Epic and Improbable are taking advantage of Unity with the SpatialOS debacle, seems a little planned
As an update to the ongoing saga between Improbable and Unity in regards to SpatialOS, Epic Games have now jumped in to take advantage of it. To be clear, I don't consider myself biased in any way towards any game engine, especially as I am not a game developer.
As a quick overview of what happened:
- Improbable put out a blog post, claiming Unity overnight blocked SpatialOS and made Unity out to be a real bad company. Improbable then open source their Unity GDK.
- Unity made their own response, mentioning that they told Improbable a year ago about the issues. Let's be real here, revoking the Unity licenses of SpatialOS wouldn't have been a quickly-made decision. Unity have also mentioned repeatedly now about making their TOS (terms of service) a lot clearer.
- Epic Games and Improbable team up to help developers switch game engines.
To assist developers who are left in limbo by the new engine and service incompatibilities that were introduced today, Epic Games and Improbable are together establishing a US $25,000,000 combined fund to help developers transition to more open engines, services, and ecosystems. This funding will come from a variety of sources including Unreal Dev Grants, Improbable developer assistance funds, and Epic Games store funding.
See the full Epic Games blog post here.
I can't help this feeling that Improbable and Epic Games somehow planned this, it feels a little off. To secure a partnership with Epic for rather a lot of money and so quickly, feels like a pretty big PR stunt. Frankly, I feel bad for the folks at Unity as it seems like they've been played here.
Unity does have a lot of issues (especially often on Linux) but this whole situation feels like a made-up farce to make Unity out to be worse than it is. Their terms of service have been pretty poor though, Unity certainly aren't angels and haven't helped themselves.
Again though, this only highlights some of the dangers of using proprietary game engines for your projects. I don't consider myself a zealot in any way towards absolutely preferring open source game engines, especially when closed source alternatives can do a lot of things better, but it should be ringing some alarms bells for developers as a reminder of how they're not really in control.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quote... help developers transition to more open engines, services, and ecosystems.That “more” is doing some heavy lifting there.
Quoting: the3dfxdudeThis wouldn't be that Unity is making SpatialOS impossible to use with Unity, only that Impossible, the company is in breach of license.That was my reading of it from the start. Impossible played fast-and-loose with the licence terms, and Unity clarified them. Pretty much a non-story, really.
Mountain Man Jan 11, 2019
id Tech, BUILD, and yes, the original Unreal? (GoldSrc only kind of counts since it was Quake/Quake II-based, and I think even Source still inherits some of that)
Oh hey, remember when id Software were awesome and not only released Linux builds of their games, but when the next id Tech engine came out, they quickly moved to open source the previous generation? Which is why we have a bunch of stuff based on everything up to Quake 3-and-a-bit-of-Doom 3/Quake 4?
But nothing after, with all the personnel changes that happened, and, y'know, Bethesda.
I mean, don't get me wrong - going through all the notes for UE4 and there's some amazing work being done there, but yeah - if you don't want to write your own, there's got to be plenty of open source resources out there, or just take a look at Godot, apparently.
Oh, wait, I think I get it - we've had an entire generation of developers trained on Unity and/or Unreal Engine, so they don't know anything else / aren't trained/adaptable. It's the same vendor lock-in that gets us Microsoft Office as 'the only office suite anyone knows' (despite LibreOffice being perfectly fine and awesome), Oracle as 'the only "good" database server', Windows as the only OS the general public knows how to work, and how the little blue 'E' is 'The Internet'. At least that last one is now 'the primary-colour spinny wheel', and 'Facebook' is 'The Internet' for people.
The people who actually care about this stuff already know about the alternatives and are either already using them, moving to them, or at least learning of them and planning their next projects with them in mind. The people who don't care and continue to use proprietary stuff in spite of there being better, open alternatives... don't care. And we can't really make them care. All we can do is keep chugging along in our own parallel universe and ignore what goes on in proprietary-land. ;)
... there was quiet some discussion about xamarin and c# and how epic changed rules
... when returning there (after reading bit about that xamarin stuff) all of it's gone now.
Heh, would say "Epic" fail :/
unreal engine is kind off open source...
i'm not sure about their licence but the code is
Quoting: elmapul"Again though, this only highlights some of the dangers of using proprietary game engines for your projects. "
unreal engine is kind off open source...
i'm not sure about their licence but the code is
Source code being available is not really sufficient at all for this sort of thing and yeah UE4 licensing terms are very far from open source or free software. id Tech 4 is open source, Godot is open source. A bu ch of engines are open source. But none of the major ones(UE4, Unity, CryEngine, Lumberyard, Source, etc) are.
Last edited by Kristian on 11 January 2019 at 8:15 pm UTC
They really do try hard to make themselfs hated...
Quoting: elmapul"Again though, this only highlights some of the dangers of using proprietary game engines for your projects. "
unreal engine is kind off open source...
i'm not sure about their licence but the code is
It is source available, not open source. The license is the important part, much more than being able to see the source code: you are signing a contract that severely limits your freedom to use that code, and could come back to bite you in the ass in the future.
Quoting: Sputnik_tr_02Epic is playing dirty right from the beginning with their store. I have avoided commenting about Epic when the news about their store appeared here because I did not want to sound like a Valve fan boy but it should be clear for anyone now that even if their store were to suppor Linux there is nothing will benefit the end user here. What they are doing (Exclusive titles and so on) is utter disgusting IMHO.
I want to sound like a Valve fanboy. Steam is on linux (and itch.io too). GOG is not but why? They support linux tho. Unreal engine is on linux, that's very good. Unity3d is fully supporting linux, too.
Anyways, reading Unity's response I think they are right. Improbable built a platform with unity3d engine without telling anything. Put your SDK on their asset store and they will shut up lol...
Quotefund to help developers transition to more open engines, services, and ecosystems.That's kind of deceitful. Unreal Engine is "source available" proprietary software and Epic could change the terms any time they'd like, just like Unity did. Then again didn't Tim Sweeney also call MS Windows an open ecosystem and then start complaining when he realized it wasn't?
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