cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5196308
It’s scary that the Unity debacle is not just happening in games but a very real threat not just in digital and app space but in real life.
It can happen in medicine, housing, even the food we eat if the trend of subscriptions and lock ins continue.
Despite this, a global concerted effort towards Open Source tech is still not happening.
In Unity for example, there is a push to transition to Unreal but less so for Godot. We see this happening with reddit too. And soon maybe we’ll see it in real life. What’s stopping our hotels and landlords from charging us everytime we open doors.
We see this in the rampant mandatory tips. Where everyone is automatically charged per order.
It’s scary and frustrating at the same time that there may not be a clear remedy for this. As the world shifts to subscriptions and services, do we truly own anything anymore?
What can happen, and actually happen in a lot of software fields, is multiple companies investing in the tool. That’s the case for the Linux kernel, for databases, for programming languages…
Many game companies even have their own in-house engine. Instead of investing in that (usually sub-par) engine, they could be investing in an open Source engine.
I don’t understand why this doesn’t happen in games. And don’t tell me that they want to keep their own engine as a competitive advantage, because most in-house engines are shit.
The reality is that there is no one size fits all engine. Unreal and, to a much lesser extent, Unity come close, but they still favor very specific scales and styles of gameplay.
Like, for as dated as it feels, Bethesda’s fork of gamebrio or whatever it was is a REALLY solid engine for the kinds of games they make. Geometry interactions are still a bit funky, but it allows for massive scale and high fidelity because exterior regions are broken into cells in a way that favors (what we would now call) streaming. But if you want a game where you seamlessly go in and out of buildings (similar to the recent Yakuza/LAD games), it is laughable and, to my knowledge, still treats every building as its own world even as of Starfield.
And when you try to make one engine do EVERYTHING? you get star citizen where a refusal to do any form of load masking means that they need to be able to simulate space ships light seconds away from each other AND infantry centimeters away from each other and you basically see the physics engine explode every few seconds as a result.
Maybe you aren’t a fan of the in house engines. If it does one thing that “wows” then that is likely how they got their publisher.