Yeah, I forgot to mention in my original post that ECS was extensively described and already in use by many private commercial engines (like Overwatch) at the time when the patent came out. Absolutely ridiculous patent that shows why the whole system is broken.
They did that to Parsec. Their SDK was once an openly accessible and amazing alternative for Steam Remote, which (In my experience) worked better and was easy to integrate into Unity.
Then Unity bought them, closed-sourced, and if you want access to the SDK, you have to ask for it and they have to approve it.
We tried that three years ago, mentioning that we're just a team of students working in school on a two-player only coop project that could really use a multiplayer we can't implement.
This is their response, and I'm still salty about it to this day:
Thanks for reaching out about Parsec! You mentioned in your comments that you were interested in SDK. SDK starts out at $1million. I think upgrading to our Teams plan might assist with the lag issues you're experiencing with your team.
Our Teams subscription starts art $35 per user.
Please let me know if you have any further questions you have.
This is the point of patents. Privatize technology that would benefit all and then ask rent from people using it. Then make money without doing shit, except for the odd enforcement (through lawsuits). Just feudalism updated to the modern age.
The people that handle the engine posting that meme on what is supposed to be an official website is bad enough, but i think they dont even understand why Fortnite and Roblox are popular, they are not popular because they are easy to use, they are popular because they are easy to use AND they are attached to two of the most popular and well known games on earth.
Obviously i hope that stuff like Godot gets more traction, but saying that this is going to dethrone or kill uefn and roblox is just hilarous tbh.
Edit: Oh, i see now why everything seemed so sketchy, they have been promoting this since 2022 as a platform for metaverses, webchain and all that web3 bullshit
People’s sudden, blind hatred for anything to do with crypto is a great indicator of their own personal incapacity for critical thinking and a proclivity to lazily adopt the opinions of their peers.
Crypto bad! /s
Wait until you find out that in-game items in MMORPG’s are really just NFT’s under a less crypto-bro pseudonym!
Perhaps you should boycott all online video games entirely because they’re all technically using crypto bro concepts like NFT’s to represent in-game items.
You're so, so close. MMORPG items aren't the pseudonyms, NFTs are. As you say, they're hardly different and nobody has ever tried marketing those as someone entirely new and amazing. That's the issue with NFTs, they're marketing bullshit because why would you market online items as being revolutionary
Does it ever hurt your brain to be so reductive about whole industries? Many, many people in the crypto industry have been dragged kicking and screaming into the "line go up" marketing bullshit and people like you are perfectly happy to lump them all together. It makes you look like a sheep. Some people are actually in it for the tech.
This reminds me of smug DNC cultists who will call anyone that expresses even the slightest criticism of Joe Biden a "Trump supporter" simply because they are programmed to lazily reduce the complexity of the human condition into two clear camps when in reality, the variety of positions that one can hold are infinite.
It also stinks to high heaven of heavily propagandized people who intensely support an actual genocide against Palestine because the adults in the room told them that they will be seen as anti-semetic if they oppose it while simultaneously foaming at the mouth over the "atrocities" being committed against Ukraine (who's military is run by actual Nazis who actually admit to being anti-semetic).
In conclusion, I highly doubt that any of your opinions were developed in your own mind. If your propaganda network supported crypto technologies tomorrow, you'd suddenly support them too.
Haha, thats so funny that inside your own comment you tell why nfts are a scam and the blockchain solves no real problem and then had the guts to send the message.
It’s even funnier that you’re all high and mighty while demonstrating a lack of understanding about NFT’s.
Here’s some nuance (for those that are allergic to it):
I AGREE THAT NFT’s ARE A DUMB IDEA WHEN THEY ARE USED TO SELL JPEGS. I never bought a single NFT.
However, in crypto world, they are also TOTALLY VALID:
IN THE CONTEXT OF A GAME WHERE OWNERSHIP OF ITEMS IS A THING
IN THE CONTEXT OF DAPPS WHERE A UNIQUE ITEM MAY BE NEEDED IN FOR VARIOUS FORMS OF LOGIC
D.I.D (digital identity)
in thousands of other contexts where uniqueness needs to be codified
Oh, what a surprise, you say there are thousands of contexts, but you only list 3, and on 2 of those its more efficient and secure to actually not use blockchain. So what we have left? Dapps? Which people are trying to push but they are barely of any relevance?
Oh damn. I guess that blockchain is really skyrocketing of outside of speculating with nfts and cryptocurrencies! /s
People that like the blockchain is more invested into trying to use it in things that are better done with other technologies than on actually seeing what is worth for, which is not much right now.
Edit: Oh, i see now why everything seemed so sketchy, they have been promoting this since 2022 as a platform for metaverses, webchain and all that web3 bullshit
That might've been the investor pitch but luckily it doesn't seem like any of that has made it into what exists now. Seems like they're just going to take a percentage of profit from games on their platform.
As a programmer you'll be payed less than a software engineer at other tech companies, unless you're in a big AAA gaming company. Also you're more likely to have more crunch time and worse working conditions. I switched from a well paying gaming job to backend and doubled my income in one shot. On the flip side, the gaming job was way more fun.
I have been working in webdev for 20 years and have enough income. But, I am so bored with this commercial project. Just want a hobby and something real, near to hardware, starting learning C and game dev, backend math and physics. It's interesting.
Hey! So, I'll go into more detail once I have a strong enough connection to watch the videos smoothly. For now some general advice that is often missed by new game devs:
Make your game fun. Not just fun to you; fun to others too. Even if that means taking a step back and looking at a mechanic you personally enjoy from a very objective perspective.
Make sure the game runs well. Limit the jittering and framerate hiccups. Give flexibility to controls. Let people change them. Provide all the options.
Drip feed mechanics into the gameplay in a natural way BUT make sure everything is technically unlocked immediately. This opens up more replayability without the opening slog some games force people to sit through.
Finally, ask for help and take criticism seriously. None of us are shitting on something you have put tremendous work into. We want the experience to be awesome. As much for you as for us.
Bonus: If you can, try and release your game on Steam between other releases in the same, or in adjacent, genres. Also consider reaching out to streamers that have shown they are willing to give factual and fair critiques, reviews, and chances for a game.
I have been considering creating a game for some time and these are the rules I would follow. Fun factor and playability absolutely stomp on everything else. A fun, playable, easy to get into experience will sell itself. From there it's just a matter of holding onto the hype long enough to make all that effort so very much worth it.
Hi, i read it all of your thoughts. İ really appreciate it that you shared your valuable time while writing this. Yeah, i totally agree with you, you are 100% right. İ will try my best to figure it out. Have a nice day.
I'm certain you'll do great! Creating a video game is a tremendous undertaking, and you are risking a lot more than your time and energy by making this. All of us want that effort and those sleepless nights to work out for you. :)
For what it’s worth, creating a game that is fun to yourself will almost certainly resonate with other gamers that are like you. It can make a game bad if you focus on the general population instead of your own personal passion project.
This of course assumes you have good taste and high standards of polish.
This seems like you're introducing selection bias. Do you really want laypersons to influence your code? You should poll a representative sample of coders for a random number, and use the mode of that.
Given the obvious similarities to The Long Dark (even your title nods to the influence), what differs your game from your inspiration? What did you want to expand upon or change?
Basso is at least confident that data miners can’t brute force their way to discovering his encrypted secrets. He’s using industry-standard AES encryption. ”It's pretty secure, unless we get quantum computers or there's some giant vulnerability,” he said.
It's a fun idea, I guess, but I don't know how happy anti-virus kinda services are with having loads of very encrypted and obscured blocks of data.
It's a bit of a "trust me bro" situation where he claims he's just hiding secret levels and stuff - and isn't also secretly side-loading malware or something like that
Anti viruses won't care as it won't be injecting executable code. But the whole idea won't work. To decrypt AES you need some sort of a secret key or certificate. So the game will have to have it bundled. Thus anyone with enough skill will be able to extract such key or certificate and decode resources themselves. Encryption will not provide any protection.
Stuff like this isn't there to stop people with lots of resources. It's to stop people who are lazy, will see encryption and go, eh, I guess I'm not doing that after all.
It's the baseline, make it annoying enough that most people won't even bother wasting their time.
I bet you that the whole thing will be decrypted and sent to torrents during the first hour of the game's release just to teach its developer a lesson.
It sort of looked like you'd construct the key by input. Like an old school password entry screen or something. I wonder if you could correct horse battery stapler it enough to have a respectable key length.
Anti viruses won’t care as it won’t be injecting executable code.
How do you know parts of the encrypted stuff isn't executable code? Like is he has secret levels with secret functionalities then part of whats encrypted might get executed, or interpreted and executed or something like that.
If he's going out of his way to hide and encrypt secrets, I wouldn't be surprised if parts of his gameloop are obfuscated as well. And if Anti viruses detect high levels of obfuscation, that just raises flags as probabilistic malware
Modern CPUs and operating systems have distinction between data and code in memory. Usually only privileged processes have the right to make data executable. If you load some random stuff into memory and tell your CPU to execute it as a code, you'll get nuked by OS.
Anti viruses won’t care as it won’t be injecting executable code.
When I first started working on malware for my offensive cybersec job, I felt pretty at loss about how the fuck are you supposed to execute anything, if you simply have to 1) allocate memory with READ_WRITE_EXECUTE, and then 2) execute the memory.
I thought that's something that legit programs don't have any reason to do - why would you ever need to allocate RWX memory? I've never done that in my entire programming career, and every bit of your code is already loaded into memory once you start the program - at a special, protected part of memory. There's no reason to ever allocate anything manually. And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to deal with this issue when writing malware, since I kind of expected that once you try to allocate RWX memory manually, and god-forbid execute it the AV will simply not allow it and flag it as highly suspicious.
Well. It turned out that actually almost everything I've ever written does use this call. A lot. That's when I learned what "JIT compilation" means, and that I've really misunderstood the basic concepts of C#.
So, surprisingly, most of programs you run (that are in C#) actually inject executable code at runtime. Although, I'm not sure if Unity actually doesn't compile into something that's not JIT C#. I guess only if you use ILL2CPP?
To decrypt AES you need some sort of a secret key or certificate. So the game will have to have it bundled.
If the Dev were to take, for example the x,y position of the player and convert that to a key, then there would not be any bundled key. This could allow specific conditions to be met without specifying the key or solution. Truthfully though, I don't know much about AES to know if that's possible.
Not really - "Everything is open-source if you know Assembly" - Look at Ghidra for example.
If code isn't obfuscated you can do an analysis what kinda stuff closed source software does. In C# (so if his game is written in Unity) you can even get very close to the original source code (IL code reversed back to C#).
That's why I mentioned anti-virus isn't going to be happy about it. You can easily google examples: examples[1]example[2]example[3] - that obfuscating is a red flag to a lot of anti-virus
All your examples are obfuscating executables. None of which is happening here. Every software that connects to the Internet handles encrypted data and there is nothing suspicious about it.
If code isn't obfuscated you can do an analysis what kinda stuff closed source software does.
And what does that change in it being a "trust me bro" situation? Nobody does that. Are you reverse engineering all software you use, don't use any software that has an ability to update, and compile all software you use yourself? Because otherwise you are trusting the developers.
We are talking about a video game. The vast majority of games on PC are released through launchers like Steam which keep updating them. You'd have to spend months reverse engineering a game to know for sure it doesn't do anything you don't like, and disable updates. Nobody does that.
As far as I'm aware you cannot copyright game mechanics. The only instance of a copyright of a mechanic I'm aware of is from a lord of the rings leveling system (can't remember the name off the top of my head)
There has been several game "mechanics" that have been patented in the past. Two examples I know off the top of my head are "overhead arrows that point in the direction of the destination" and "minigames during loading screens".
That said, these were applied for specifically as patents in the US, and every other game made does not go through this process (especially since I doubt that this would worm in this day and age... I hope, wtf is going on across the pond) especially for entire game concepts, and OP is definitely in the clear.
The point in the article isn't bad, but what he is forgetting is whatever version of Unity his engine depends on, will always be available. It's not actively being worked on really, unless you intended to update to a later release but most don't need to. Doesn't matter if Unity goes down, they will always have a product, they'll just get smaller and privatize which isn't a bad thing.
Unity made a gazillion dollars and wasted it all on acquisitions it had no business managing. They poofed a billion easy on those and people got extremely profitable payoffs and retirement plans. All this while they play is for fools.
As a Unity employee who was recently let go I know it's still a total shitshow, and we're all better off cutting our losses and not planning improvements on the Unity version of our games. At least Unreal isn't bleeding money and backtracking on a bad business model.
True, except that you need to be able to compile for the latest SDK, etc. Google and Apple now require that your app is compiled against the current or immediately previous SDK, and will actually hide your app on the store if it isn't now. Perfectly good games just disappear from the listings for some BS reason.
And the old version of your game engine often won't compile against newer SDKs, especially if it's more than a couple years old.
I experienced something similar with my game that I made using Unity and the Chromecast plugin for it. Google stopped updating the plugin, and the new Unity didn't work with the old plugin, and for some reason I needed to use a newer Unity version. (It's been a while and my memory is hazy on it now.) I could not compile my game for modern devices anymore. Luckily, it wasn't even a game I had published, so I didn't screw over any users with that, except my own family.
Unreal is heavy, and while you can make games without any coding knowledge, it's more for super fancy 3D games.
Unity and Godot are a bit simpler and more casual. Unity is ripe with issues and Godot is a little more immature. I would recommend Godot if you care about open source/community vibes, or Unity if you want more powerful features.
I wish there were better 2D or 2.5D dedicated engines, since imo most games don't require 3D to be cool, but I don't personally know any good ones (RIP Flash)
Thanks for the suggestions. I was initially looking at RPG Maker but when I saw that it can't really handle isometric views I was a bit put off it. Well, that and the price of it....
GameMaker is a pretty good 2D game engine. I used it up until Yoyo Games pushed me out by making it prohibitively expensive with the release of Studio - but from what I hear, they've recently reversed course on their pricing in a good way.
I originally learned how to write code using the (very easy to learn) drag and drop editor in GameMaker 6, and I'm now a professional software developer, so I guess it holds a special place in my heart, haha.
I have zero trust in Unity given recent events. In this case, I'd recommend Godot, unless OP is trying to build something that's intended for a large-scale/mass release.
I came to most of the same conclusions. I really like Rust, I'm glad it exists, I'm amazed by the people who designed it. It is not very good for creative work at all.
Honestly the "rewrite it in rust" meme is actually the use case where it shines: when all the requirements are 100% clear up front, and you just need to make a new version of some software that is much faster and more reliable. That is not what game development is like.
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