Unreal has explicit licensing terms that forbid them from doing this. Terms which people are going to pay very close attention to.

Not to mention that Epic gets their money from Fortnite, not necessarily the engine. They have no reason to squander their goodwill like that.

On top of that - if you want to release on a console, you need to write all the console-specific code yourself. This is quite a lot of work, especially for an indie developer.

Godot is a great start, but it's got a long way to go before it's a commercial-ready engine.

Does Jellyfin allow you to bring in your music libraries?

Also, does Jellyfin have Samsung TV clients, or do you need to cast from your phone? I've been trying to de-Google myself and I don't want to have to keep investing in Chromecasts, and part of the reason why I've stuck with Plex is because their app is everywhere.

Do you agree that retrievers are bred to retrieve things?

Do you agree that herding dogs are bred to herd things?

Do you agree that pointer dogs are bred to find things?

Surely you've been around these kinds of dogs before. It's not something that they learn; they are specifically bred to do a job and they will do that job even without training. You've seen or heard of how a sheepdog will herd small children, I'm sure. It's why the breed exists; they are specifically bred to do a certain thing and genetically their instinct is to do the thing that they were bred for over the course of thousands of years. You can remove them from their mom and not give them any training and they will naturally do the thing that they were bred to do. You don't have to train a golden to bring you back a ball.

So is it a surprise that a dog bred to kill things will want to kill things?

That's not simply because of "a poor owner", although the fact that people refuse to train their killer dogs to not be killers is part of it. It's because their dogs are genetically predisposed to kill, just like a pointer dog is genetically predisposed to find things.

It is absolutely a bad breed. Killer dogs should be banned worldwide. Every single pitbull, rottweiler, etc. should be spayed/neutered and the breed should end. They're too dangerous and dumb owners have proven that you can't rely on humans to keep them under control.

It's not the dogs' fault, mind - it's their instinct. But that doesn't mean that future generations should have to deal with it.

Unity is a game engine that is frequently used by mobile app developers and indie gamedevs. It's lightweight and easier to learn than its main competitor, the Unreal Engine.

Sometime within the last year, Unity adjusted their terms of service. It used to state that you were only governed by the TOS for the version of the Unity Editor you used. If you disagreed with a new TOS, you could use the older terms as long as you didn't update the Unity Editor. This clause was silently removed a while ago, without replacement. Nobody noticed.

This week, Unity announced they are changing how they charge for the use of their engine. It used to be you had to subscribe to Unity's developer accounts monthly if you were selling your games - this is how Unity made money. Unity has changed it so that you still have to do this, but they are getting rid of the cheapest plan (now the cheapest plan is $250/month) and Unity is now charging $0.20 every time your game gets installed. This is applied retroactively, to every game that has ever been made in Unity.

So if someone buys your game, installs it, then reformats their hard drive and installs your game a second time. You now need to pay Unity $0.40.

If you are selling your game for $1, then you effectively pay $0.30 in platform fees and $0.40 to Unity, meaning you only made $0.30 yourself. There were open questions about how this would work with GamePass, Humble Bundle, etc. - Unity has said they'll just charge Microsoft (or whoever is the distributor) instead, without giving any details as to how this works.

This also means if you sold your game in 2012, you are now paying Unity $0.20 any time someone decides to reinstall your old game - even though at the time you were bound by a different EULA, which Unity now says is invalid and they can retroactively change the terms of.

People are saying this isn't legal, but indie devs don't have the money to throw at lawyers. Bigger corpo places do, but they also likely have a special contract.

People are understandably upset by this, as they are now going to be on the hook for money they don't necessarily have. This is a threat to their livelihoods and many games are just going to remove their games from sale rather than risk losing being on the hook for a bunch of money. This means you won't be able to buy a lot of indie games in the future.

Freedom of speech. Everyone is able to be heard, even if their opinions are distasteful. It's what the US was built on and why people can fly swastikas and wear klan hoods without being arrested.

They can only be arrested if they commit a crime, not because their views are horrible. You can walk down the street yelling racial slurs at everyone and that's perfectly legal as long as you aren't being violent or inciting others to violence.

That doesn't mean society has to tolerate them - counter-protesting is alive and well, and Nazis have been fired from their jobs for their views. But the government can't arrest them simply for being Nazis.

Unreal is much more entrenched than Unity is. At the AAA level, more places hire Unreal devs than Unity devs.

Unity is popular with indies because it's dead simple (Unreal is a complex monster of an engine). But even Unreal doesn't have a monopoly, between things like Source, Lumberyard (which is now FOSS and run by the Linux Foundation), etc. Not to mention you can always roll your own engine, which many places already have.

Depending on how much money you expect to lose, that may be the more prudent option for some.

At the very least you'd have something to work with - it's not truly "from scratch".

I work in the AAA industry and I've ported code from one engine to another - it's not fast by any means, but at the very least you can assume the code that's there is largely correct. The killers are materials/shaders, porting over design work, and fixing timing issues. If you have netcode that can be tricky as well.

But at the very least you can have the core of your game running again reasonably. It's how things like Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe went from Source to Unity, and how Pokemon BDSP went from the proprietary Pokemon engine to Unity.

Indies and AAs can hire some extra hands to work temporarily with their existing engineers to port and they'd probably lose less money than Unity is charging.

Unreal licensing is explicitly tied to the version you use. So if you use Unreal 5.3, you are bound to the license attached to the code for Unreal 5.3.

If that license changes in Unreal 5.4 and you disagree with the new license, you don't need to follow the terms as long as you never move from Unreal 5.3.

Ah, yes, the peak argument.

"Here are reasons why you're wrong"

I'M NOT READING THAT

Glad to see you were here to have a discussion in good faith.

It's like you didn't even read the last half of my comment.

Of course it's not good right now. I admitted as such. I even said the same things you said.

But do you really think capitalism will just sit on its hands and let this stuff stay bad forever? Do you really think this is the apex of this tech? Half your arguments are "well don't give them your business then", disregarding the fact that change is already happening on the ground from AI drive-thrus to self-checkouts to the death of concept artists.

It's like the people saying the Internet was a fad, or people insisting climate change was overblown. Sticking your head in the sand and assuming that "it'll never be good" is opening yourself up to being blindsided - because what if you're wrong?

Arrogantly assuming that this stuff will never get better is how we'd wind up with large swaths of the workforce kicked out of their jobs as they get replaced by robots. Assuming the status quo is always going to be the same is what we did with climate change for decades, and now we're here and fucked.

Could you imagine what would be different if we took climate change seriously in 2002? We're dealing with the same sort of threat now. We should lobby for protections and legislation like UBI to ensure that the threat can't come to pass - or if it does, that a broad social safety net can take care of everyone.

You may work in FOSS, but I work in AAA game development as an engineer, primarily C++ - otherwise I have the same qualifications as you.

I cannot talk about what I do but trust me when I say I see this stuff on the horizon from within the capitalistic beast. Things are in motion that I don't think we can come back from. Execs have dollar signs in their eyes and R&D is full steam ahead.

But let's say I'm wrong, and for whatever reason all of automation is somehow a dead-end. What's wrong with having a better safety net? What's wrong with preparing workers better for large shocks to the economy?

If we prepare and I'm wrong - then at least there's a net benefit that will stick around next time a large depression or economic shock happens (e.g. COVID). If we don't prepare and you are wrong, then huge sections of the economy are absolutely fucked.

Which would you rather have?

I've been saying this for years now.

Within 20-30 years, most things as we know it will be automated.

• White Castle is buying 100 robots that can flip burgers and man fry stations.
• Amazon has shown off a cashierless grocery store.
• Wal-Mart is deploying tech to identify when stock on a shelf is low and was looking at robot stockers.
• Waymo, Uber, etc. are working good progress on self-driving taxis.
• Domino's has a pizza delivery robot they're working on.
• Amazon is deploying its automatic delivery drones.
• Russia is actively using self-driving semi trucks in Siberia, and there are multiple startups working on the problem elsewhere.
• Journalists are slowly being replaced by AI.
• Both WGA and SAG-AFTRA are striking because of the threat that AI will take their jobs in the near term.
• There was that dumb AI lawyer thing a little bit ago.
• Blizzard is replacing concept artists with AI image generation.

And so on.

The point isn't that the tech is good now - it isn't. Wal-Mart didn't keep their stocking robots. The AI lawyer got in a tremendous amount of legal trouble. AI journalism has been rolled back after quality issues.

But do you think the technology will stay this bad?

Like, remember what phones were like in 2003? People still had landlines. The closest thing to a smartphone was a Blackberry (which came out in 2002). 3G networks were brand-new (and spotty). None of it was very good, yet they got better and better and now here we are 20 years later where smartphones are an indispensable part of daily life for most people.

What will automation look like in 2043? 2053? That's within our lifetime. What kind of jobs will today's kindergartners have available to them when they reach their 20s and 30s?

There is nothing to indicate that automation will always be bad forever. There is money to be saved by cutting out the human element and replacing them with robots. It's looking more and more reasonable to invest in R&D that eliminates human jobs, in every industry - from Uber and DoorDash drivers to semi drivers to tutors to artists to cashiers. It's coming, and we have to think about how we're going to support all the people that won't have a job anymore.

Where do you live? In California it's commonplace that self-serve station refills are free.

The main exceptions are touristy places like Disneyland. But most places have the dispensers on the dining room side (not the cash register side) so you can get free refills.

A bit harder to ship on console, though.

At least Unreal is source-available and you only need to use the license for the version of Unreal you use. If Epic changes their license, you don't need to agree to it and can still ship under the older license.

Godot is a great engine but it isn't a silver bullet. It can get there, though.

Because a lot of mobile games are made in Unity, and mobile has a higher rate of people who install and then uninstall without really playing the game. People also install things by mistake on mobile, thinking they're something else.

So by charging based on installs, they're able to squeeze developers a lot more (especially mobile game developers). Competitor engines like Unreal don't run very well on mobile.

The article you link says the judge already knew how to code beforehand.

He’s been coding in BASIC for decades, actually, writing programs for the fun of it: a program to play Bridge, written as a gift for his wife; an automatic solution for the board game Mastermind, which he is immensely fond of; and most ambitiously, a sprawling multifunctional program with a graphical interface that helps him with yet another of his many hobbies, ham radio.

https://lemmy.world/instances

Replace it with your instance domain.

What about all the games that have already been cracked?

Bear in mind this affects every game, including games that have already been released. So if that stuff wasn't patched out before, then devs would be charged for piracy.

I dunno. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I agree that crackers aren't bad people, but it leaves some unknowns because you're counting on them to go above and beyond, essentially.

I dunno if Epic's licensing is worse. At least it's a cut of revenue and not charging per install.

Not to mention that Epic gives sweetheart deals to indies periodically. They make their money from Fortnite, not the engine.

This actively hurts the developers and helps Unity.

The devs will be charged for every install. Even if that install wasn't legitimate.

So if you pirate a Unity game, it's no longer a victimless crime. You're actively making the developer pay for your piracy.

Like normally, I am totally cool with piracy. But giving piracy as a solution here is actually detrimental to the developers and doesn't hurt Unity the company at all.

I have "hide read posts" enabled on the Lemmy side, through the desktop page.

When I go to my profile on Lemmy's website, I don't see any posts I've made (which makes sense, I've read every post I've ever written), but I do see all my comments in the comment section of a read post.

For some reason, on Sync it doesn't show the posts or the comments. My profile is completely empty unless I go into the settings on my Lemmy instance and toggle the "hide read" setting.