Let's see if anyone can parse what this Twitter status update means.
0x6A7232
US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
I think that's how much they had to fork over to Unity to license their source to fix their darned engine. Unreal. smh Hope it's worth it in the long haul, but that bites.
Comments
It's an outgrowth of that whole "Hey, why should we spend money on QA testing? Just release it and let users fix it." school of thought.
It's also part of why Early Access is such a benefit. UWE is fortunate in that they have income from other products. A start-up developer with nothing to go on still has these (if you ask me, outrageous) expenses to cope with. EA cash helps keep them going to completion. (I speak, of course, of developers who actually intend to finish their games rather than rake in EA cash and run for Switzerland...so to speak.)
UNW is making money from merchandise along with purchases. But that might not cover the Unity expenses. The trello says a possible price increase. Dose anyone know how much they will rack up the price?
The price will increase $5-10.
contracting out to Unity to use their engine i would expect was just more easier, but i would of thought a group like UWE would of had that one thought of before making such a deal and had something in place so not to be blindsided in this way.
sorry but that's like saying there is something wrong with paying a special cleaner to clean out the rain gutters just because you paid him the service to fix the problem. if the problem is serious enough and unity has nothing to do in that area, unity could deploy men, resources and time to the job to fix it as a special request. as for how reasonable the price is or not, that remains to be seen.
Subnautica is a fairly unique game in what it requires from the engine. The fact that the interactable terrain stretches in three dimensions breaks a lot of assumptions developers would normally make with drier footed games and makes entire engine features unusable, like using a nav mesh to allow AI to navigate the world. I'd give Unity a little slack, but I don't have the foggiest clue what the context of the linked status update is. Could be some bull the engine really should have seen coming, could not.
Eh, it's become more-or-less standard practice. The ones to avoid are the publishers who won't let you fix their products even with a license. (Adobe, looking right at you. You, too, Microsoft.) For relatively simple work, basic licenses generally serve needs fine. It's when you start pushing the boundaries of what the engine was originally built to do that things start getting...interesting.
Digression warning! We're about to go on a short - but interesting - detour.
Pound for pound (so to speak), Unity is pretty useful. Point of fact, if you saw the movie Passengers, you saw a unique application of Unity.
Unity is good for rapid development of relatively simple things, or - if you're willing to put in the time - the development of some pretty dang complex stuff. Plague Inc., The Room, Rust, Kerbal Space Program, Cities: Skylines, Fallout Shelter, realMyst, Stranded Deep, Osiris: New Dawn, Clustertruck, Firewatch, Universe Sandbox, and, yes, our own beloved Subnautica all run on Unity. Plus about a hundred others.
Digression has ended. All clear.
Unity has four license levels. The first three aren't too onerous on pricing. The fourth, most accommodating, most powerful license...they don't even publish a price tag, just a "call us and we'll negotiate" - which is typically shorthand for "be prepared to sign over your DNA and all derivative works."
Every game that does anything serious with it has issues with Unity. I hate watching Kerbal Space Program choke over simple space stations because it decided to trust Unity's physics engine instead do the work to make it itself.
The simple fact is that thanks to modern 3d graphics API's, building your own cross-platform graphics engine is not as hard as everyone often thinks it is.
Great plan if you have unlimited funding and time, which most companies don't. The reason that releases of entirely new engines are few and far between is because it costs just so much to build one. And, making matters worse, it's investment with no immediate return or guarantee of return. You can't sell an engine to gamers; there needs to be a game. All the time you dumped into building your new engine did nothing to help you get a saleable product to market, which means you're starting out already down a million-plus. Sure, there's a chance you'll be able to market your engine to other developers, but those sales only come in when successful games are released using it. So rather than starting from zero to get to what is the same point with only minor differences from other products...that's a lot of effort for very little gain.
Building an engine is an enormous pain in every sense of the word. An engine is no simple thing. First you have the implementation module that handles running the logic employed by the game - the program, if you like. Then you have an audio component, responsible for converting software output into usable audio. Add on a physics simulator now, which is an insanely-complex number-cruncher that, when it gets things wrong, gamers will shred en masse. The AI routines need to be built, too; those aren't contained in the game itself for the most part, instead they call routines contained in the engine's AI package. Sure, developers tweak those routines or find new ways to harness their output, but the heavy lifting is done by the engine. And, lest we forget, the rendering component. You'll buy yourself a DirectX license, probably (which ain't cheap), and use that as your input hardware interface layer, but you'll still need a GPU interface. Yes, modern APIs are able to streamline that process, but - and this is key - you will pay for that convenience. Someone did the work to code the API you want to use, so you can bet they're going to charge handsomely for that convenience.
Most of the time, it's wasted effort, reinventing the wheel. Bursts of engine development activity occur when hardware technology makes a leap, making investing in new engines really a profitable idea. And, yes, AAA houses routinely build their own version of an existing engine so that they can tune what they want, but the key element is version. It's why Epic Unreal has been the dominant engine for a long time; it's a complete, working design that is modification- and customization-friendly. Taking the time to build from scratch is a waste 99% of the time. Instead, you buy a license for the engine that makes the most sense, a license which gives you source code access and the authority to make changes...which is what UWE has apparently just done.
Most of the time, problems like those experienced by KSP are caused by the developer just being cheap and/or lazy. Either they don't purchase a high enough license to enable them to modify the engine's source to more tightly meet the game's needs, or they did buy the license but haven't implemented appropriate changes. It's like saying Deus Ex: Invisible War sucked because they didn't build their own engine. No, not at all; it had problems because Ion Storm/EIDOS cheaped out and didn't buy adequate licensing to allow for modification. They used a base version of Unreal Engine 2, and it shows. Splinter Cell, on the other hand, used the exact same engine to start with, but licensed-up to allow them to tweak and tune the engine to be exactly what the game needed. They didn't rebuild the apartment building to change the paint in one unit; they just bought the license from the landlord to repaint.
^Correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is the basic thing I got from what Unity is all about...
You are absolutely right with what you have said but the question is how much does UWE has to suffer to make this thing happen ?
Like when I first saw that game I wondered what the devs used i was mind blown when I found out that it was unity i was like I didn't know unity can make this but what's done is done all what we can do support them in what they are doing
Unity also did KSP, though, Kouji. But you're absolutely right in that fully 3D worlds aren't common in gaming, so it was always destined to be a bit of a tussle to make it happen.
Also does Unity come with Level of Detail, Detail over Distance, open world VIS programming, out of the box or did UWE have to program that stuff themselves (or buy external addons for that)?
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Obviously I'm making assumptions here o/