this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
701 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
60086 readers
2762 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Third-party tools might or not be a problem depending on whether those tools also support other frameworks or there being equivalent tools for other frameworks.
Again, it depends how tightly coupled the game is to the framework (directly or via 3rd party tools), but yeah, the more work you've sunk into the Unity-specific side of things and the more tightly coupled your game is to it (i.e. doing everything via Unity rather than, as I did, make the game run as a data model which then dictates how the visual layer - which is where Unity mainly is - is updated) the harder it will be to move.
Mind you, the Unity guys really pushed for devs to go via it for everything (it's software design and architecture aren't exactly great) in a sort of spaghetti design, so I expect a lot of indie devs using Unity who don't have quiet as much experience and/or it's not really broad, will get burned due to falling into that specific trap.
The Godot tools are significantly behind Unity. Unity has a much bigger community and a built in store for their addons. Godot has neither, and has been around for less time. Godot doesn't even have a built in terrain tool for example, and the most advanced plug-in for it is still pretty basic.
I don't think one can say "it will be a problem" because there are so many different ways to do a game (do you really think "terrain tools" matter in something like Terraria???!), all one can say is that "it might be a problem", which is what I'm saying, and judging from my experience with it it will be more of a problem for people doing 3D worlds with terrain, pathing and so on than for people doing 2D or, like me using 3D as a sort of moving gallery to show in a nice way what would otherwise be pretty bland.
Whilst I'm currently on vacations, next week I'll have to start evaluating both Godot and Unreal for my project - which, as I said, whilst it does show things in a 3D view, is architectured so that the game essentially runs in data space with user-input coming from the framework (and it's pretty easy to change that because it's centralized) and on the other side the framework rendering visual views of the data.
My plans to upgrate to the latest Unity are now shelved and I've already planned how I'll remove the last pieces of Unity influence (basically Vector2) from my data layer and make sure it's totally separate.