Hey readers, I am curious how you all feel about the future of Unity. Has their recent changes in pricing changed anything for you? I know that they have backtracked a bit, but I personally have lost trust in them and don’t feel that they have done enough to earn it back. Unity has been a great tool for me for many years, but I am curious if it is time to start looking at other options. What do you all think? Should I stay with Unity or try something else like Godot?
Also, I’m just curious how many of you have been following along with my most recent blog project and if so what your thoughts are. Feel free to leave comments below, I would love to hear from you.
I think its fine. They obviously realized how dumb it was pretty quick. I like godot but i am also really wnjoying this project and i dont know how possible ot would be in gdscript. They dont have interfaces.
Thanks for sharing your opinion and I am glad you are enjoying my project!
Just as an FYI, you can use C# in Godot if you download the dot net version. Other open source engines such as stride3d use C# as well.
Me too. I am also curious about the future planning of you and your project. I am thinking to switch to ue5. What do you think?
My plans depend partly on the interest shown in my current project. I will probably try to get this project finished in Unity, allowing the combatants to move and attack and letting the victory or defeat to be driven by whichever unit still stands.
Regarding UE5’s engine – it is quite impressive. Sadly, since I lack a team of artists, I will rarely need most of what it can do. Making my “programmer” art bloom is not amazing 🙂 Another concern is that I work on a MacBook Pro, and in the past when I have tried UE it always felt very taxing on my system even just to have it open with a blank project. It might be better by now though. I would be curious to know how you like it if you give it a go.
Regarding the business side, I think UE5 is a bit costly and I don’t have a high level of confidence that Epic will be honest and can refrain from doing greedy things similar to what Unity has done, so I am probably more interested in open source engines if I end up making a switch.
Understood. I am also thinking to make my own engine which will be written in c++. But since my mathematic and programming are so bad I am a little scared of doing it…
Ohh, that would be interesting. Good luck if you try it! Also, what do you think about something like Cocos 2dx? It’s open source and C++ so anything you got stuck on, you could probably learn from them.
You might consider looking at something like Ogre3d. It’s a powerful c++ rendering library that will at least take care of the trickiest parts of building an engine.
My head tells me that the updated changes are decent, but I dunno, ever since that first announcement I was ready to move on, and I am still kinda feeling that decision is the right one. I don’t think its the new terms, they aren’t perfect, but at least on the surface seem fine? I think the thing for me is that it’s clear the engine is going in a different direction than I am. The things they have been most excited about in recent times is tools for gambling apps, the iron source merger and the new pricing model. They’re finally getting networking back into the engine, but its more as a tool to integrate their paid networking service than anything else. So yea, for me, I’m ready to move on.
As a side note, I started to check out the Godot engine myself, and I’m gonna see if I have any luck converting your tactics tutorial. I figure I should have a pretty good idea if I can at least get through the pathfinding chunk. If I can manage to clear that hurdle, I think I’ll be able to get through the rest.
Thanks for your thoughts. I had been excited about some of Unity’s initiatives like DOTS and AI, but they seem to be quite slow on integration. You might be right that there is more money to be made in other areas, and so that is where they are focusing.
I would really love to hear how it goes for you with Godot and converting my tactics tutorial!
I would also be curious how you feel about the changes between architecture in that project vs my current one. I know I haven’t gotten as far into the battle just yet so it might be harder to say, but people have been pretty quiet. I think it might be because most of the time I got feedback it had been when someone got stuck: “Hey I love your project and am stuck here…” Haha. I think maybe I made it harder to get stuck this time.
I think you aren’t getting much feedback just because there is so much set up for this project, but it is super promising. I am following along converting a different D&D SRD but so far, just no where to get stuck but I am always checking up to see when the next part is posted.
Good point, it may be hard to understand the value of all the interfaces etc if you haven’t needed it before. What SRD did you end up choosing?
Im doing one from the into the odd framework. Going to try to retool a bit into a roguelike.
Oh neat, I hadn’t heard of that one before. I’ll check it out. Good luck on your roguelike!
Making some slow progress converting to Godot. Fairly close to getting the board creator up and running. I know roughly what needs done, but still trying to figure out the syntax godot is looking for. If push comes to shove I can probably just make it work, but I want to figure out what I’m getting wrong first. With what I’ve seen so far though, I’m fairly confident the tutorial should at least be doable in godot, though I don’t know what kind of performance it will have yet.
My biggest gripe so far is that it seems like everything is string based, like dictionary keys, looking up nodes and so on. At least so far as I can tell?
So far haven’t run into any coordinate system issues, though its pretty early for that. It’s fairly similar to Unity in that regard, just the x is flipped I believe.
I’m glad you are sharing your experience! I started looking at Godot a little myself, and I would guess you are probably correct since everything is just a big node tree. It would make sense to grab nodes by their string name.
I think my biggest gripes so far is that I don’t like the way that you don’t really “attach” a script to a node, you just subclass whatever the node was. I think they are encouraging inheritance rather than composition but I prefer it the other way around.
Also I haven’t found a way to connect the scene view to the remote playing game for debugging. I can see the node graph and inspector at least. Anyway, good luck!
Was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. I would use a function to check if an object had a specific function, then immediately try to use it and godot would tell me the object didn’t have it. Turns out that when running code in the editor, everything needs the @tool command at the top of the script, even the scripts you are calling. Didn’t realize I needed it on the tile script. But anyway. Board Creator is almost done, making the board just fine now, I just need to get the loading and saving working. Once I get that working I think I’ll post up my progress on the forum.
That’s excellent, congrats on your progress!
I am going to stick with Unity for now. Your posts were an encouragement to continue with my Unity project, but right now that’s all it really is: a project. I feel as thought I’m not at a point where I need to worry about pricing and things of that nature.
At the very least I could end up with a prototype and figure out migration after that.
I can get behind that, thanks for sharing. Unity is great for prototyping. Also, with the extra effort I have been putting in on making things interface based, hopefully migration would be less of a chore.
Personally, I feel like their retraction is akin to just about any other bugfix to a poorly thought-out release of software. It just patches the initial mistake they made, in failing to consider their target audience.
I also feel like people have over-reacted very strongly to the updates. Yeah the way they were going to do it would have hurt little devs more than big ones, but *SO* many people on social media were misunderstanding the terms of the change and how the threshold worked. So to be fair it’s also a bit of PEBKAC / no-RTFM from some of the crowd. I’m not just talking a few dev friends here and there on Facebook, I’m talking WHOLE GROUPS of people in Unity dev communities on FB and elsewhere who just would have been better staying silent than publicly putting their feet in their mouths about it.
Either way I think that Unity has done what they can to try and erase that bad taste they left in everyone’s mouth, and for some it’ll be enough and others it won’t. I personally won’t stop using Unity over it. Once (*big if*) I get a game released big enough to pass those thresholds, even if they flop back to how they were going to run it, I’d still be pushing enough profits as an indie that I wouldn’t worry about it. And at that point if it becomes too big of an issue, I’m also a C++ dev, I’ll “just” port over to Unreal lol! Anyway this is all just my 2 cents of course. 🙂
Thanks for sharing your 2 cents, I hope some day you do reach a point where where you cross those thresholds.
Thanks for replying! I tend to lurk here more often than participate, but any time I do participate you always reply with something. You have no idea how much I appreciate that, and appreciate this learning series. Thank you again!
You’re very welcome! I may have some idea, cause honestly it feels good to me to get feedback as well 🙂