customization. I remember a time that game engines were these precious secret tools that you had to pay millions of dollars to get a license for. Now you can get the full source of UE5 on Github for free. And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue. This is just a no-brainer folks. IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified. In fact it's a bargain and you save money by paying Epic 5% compared to anything else out there. Use UE5 unless you have a really really really good reason not to.
- alex_lav 3y ago
  > IMO Unreal Engine is the best deal available and fits >90% of use cases for game developers. The only place Unity really shines (both IME and in industry) is mobile games. Unreal IIRC doesn't really have even close to comparable support for mobile platforms. Mobile games by revenue make up more than 10% of the games industry, so I would say the ">90% of use cases" thing is just untrue. > And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue. > IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified. Again, for mobile games, that's 5% after 1m in revenue, which also includes Apple and Google's 30% cut. So again, no, it's really not a good deal _at all_. In retrospect this comment feels like some form of advertisement for UE5 more than actual discussion.
  - p1necone 3y ago
    > Mobile games by revenue make up more than 10% of the games industry I've said this already in another recent thread but mobile games and pc/console games are two entirely separate markets, with different potential customer pools. Conflating them together makes about as much sense as conflating console/pc games with accounting software.
moth-fuzz 3y ago
I by and large loathe how commonplace big do-it-all game engines have become in indie game development, with unity at the forefront of this movement. Even if everybody and their mom used the same awesome product, I'd still be upset because because of the market stranglehold that eventually creates - Unity in this case is worse because it isn't even an awesome product. It's a mediocre product with an actively hostile business strategy. I admit this is entirely emotional, but when I learned that Hollow Knight[0] was made in Unity, it broke my heart. A 2D game with a consistent art style (read: write the shaders once and forget it), made up entirely of flat surfaces with only a handful of different methods of movement, no physics to speak of, and only a couple hundred different types of enemies, most with large overlaps in AI save for bosses. Gorgeous game, strong art direction, thoughtful lore and story, but any game developer could probably write the engine for such a game in a couple weeks. But every indie developer I've talked to about game engine development acts like it's a dark art. That it's just impossible for mere mortals to do such a thing, and if you do, then you'll never ever release a game, or you'll spend literal years on the engine. Again, I predict a couple weeks. Back to the article, I dislike that 'game development post-unity' just means 'picking out a new engine'. Everybody's jumping ship to Godot or Unreal or whatever else because we all need a game engine. But why? Why is this song and dance necessary? I feel like since the author is a game engine programmer himself, this option should have come up higher on the list along with the non-engine libraries and frameworks. 0. https://www.hollowknight.com/ https://www.hollowknight.com/
- notamy 3y ago
  > But why? Why is this song and dance necessary? I feel like since the author is a game engine programmer himself, this option should have come up higher on the list along with the non-engine libraries and frameworks. I’ve done a little bit of this casually; imo it’s because I don’t want to write the engine. I want to be making features for the game, not making a bespoke custom engine and fixing issues with it as well as my game.
- muchwhales 3y ago
  Just to give some perspective: Without prior graphics programming experience, I was able to write a simplistic 3D engine (VERY simple, but enough for my purposes) in a week or two. I somehow assumed that it was just an impossible thing to do and so I've never tried, until recently. It turned out to be much easier to get something going than I could've imagined. It's true that Unity and other engines offer tons of features, but most indie developers probably won't need them, and by the time they do need more than the basics they'll have so much experience that they can easily implement what's missing in their own "engine". We're also seeing some interesting developments in this space with WebGPU, which is what prompted me to finally give it a try in the first place. I've never used OpenGL before and I was still able to get by (more or less), after failing miserably to complete the Vulkan tutorial... If nothing else, I can only recommend people at least think about whether they really need Unity/Unreal and consider that there are disadvantages as well as advantages when using them.
jmugan 3y ago
Anybody know of something good and simple in Python? I'm more interested in agent-based machine learning in 3d simulation than making games. I'm familiar with Ursina on top of Panda3d. Is there anything new on the horizon?
- az09mugen 3y ago
  I don't know if it will fit your needs, but take a look at godot, which has gdscript : https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/gdscript/gdscript_basics.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/g...
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Panda3D is probably the best proper game engine in Python, unfortunately. Python as an interpreted language tends to have large performance costs for games, and python hasn't been too popular as a scripting language buit on top of engine code (studios love to use python for tools, though). I'd second taking a look at Godot, since its GDScript is meant to closely mimic Python.
- raytopia 3y ago
  Panda3D is your best bet.
mjan22640 3y ago
I guess the motivation behind the move was to monetize large titles. Killing off their nursery is an unintended side effect.

149 points by generichuman 3y ago

I feel like, realistically, for a lot of the people that feel might be affected by this change they could probably do their games in an engine like Godot without much trouble. Though as it says in the article, Godot does lack proper support for consoles.

gabereiser 3y ago
Rewriting shaders, MonoBehaviors, animations, triggers, levels, and systems? Yeah, not too much trouble.
- jayd16 3y ago
  I think they mean for future games. Ports will be pretty brutal unless the outrage remains high and someone makes some kind of porting toolkit.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    interesting, but I can't imagine someone battle-testing a proper unity scene porter that would be faster than simply re-importing your assets (easy?), re-writing game scripts (easy-ish, since Godot has c# support. but annoying and time consuming), and re-doing your shaders/materials (basically a complete re-write, unfortunately).
    - jayd16 3y ago
      Assuming C# support is rolled out to all platforms soon, its still a massive undertaking to port over scripts from Unity's lifecycle and libraries to Godots. I assume shaders are actually much much easier to port in an automated way. But also many assets are custom to Unity, like their animation system.
      - gabereiser 3y ago
        Yeah, anyone who hasn’t had to rewrite and/or port will think it’s easy. Not knowing Unity has its own lifecycle for scripts and has its own APIs for doing things the “Unity” way. Want to create an instance of something? No, it’s not just new Thing()…
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        I say "easy" in a relative sense, since we're talking about leveraging the use of automation here (and we know how that ends: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/). And I'm assuming you have a decent engineer assisting in moving the scripts. they can learn the differences in the game loop and port over a lot of the high level scripts with a bit of thought. But not in a way that is easily automated. And to be honest, I don't know how easy asset migration is (hence the question mark). it's a surprising pain point when moving from Unity to Unreal even if you keep everything as the industry standard FBX. I don't know if it "just works" in Godot or can be its own undertaking. Histoically it does mess up a lot of texturing and animations, even if you manage to get the base model in intact.
        gabereiser 3y ago
        Yeah, even a seasoned engineer would take as long. The issue with porting C# code from Unity to <engine> is the different ABI. It’s like trying to port Win32 C++ code to MacOS with the minimal cocoa obj-c required. In the end, they are two completely separate ABIs that have to be targeted. There is no such MonoBehavior API in Godot. They have different lifecycle management APIs, so creating, destroying, and triggering code has different signatures and different calling conventions. You simply can’t transpile code from one engine to another simply because you’re using the same language.
nodja 3y ago
> Though as it says in the article, Godot does lack proper support for consoles. None of the open source engines do, or ever will as publishing to consoles requires that you sign an NDA. If you're a godot dev and want to publish on console look towards https://lonewolftechnology.com/ https://lonewolftechnology.com/
hiccuphippo 3y ago
Is the lack of console support a technical issue, it hasn't been added yet; or a political one, no permission to add support on open source software?
- ensignavenger 3y ago
  There are commercial companies offering Godot-based games a path to consoles, so it isn't technical at all. It is entirely a matter of licensing with the console makers not wanting to allow open source support. But they don't mind 3rd parties developing proprietary extensions to support consoles and following their licensing restrictions.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Any references? Edit: This is the only one I could find, but looks more like a contract to port: https://lonewolftechnology.com https://lonewolftechnology.com
    - ensignavenger 3y ago
      Also mentioned in another sibling comment, coming soon https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-a-practical-console-porting-solution-for-game-developers/ https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-..., W4 is a company founded by Godot founders.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  mostly Political. Console dev kits from the Big Three are all under NDA, and you need to apply to get them. So we're talking about access to closed sourced code with use in an open source engine. Godot created W4 Games to get around this. So while Godot is open source, W4 can work on a fork that implements console-specific code that cannot exist on an open source repo.
cridenour 3y ago
Not for long on the console front - though costs have yet to be determined. https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-a-practical-console-porting-solution-for-game-developers/ https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-...
pritambaral 3y ago
> Godot does lack proper support for consoles. Sonic Colors: Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch was made in Godot[1]. From what I read elsewhere, console support code is usually protected by NDA, so the Godot devs setup a commercial entity to support consoles[2]. 1: https://www.destructoid.com/first-sonic-colors-switch-patch-fixes-some-bugs-adds-godot-to-the-credits/ https://www.destructoid.com/first-sonic-colors-switch-patch-... 2: https://w4games.com/2023/02/28/godot-support-for-consoles-is-coming-courtesy-of-w4-games/ https://w4games.com/2023/02/28/godot-support-for-consoles-is...

quchen 3y ago

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerenhance.com%2Fp%2Fgame-development-post-unity https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerenhance.co...

aschearer 3y ago

Didn't find this article especially helpful. Author admits to having no special knowledge so literally polls Twitter and shares the results. Doesn't really add much to the discussion. I'd really like to see how alternatives handle stuff such as: - Editor tools for non-artists - Editor API for customization/automation - Profiling CPU/memory - Integration with things like FMOD, Spine, whatever else - Tools for debugging - How does level editing work, what tools are present to assist with visualization, organization, construction

johnnyanmac 3y ago
Casey is a seasoned dev in the scene, with a decent resume of games and an even more impressive resume on knowledge in engine tech. Most notably, he's working on a new programming language called Jai that is tailored for game development. So he may not be the most appropriate person to ask for game engine advice (since he says in the article, he makes and rolls a lot of his own tech), but he will inevitably be asked for his thoughts and advice on the situation regardless.
- badpenny 3y ago
  AFAIK Casey Muratori isn't working on Jai, that's (entirely?) Jonathan Blow.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Yes, you are correct, I was mixing engine programmers that both worked on "The Witness". Casey is known (among many other tools and research) for Handmade Hero[0], an engine he uses to teach very low level game programming concepts. Which he is using to release a full game with (and you can "pre-order" the game on the website which gives you access to the source code) 0: https://handmadehero.org/ https://handmadehero.org/

ldoughty 3y ago

I'm not really into this industry, but I've dabbled with Unity over the last month for some fun/expanding knowledge... I've seen 2 articles in the last day about this topic with clickbait misinformation from sites I would expect to be more accurate... Including talking about how a "free game" was going to cost a developer millions... and how "independent developers" will be bankrupt... But how? The fee page and FAQ [1] state "will apply to games made with Unity Personal and Unity Plus that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months".. If you are distributing a free game, by definition, you made no revenue for the game and you pay nothing to Unity. Key point: the metric is PER game... so it's not like your $5 game with 200k revenue and 200k installs will trigger your separate FREE game to cost 5 million in damages. If you are an "independent" developer, or even a team of 5, then the $2k/seat-year Pro license means the threshold is now $1million... pay 2-10k/year upfront to pocket an extra 800k? These seem like a no-brainer... Now, I can see this being an issue for studios that invested heavily in Unity with dozens or hundreds of developers.. and I appreciate discussion on this topic... I'd love to see more realistic reactions and discussions... and less "abandon ship" (like this article) and I-didn't-read-the-memo knee-jerk reaction stories for attention out there right now. (And I know some of the early concern was download-bombing, but they have addressed that, and most of the articles I read didn't cover that explicitly) [1] https://unity.com/pricing-updates https://unity.com/pricing-updates

TylerE 3y ago
"Free" games don't really exist any more on the mainstream platforms. "Ad supported" games though... and guess what? Unity is an ad company, not a tech company, at heart.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > Unity is an ad company, not a tech company I'm not sure that's true, their Ads business(es) is made up of other companies which they acquired over the years and is/was somewhat isolated from the engine/tech part of the company.
marcus_holmes 3y ago
I think the concern is that Unity is failing. Charging royalties is not going to save them, and is going to drive more devs away from the platform (as this article shows), so they are going to have to do more drastic things to raise revenue, which will drive more devs away, and so on into the familiar death-spiral. If they can't cut costs enough to get profitable (and history shows this is very difficult) then they're doomed to go through a series of increasingly more disastrous acquisitions (see Yahoo for details). Given this, then the details of this particular royalty structure don't matter. Yes, a freebie game may not have to pay any royalties now. But as Unity enters the death-spiral that will probably change. Or there will be mandatory malware shipped with the engine. Or some other craptastic revenue-generating idea will mess with the game. We can expect relatively frequent, drastic changes to Unity's licensing as it tries to escape its fate.

Macha 3y ago

It's interesting that Source doesn't get a mention here, when it used to be a rather popular engine. Given unreal is second, it's clearly not an objection to closed source engines

hueho 3y ago
Source is not easily licensable.
mastazi 3y ago
I follow indie games news and I don't remember seeing any recent indie release using Source. My guess is that it's no longer as popular as it used to be.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thisisonthetest 3y ago
Actually Source was never a popular engine among developers. If you exclude valve we’re talking dozens maybe? And when 250+ games are released on every week on Steam it’s a very rarely used engine
Freedom2 3y ago
When has Source ever been "rather popular"?
- teirce 3y ago
  The only time period I can even think of that _might, maybe_ qualify would be the Source mod era, but that came and went over a decade ago. And of course they were free mods, not standalone games with purchases or licenses. Some of these mods turned into games later (Chivalry, Black Mesa, Insurgency come to mind) but without investigating I'm not sure they even use Source anymore.
  - PrivateButts 3y ago
    I agree that it's barely used in this day and age but worth noting that Titanfall 1, 2, and Apex Legends are all heavily modified Source

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

This blog post points out something really interesting: > Less than half their revenue comes from game engines. Over half comes from advertising. That is to say, Unity makes most of its money from people PLAYING games made with Unity. The sales to the developers are secondary. Unity had to change their model, and that meant either making the engine cheaper to acquire more games to get more ads, or it meant raising the price of the engine at the likely cost of ads, and for some reason they chose option 2, which seems like a dumb idea. The best explanation for that I can think of is that almost all of the advertising money should be coming from smaller mobile games, and so this is a move to try and make more money from the desktop games and the mobile games that don't use Unity's ad networks, which probably look like big, untapped sources of income to dumber product managers. But now imagine that they did the opposite: they raise the maximum revenue requirements and "must show splash screen" requirements and generally make Unity more available for less. Engine revenue goes down a bit, but ad revenue goes up, which probably works out even better in the long run, but also solidifies the user base, garners good will, and generally leaves everybody feeling great about Unity.

foota 3y ago
I don't think there's anyone not using unity today that would use it tomorrow because of a pricing change (well, at least, for values of today and tomorrow from last week)
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  I wouldn't even care if they switched to Epics model and asked for 15% of revenue after the first 1M - For games making use of Unity 2024 of course.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    … do you have a game doing 1M in revenue?
    - jay_kyburz 3y ago

p1necone 3y ago

I feel like any piece of software that's widely applicable to a whole industry of users (3d modelling, image editing, game engines, etc) is destined to eventually solidify on an fully production quality open source solution that everyone contributes to. It's already happened for 3d modelling (Blender) and digital painting (Krita), and it feels like gamedev is an even better market for this to happen in than those because all the users are also going to be capable of contributing to development of the engine. From the outside Godot looks like it's the closest to ready for building proper AAA quality 3d games. I've also actually used Bevy and if you're a fan of rust and ECS based development it's really nice for building procedurally generated stuff that doesn't need a level editor, or for building 2d games and relying on a 3rd party editor like Tiled or LDtk. However there's plenty of places where it's still a bit rough around the edges, like dealing with more complex multi stage asset loading pipelines.

ninepoints 3y ago
AAA quality? No it's not there, but it's certainly been improving on a number of fronts.
- p1necone 3y ago
  Yeah I'm not saying Godot looks AAA ready, just that it's much closer than every other option. Although I would love to see how far a code only engine core + separate third party level editor tooling model could go, it appeals to my intuitive feel of what the "right" way to build software is.
  - ninepoints 3y ago
    I have casually evaluated Godot so I am moderately aware of its capabilities. The thing I did not evaluate well though is how well structured its data and asset pipelines are. The big thing a AAA engine needs (aside from rendering, console support, and perf and all that) is the ability to scale production to hundreds or thousands of programmers and artists. The ability of an engine to scale in this way is generally learned painfully by doing, and I'm looking forward to see how Godot fares on larger scale projects over time.

empath75 3y ago

Games development is very hit based and most games make nothing. You might think, "oh if most games make nothing, then thos won't make an impact", but if you're removing the profit from the relatively few hits there are, it wrecks the incentives to take the risk of developing a game to begin with. If Unity wants a piece of the profits, they need to be investing.

webprofusion 3y ago

Godot is the most obvious answer from a long term non-profit perspective, but it's not without it's caveats. Rewriting is obviously difficult, starting new projects is somewhat easier. The main issue I see is the Unity asset store ecosystem is completely different and provides massive amounts of functionality for current games, which Godot doesn't yet have much of. I've tried Godot a few times and basic stuff like export to web didn't work at all out of the box, and it felt like alpha quality stuff. I would however like it to succeed. Unity also has extensive documentation and training and it's an established tool for game devs who then migrate to industry jobs like industrial process/environment simulations. I have a feeling Godot is barely aware of these scenarios as it's rarely the engine of choice.

clnq 3y ago
To put this very directly, Godot is a meme in the commercial games industry. Most of companies with above AA cash would rather write their own engines than use Godot, as the maintenance effort would probably exceed the effort to write the own engine to spec. Maybe Godot is more seriously considered by indies and open source fans. But then, Unreal Engine is also practically open source for any licensee, including ones that won’t ever pay a cent to Epic. So even in indies, it’s rare to see Godot. I champion all development in games. So I wish good luck to Godot. I’ve actually been thinking about contributing, too. I think in some ways, the ethics of Godot are a breath of fresh air. But contributing to UE looks much better on a resume. There are a lot of forces working agains Godot: inertia, economics, instability, lack of talent, lack of appeal to talent. No marketplace actually is the least of its concerns as we don’t use marketplace stuff much in AAA/AA. The engine makes a lot more sense on paper than in reality.
- vvanders 3y ago
  I hope Godot/Bevy do well but there's a kernel of truth there as well. It was not uncommon for us to make significant changes to licensed engines to meet the needs of the game style/design. UE3 for instance was pretty awful for open world titles(gears was quite a rails shooter and the engine reflected that), there's a number of titles that took the renderer and re-did many of the major game systems. Once you make changes like that upleveling is a serious challenge. We had one dev who's responsibility was to pull latest, spend about a month getting to to compile, another 1-2 months fixing all the issues, checking it in only to them spend another 2 months fixing all the cases that weren't tested. With a ~6mo uplevel cadence it was just enough time to finish it in order to start the next uplevel. Once you've gone through that internal engines start to look appealing(although they have their own pitfalls, I.E. heavy dependency on MAX/Maya for editor support and other "fun" bits).

dham 3y ago

I've been enjoying Construct 3. Not the visual scripting but the Javascript portion. It's a really good Javascript engine at its core. For some reason people don't know this? DragonRuby has also been pretty fun and hot reload is nice. Godot is the main answer for Unity but web support is just better with Construct, obviously since it's built on web technologies. My main issue with Unity and why I never picked it up is, I have poor vision and the editor doesn't scale on Mac. You basically have to have perfect vision to see anything that's going on. A scalable editor is a must. Godot / Construct fit these. Game Maker looks so poor on 4k that it hurts my eyes.

vunderba 3y ago
Construct 3 moved away to a subscription model (I was a huge fan of C2 back in the day) and annual fee. I'd recommend checking out GDevelop, an open source 2d visual game engine which also exports for HTML5/mobile, and is completely free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDevelop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDevelop

pengaru 3y ago

This feels like blogspam trying to bring traffic to computerenhance.com. Casey has never shipped a video game of his own. It's not just an "I haven't used off-the-shelf engines" situation, he hasn't developed a game start to finish with any engine. AFAIK Handmade Hero is the furthest he's ever gone in shipping a game, which is a far cry from finished. He's not really qualified to speak to the matter of which engines are best for delivering and supporting polished, fun, finished video games. Please correct me if I'm wrong; what titles has he put out there with his own engine?

raytopia 3y ago

I know a lot of people recommend Godot because it's super good but if you want a more code oriented and batteries included engine I recommend Panda3D [0] it's open source, super mature (it's actually one of the oldest continously developed game engines), and can be used form Python and C++. Not sure why it's not more popular it's flexible and super fun to use. [0] https://www.panda3d.org/ https://www.panda3d.org/

readyplayernull 3y ago

10 years ago everyone believed Blender would become the new Unity, but it didn't, it's too difficult to make games with Blender, no one even mentions the idea or recommends it anymore, although its 3D editor is highly used and improved during the years. For Godot to become the favorite indie game engine they must focus on making its workflow straightfoward and simple. On the tech aspect Godot seems like Unity 5.

aaomidi 3y ago
10 years ago Unity wasn’t trying to shoot every developer that uses them in every organ that matters. That’s changed. Unity won’t be able to last this because it’s impossible to make the economics of it work. So even if the alternatives aren’t as good, people are going to have to use it. It’s not really optional.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  This is true, but it's not like Godot is the "best alternative". for a medium-large sized team, it's only the best alternative if you have overly rigid reasons to not use Unreal Engine or your 3d game (if you have a 2D game, you are probably better off using GameMaker. Or perhaps going back to Monogame).
andolanra 3y ago
Nobody mentions the idea or recommends it anymore because the game engine was removed from Blender entirely back in 2019, in favor of purpose-build game engines like Godot: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/Removed_Features https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/R...
- readyplayernull 3y ago
  Sure, but at the time they showed real interest in becoming a mainstream game engine, showed some cool advanced projects, and had a few years to try out, why did the give up if there was hype?

fbdab103 3y ago

Selfishly, this will be a minor win for me. I occasionally like to try indie games from itch. For safety reasons, these are obviously run inside a VM. Unity games have always run like garbage on this setup, so the more developers migrating off the platform, the better for me.

TylerE 3y ago
Unity games run like garbage native, too!
- olig15 3y ago
  I was once pulled on to a small unity mobile game that was being released by a small studio in the iPhone 4 days to help fix performance issues. After looking at the frame capture, I could see that the entire scene was being rendered about 5 times per frame from different angles. Turns out the team had a bunch of cameras enabled, but because they only saw the rendering from the last camera, they just edited that one. I sometimes think Unity makes making games TOO easy, and you end up with people that have no technical knowledge of the way games work so they can’t fix/diagnose the most basic things. Obviously the game runs slower when you render the scene 5 times, but they didn’t even think to open a frame capture tool. The fix for the issue that plagued them for months, was to uncheck the ‘enabled’ box for these unused cameras. Probably took 30mins to diagnose and fix.

Dban1 3y ago

Godot

codelord 3y ago

IMO Unreal Engine is the best deal available and fits >90% of use cases for game developers. Unless you are building something for the web or low powered mobile VR I wouldn't even consider anything else. For PC and console games UE5 provides incredible amount of tools and flexibility. It's also great for building 2D/3D mobile games. People who say complexity of Unreal has stopped them from using it have gotten it wrong. UE5 provides you with a lot of tools, you don't have to use them all. But if you are thinking of building something more complex than a hello world example, you'd realize that the additional tools that UE5 provides you greatly save your time. If you are a total beginner you can use Blueprints to write the game logic and use the existing out-of-the box tools. If you are a more experienced programmer you can use C++ to build custom components/plugins to get more customization. I remember a time that game engines were these precious secret tools that you had to pay millions of dollars to get a license for. Now you can get the full source of UE5 on Github for free. And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue. This is just a no-brainer folks. IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified. In fact it's a bargain and you save money by paying Epic 5% compared to anything else out there. Use UE5 unless you have a really really really good reason not to.

alex_lav 3y ago
> IMO Unreal Engine is the best deal available and fits >90% of use cases for game developers. The only place Unity really shines (both IME and in industry) is mobile games. Unreal IIRC doesn't really have even close to comparable support for mobile platforms. Mobile games by revenue make up more than 10% of the games industry, so I would say the ">90% of use cases" thing is just untrue. > And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue. > IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified. Again, for mobile games, that's 5% after 1m in revenue, which also includes Apple and Google's 30% cut. So again, no, it's really not a good deal _at all_. In retrospect this comment feels like some form of advertisement for UE5 more than actual discussion.
- p1necone 3y ago
  > Mobile games by revenue make up more than 10% of the games industry I've said this already in another recent thread but mobile games and pc/console games are two entirely separate markets, with different potential customer pools. Conflating them together makes about as much sense as conflating console/pc games with accounting software.

moth-fuzz 3y ago

I by and large loathe how commonplace big do-it-all game engines have become in indie game development, with unity at the forefront of this movement. Even if everybody and their mom used the same awesome product, I'd still be upset because because of the market stranglehold that eventually creates - Unity in this case is worse because it isn't even an awesome product. It's a mediocre product with an actively hostile business strategy. I admit this is entirely emotional, but when I learned that Hollow Knight[0] was made in Unity, it broke my heart. A 2D game with a consistent art style (read: write the shaders once and forget it), made up entirely of flat surfaces with only a handful of different methods of movement, no physics to speak of, and only a couple hundred different types of enemies, most with large overlaps in AI save for bosses. Gorgeous game, strong art direction, thoughtful lore and story, but any game developer could probably write the engine for such a game in a couple weeks. But every indie developer I've talked to about game engine development acts like it's a dark art. That it's just impossible for mere mortals to do such a thing, and if you do, then you'll never ever release a game, or you'll spend literal years on the engine. Again, I predict a couple weeks. Back to the article, I dislike that 'game development post-unity' just means 'picking out a new engine'. Everybody's jumping ship to Godot or Unreal or whatever else because we all need a game engine. But why? Why is this song and dance necessary? I feel like since the author is a game engine programmer himself, this option should have come up higher on the list along with the non-engine libraries and frameworks. 0. https://www.hollowknight.com/ https://www.hollowknight.com/

notamy 3y ago
> But why? Why is this song and dance necessary? I feel like since the author is a game engine programmer himself, this option should have come up higher on the list along with the non-engine libraries and frameworks. I’ve done a little bit of this casually; imo it’s because I don’t want to write the engine. I want to be making features for the game, not making a bespoke custom engine and fixing issues with it as well as my game.
muchwhales 3y ago
Just to give some perspective: Without prior graphics programming experience, I was able to write a simplistic 3D engine (VERY simple, but enough for my purposes) in a week or two. I somehow assumed that it was just an impossible thing to do and so I've never tried, until recently. It turned out to be much easier to get something going than I could've imagined. It's true that Unity and other engines offer tons of features, but most indie developers probably won't need them, and by the time they do need more than the basics they'll have so much experience that they can easily implement what's missing in their own "engine". We're also seeing some interesting developments in this space with WebGPU, which is what prompted me to finally give it a try in the first place. I've never used OpenGL before and I was still able to get by (more or less), after failing miserably to complete the Vulkan tutorial... If nothing else, I can only recommend people at least think about whether they really need Unity/Unreal and consider that there are disadvantages as well as advantages when using them.

jmugan 3y ago

Anybody know of something good and simple in Python? I'm more interested in agent-based machine learning in 3d simulation than making games. I'm familiar with Ursina on top of Panda3d. Is there anything new on the horizon?

az09mugen 3y ago
I don't know if it will fit your needs, but take a look at godot, which has gdscript : https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/gdscript/gdscript_basics.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/g...
johnnyanmac 3y ago
Panda3D is probably the best proper game engine in Python, unfortunately. Python as an interpreted language tends to have large performance costs for games, and python hasn't been too popular as a scripting language buit on top of engine code (studios love to use python for tools, though). I'd second taking a look at Godot, since its GDScript is meant to closely mimic Python.
raytopia 3y ago
Panda3D is your best bet.

mjan22640 3y ago

I guess the motivation behind the move was to monetize large titles. Killing off their nursery is an unintended side effect.