this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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I'm pretty sure there are open source alternatives to this?
Anybody care to shine some light on which projects would be comparable, and how they stack up against unity?
Godot, it's the most mature of the bunch. It's a little different than Unity, but it's definitely very user friendly, really powerful and has an active community.
Godot feels nicer to work in than Unity. The object model is better designed and more intuitive. I hope this gives Godot a big boost.
Godot is probably the best choice for open source game engines. Its got funding and full time developers working on it.
Stride3D is probably the closest open source clone of Unity. It was developed by Silicon Studio as a commercial game engine but they eventually stopped and open sourced it. Its got a ton of modern features including vulkan and direct x 12 support. It has an active community too, but no full time staff making new features.
There is, unreal besides being a product has its source available and Godot focus on the same niche most of unity games were. But the problem never was the lack of replacement, the problem is, a game with years of development on unity whould not easily switch to any alternative, they have assets from unity store, scripts made for unity, UIs using unity specific stuffs, even network protocols could be bounded with unity. Change this is an herculean task and most of the games are in barely maintenance mode, imagine a full rework. So these games should be pulled of the market and thrown in the garbage to avoid new installations.
I read that there's a porting tool from Unity to Godot out there. Never used it, have no idea how well it works, but that is a possible option.
Not exactly, Godot is 100% free and open source, Unreal is only partially.
Edit:
I misread, the meaning is that Godot and Unity is serving the same niche, which is true. Except for those who want true Open Source, then Godot is the clear choice.
Sorry, I was trying to say that Godot gas the same niche of unity, in the sense of both are widely used for indie and small games
Sorry, I misread, I can see what you mean now. And that's true.
I think he meant as the kind of games and Devs that use both tools. They broadly fit the same niche
Yes, you are right, after reading again I can see that.
Coders cost money and coding takes time.
This is true for most of software out there, but most of the game industry operates with a small margin, and when you look to games individually, most of the games that are still selling (think about GoG games) are not worth any developer time
The most valuable thing is an experienced team who thoroughly understand both the specifications and the implementation as well as the reasoning behind both. Written specifications are great as onboarding and reference material but there will always be gaps between the specifications and the code. ("The map is not the territory.") Even with solid specifications you can't just turn over maintenance of a codebase to a new team and expect them to immediately be productive with it.
Godot Engine is a nice alternative.