Unity is coming out with a new pricing model for 2024, where game developers will have to fork over money every time someone installs their game. this includes redownloads of already bought games, and downloads of games from places like game pass. it also applies to game demos and free games. it even applies if someone transfers a game from one device to another.
the policy applies if your company makes over $200,000 in yearly revenue and the game has been downloaded over a certain number of times in its entire lifetime.
there are rumors that gambling games and gotcha games are exempt.
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
This is just going to push devs to other platforms. Godot is totally free. Unreal is only 5% of revenue over $1M. There's things like Unigine for 3D and loads and loads of 2D engine.
Godot is aptly named.
Unfortunately, that would imply that people could actually program in C/C++ and not just barf out some lines of Python or Javascript or some other troon-friendly middleware with insane computational burden.
Yeah I'd be interested to see what "computer science" actually learns and what a modern developer job is even like. All of the web-based custom business software I use is just terrible. It's layers and layers and layers of middleware for something that should be snappy and responsive. I'd require computer science students to do an assembler class myself. Doesn't have to be something complicated, like 68k or Z80 or something. Maybe a simple Gameboy game as the final.
Most of the professional devs I've talked to have no idea what the computer is actually doing. They talk of fancy sounding stuff "node", "jQuery", "Ruby on Rails" but the output is a slow buggy mess. Or they will talk about what languages they know. My answer is I don't really know any to be honest. I've done a lot of them sure, but if you dropped a project in something easy like Python I'd end up looking it up to make sure I was doing a branch or a loop right. It would take a whopping 5 minutes to figure out. That's how I learned though. Hell, I think I started with the QBasic help files when I was like 5 or 6. Let's see what this command does. Oh, it didn't work, how about this, etc.
Traditionally computer science wasn't programming but theory. Students wouldn't be expected to use a computer during the course. I don't know how it is nowadays, but I think there are usually different tracks after the initial course based on what kind of developer someone wants to be. I like your idea though. I learned on really old computer books that were out of print and obsolete by that time, but they gave me a good understanding of fundamental architecture.
Haha that too. Spent many late hours staring at those blue and gray screens.
I had those monkeys throwing atomic bombs by the end.
most developers do not know what a map-reduce function is, or what cache-coherency is. if you put a gun to their head and told them to write a memory pool that avoided any sorting and any searching for next free element they couldn't do it.
When people ask me how to get into C I say go look at the Brogue source code. a functional game written entirely in C in a mostly sane way.
When I get asked about C++ I say go look at the Qt coding guidelines - how they write the Qt libraries. It isn't fancy but it is a HUGE project and it is maintainable. It's also performant.
I'm not really sure using C++ is a mark of wisdom. I understand games people find some use in it's flexibility. It is terribly implemented though and very dated.
C# or whatever being slow is dwarfed by the inefficiency of games programmers. Using C# doesnt make stuff efficient, in fact due to the difficulty of it probably the game just ends up being less well written. Starting with c++ is kind of optimizing first. Because you do extra work and your game is more efficient ( hopefully). But it's harder to refactor the code and change your actual algorithms, not to mention that bugs in C++ can be insidious since there is very little runtime safety.
What I see is people saving a few cycles writing CPP only to waste billions in order to lag out while nothing literally is happening in the game. It's just an endless loop that uses all your CPU cycles to get to 30 fps.
This is even worse given the precise nature of what they're trying to enforce.
This isn't like changing their price model for how much they charge for developers to use their engine, or adjusting how they handle royalty fees, they're explicitly trying to charge any developer for every fucking time their game is installed.
If they're trying to make this shit apply to games already released on Unity they're going to completely tank their company within less than a year.
This is far beyond any realm of madness in the software world.
nah, its madne$$ i think its a scheme to justify annother piracy crackdown but cant rule out plain greed... they really did not think this thru though they made the old pirates killed our gamestuido bit real... hell you might not even need the whole game just whatever verifcation code/program they use and some simple automation and some proxys/vpns boom dev now has an extra expense and where they made this retroactive they made any company basicly install a bomb if they used unity for anything...
Is piracy still alive even? At this point I've not downloaded a cracked game since the noughts.
eh, kinda in a zombie form. but its still around kinda surprised its not had a resurgence tbh.
I've never used Unity but I have made a few demos with Godot mostly to learn Godot and interop with Blender. Godot is quite good.