On Unity's updated pricing changes..
First off, thanks to all for your patience with me on addressing Unity's recent pricing debacle - but it was important for me to wait to see how things played out before posting here.
It's no hot take that Unity shot themselves in the foot with their initial announcement. I expect we'll need to wait a few months to really feel its true impact, but their eventual retraction - to my mind - is a decent one.
As an asset developer, my position is a little more unique in that it depends on both Unity and its users, but the climbdown is enough for me to say that AC's development and support will continue as it has been. From a purely technical standpoint, I still feel that Unity is the best fit for AC - a toolkit that's both very genre-specific, but also one that aims to aid those who need more flexibility.
That said, this period has been a good lesson about eggs in baskets, and I have spent a lot it looking into the main alternatives. Personally, I find Unreal clicks for me in a way the others don't quite.
A lesson I learned very early on in AC's lifecycle, though, is that a toolkit works best when embracing the principles of the engine it's atop. A theortical "AC in Unreal / Godot" etc would best be its own beast, rather than a 1:1 port. I'll continue to tinker and see where it takes me, but it would be remiss of me to say more than that right now.
AC will be reaching its 10th birthday next month - a fact only made possible by its community, as a tool is only worth what's done with it. Regardless of the future, thank you for the journey so far.
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
Thank you for all your hard work!
I haven't actively arulound much but have been lurking between working two jobs and other family problems.
It is really unfortunate what Unity are doing, but I don't think anybody can honestly say they weren't expecting it they floated the company. Investors want their portfolio to increase in value, they don't care how.
Anyway, having read through Unity's updated policy they haven't actually backtracked on anything, they have just increased the threshold slightly. I don't think this is enough to stop a mass exodus of big studios or Indies trying to game dev their day job. Hobbiest Devs will stick around because Unity is a nice toolset.
With that all said, I think you are absolutely correct in looking for another home, I dare say that some proprietary engines will start offering incentives or porting tools to help "steal" the userbase. Of course, the only guaranteed stable base is an open source engine with a permissive license. But paid products are often looked upon unkindly in the FLOSS circles, so using Godot might come with its own unique challenges if you want to keep the lights on.
Unreal Engine is very capable but is heavy going on the resource front, it feels like wading through treacle compared to Unity's snappy UI. Still, it does seem like the best option at the moment.
Unity will not recover from this, they have proven their disregard for the userbase and asset creators alike. The best they can hope for is a rebirth of some kind, but that would need to be in a wildly different form.
I would really like it if one day this could be done in unreal engine, since it is my game engine that I use, although AC for Unity works too well, I only use UNITY to be able to use your plugin.
As for the unreal engine approach, it could be done like Horror Engine does, with elements that you put on the map, and they have the functionality of adding texts, moving, hiding, showing objects, and many more things, when you pass over or over them. actions.
For visual programming as you do in your plugin, you could make a state machine extension, there are many plugins that use that section of unreal to make plugins for conversations, quests... etc.
@monotonic "But paid products are often looked upon unkindly in the FLOSS circles, so using Godot might come with its own unique challenges if you want to keep the lights on."
Godot is actually working on getting an asset store up for that sort of thing. I think the community would love it. It's more like a Blender type model over there, they have a user dev fund and everything.
That said, I imagine with Unity backpedaling just enough, that a lot of asset creators aren't running to a new engine in any matter of months. But personally I'll keep looking at other engines too because Unity clearly has some wacko investors that are trouble in the long run.
"I think the community would love it."
This is a pet peeve of mine. I'm not directing this at you, it's more targeted at the FLOSS community as a whole.
The the biggest advantage with FLOSS software is that no company has a foothold in the ecosystem, you can see any and all code in your little digital world, you can fork the code and modify at will. With each bit of proprietary code that is allowed and accepted we get closer to accepting it as just the way things are. There is a slow erosion of what the community accepts, this has become especially prevalent since the uptake in GNU/Linux by people who are using it because it's trendy at the moment.
With that said, I'm not certain that a game library should be considered in the same light as MS Office or anything from Apple.
Well, I think game engines are too complex to not rally a community behind them as a path forward. Unity itself wouldn't matter a bit without the massive community that got involved. Otherwise you won't even get enough documentation and bugs exposed and things like that.
I do think just forking something and building your own thing totally would be cool. The only problem is you also put 100% of the maintenance, the problem-solving, and areas that you'll never even notice to optimize... all on your shoulders. It could still be worth it though if working in that way interests you.
Thank you Chris.
Thanks so much, Chris! And an early happy 10th birthday! I've also decided to stick with Adventure Creator. Hope things aren't too stressful on your end.
Absolutely excited about a potential Unreal port! I wanted to use Unreal for my next project so we could take care of Xbox One's GDK without having to pay a Pro licence for Unity.
Having an Unreal port of AC would be an absolute dream come true for me.
10 years already!?! Thanks, Chris. I'm making my third game with AC. It wouldn't have been possible without you.
Thanks for the update. I hope we will see AC on other engines because we can't be quite sure what Unity will do in the future.
I feel I need to correct a couple of points here.
I'm not sure that anybody has directly compared Unreal to Godot here, and if they have it has been as a suggestion for the best alternative engine.
Unreal has been in development for a long time as an FPS game engine, only in relatively recent years has it started to get more general purpose features added, which were hacky early on. With that said Unreal is a good AAA game engine.
Godot has also been in development for many years, the difference is that Godot was built from the ground up for extensibility and to be a general purpose game engine. It does not have the same scope as Unreal nor does it have the same user base.
Unreal at the moment has a 5% royalty fee when the turnover reaches a certain threshold, contrary to what you seem to suggest, this can change too. They are free to modify their licence agreement at will, specifically when new agreements are issued.
Godot is open source and free / libre meaning you can fork and tail the repo if you want absolute assurances that you will not be forced into a license agreement. This won't happen though because as soon as they even suggest this the community will create their own fork just as they have with every other open source project that was taken over by greedy parasitic corporations.
With regard to asset stores, Godot can import just about anything, so buy your assets from here, there, wherever and they will work.
Speaking more specifically about Adventure Creator and the suitability of the engine, I'm not familiar with the inner workings of AC so my opinion is specifically around functionality from the users' POV.
Unreal is a heavy lumbering beast with tonnes of features that the vast majority of adventure games will not use, ever. It takes 25+GB to install and is not easy to modify. Godot is tiny and includes only what you want to include. When using AC and Unity I could get away with using zero external functional assets and only a small portion of the Unity included functional assets because AC provides most of what you need. In this space Godot is perfect because it provides exactly that, a competent but basic set of functional assets (nodes) for you to use straight out of the box, meaning AC can be AC without fighting the internal systems.
Another benefit of Godot is that we can use pretty much whatever language we like, GDScript (Python in all but name), C#, C++, Rust, you name it.
In my opinion, the only real benefit Unreal has is the integrated asset store.
Looking very closely at this Unity/Unreal of AC. I have been able to create a PC modified framework within Unreal using Point and Click Adventure Toolkit. It has been very good...BUT. Unreal and mobile is a hard beast to fight with and I believe the Unity and AC is a far better fit to translate to other platforms. I had left Unity about 5 years ago to do Virtual Production with Unreal.
I am very happy to return (for this project) to the great framework that the mighty Chris has build with AC. My 2 cents.
Happy 10th Chris.
Thanks for sharing your 2 cents '24pfilms'. You basically said the words that were on my mind too. Also, Happy 10th Chris and Adventure Creator!
have you considered applying to the epic mega grant https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants for a plugin port?