ouraf said:
I've never heard of engines made specifically for RTS that wasn't abandoned long ago
There is Spring:
Not sure how active it is….
This is a perfict example.
We are planning an RTS, and we chose to use UE4 instead of this engine.
We put some thought into it, But breaking past that barrier is what t the OP needs to do.
GeneralJist I have a question for you. When choosing UE are you really not bothered that Epic Games is 40% owned by China's Tencent - https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/tencent-acquired-40-of-epic-games-for-330m/ which is under the authority of Chinese Communist Party?
I'm sure you could try to turn a blind eye and say something like "I choose engine for the tech, nothing else".
But can you really live with the fact that your money one way or another ends up supporting:
You can read more and find lots more information about it.
Epic is building their tech on money from China and is 40% controlled by them.
It's using similar manipulative tactics, and tries to spread itself all over tech world, trying to weaken Apple, Google and take over their platforms.
Do you really want to be a part of that, give them more money and make them more powerful?
Because to me, this company looks like a major threat to the future of the world, in terms of tech, freedom and even democracy.
After Tencent-Epic buyout, some of the staff had the integrity and honor to leave the company. Personally, I applaud them.
ShadowKing said:
(trying to delete this post, was made by accident)
Well as they say …… If you have a trillion monkeys typing randomly for trillions of years, one will eventually write the Bible….. I guess anything is possible :-P
ShadowKing said:
But can you really live with the fact that your money one way or another ends up supporting:…
If you argue like this, you can't use any modern hardware because all major companies are producing their tech in China, China is the biggest electronics producer of the world and you don't think that those factories are owned by privat salesmans, they're build on chinese ground and the government is raising fees as every country does or they're entirely owned by the government.
Your post is nothing but simply naive ?
ShadowKing said:
which is under the authority of Chinese Communist Party?
That kind of round about political decision making does not impact my decision making at all.
I don't like the CCP, and it looks like you had all those links primed just so you can harp on this issue.
The CCP has done crazy inhumane things, and continue to do so, but your logic is like saying Epic is doing those things.
I don't care which mega corp owns wich mega corp, I focus on what can get the job done. In the most appropriate way.
If you let your line of decision making guide your habits, then you might as well not do anything.
When you went down this rabbit hole, I thought of this. listen to what he says at the end about buying the tomato.
Your a fool to actually live your life with reasoning and logic that you displayed.
And Winny the poo is banned because people say the leader looks like him, and they destroy winny the poo dolls in effigy to show their discontentment.
You could use the same logic your using about dealing with any Chinese company, which people have, Remember Huawii?
Your using liberal SJW logic.
Example:
people in palo Alto spent 150K to rename 3 schools because they were named after great men, who were now seen as eugenicists. Can you imagine, having a spare 150K to just change school names based on your feelings?
Go watch this video, which is about how Epic's Nanite system works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw
They've made some huge technical advances. They have the ability to display an arbitrarily complex scene in finite time. We're all used to rendering slowing down as more stuff is in the scene. It doesn't have to be that way. It takes some very impressive level of detail technology at the triangle group level to do this.
That's the level you have to be at to develop a new game engine today. Go watch that video.
UE has something good.
And Esenthel has something good - https://esenthel.com/?id=compare
Don't worry you can stay with what you like ?
Nagle said:
That's the level you have to be at to develop a new game engine today.
I don't agree with this statement.
Look at Super Mario, does it need something like nanites to be a great game?
Don't just follow some marketing hype. All products have both good and bad sides to them. It's up to people to choose what they particularly need.
When I think about the games that I'm building now, I don't need stuff like that. Other things are important to me ?
If I had to use UE to build my games, I couldn't do it, it has some major downsides that would completely prevent me from finishing my work.
My personal advice is to get a day job as a games/graphics programmer so you can support your family. You can work on your side projects on your free time(assuming you have such with a baby on your hands!)
You should have no problem IMO getting a good job there(though it depends where you live).
You realistically cannot compete with beasts like Unreal that have teams of hundreds of people. This isn't a judgement about your skills obviously! Oh sure you might be able to an engine that looks good and has a good editor, but you cannot possibly make the amount of tools and provide the same level of support they do. It's just…impossible. Aside from their core tech team, those companies employ specialized teams of consultants that are spending most of their time flying around the world and advise game developers that use the tech on how to solve their issues. Obviously indies don't get this kind of support for free, but then again they can go into forums and have thousands of other people that have knowledge of the engine capable of helping them. Your user base is not nearly that big.
Between Unreal and Unity, there is unfortunately very little room for competition. Even IF your engine was somehow comparable, people will still prefer the established for the sole virtue of being established. Much, much higher chance for a designer/artist to find help when being stumped with an Unreal issue than with an Esenthel one. The amount of people that are using the same thing as you do is an incentive on its own. Yes, obviously that is “unfair” - the big are getting bigger just for virtue of being already big. And obviously you are right that the MegaGrants thing is mostly a PR strategy.
>>Look at Super Mario, does it need something like nanites to be a great game?
No, but the tons of extra stuff that Unreal or Unity have don't really hurt(apart from bloat, which is a problem, but most people are willing to deal with it).
Even if I am making a cartoony platformer like Mario, having all those extra goodies means I can at least try to see how the game looks with Nanite. That is extremely helpful in the initial draft stages where i can experiment with the look of the game.
And the biggest thing is that presumably the cartoony platformer won't be my last game - if i decide to make a more realistic-looking game in the future, my work and knowledge in Unreal is transferrable.
>>If I had to use UE to build my games, I couldn't do it, it has some major downsides that would completely prevent me from finishing my work.
Alright this is an extremely hyperbolic sentence. UE has its quirks and major flaws like any other product(especially a big one). Saying that it's impossible to make something like the games you linked(which look good btw) with it is just false though.
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This does not mean your engine is useless, obviously! And as I said it is part of your portfolio, so you can get a very decent job working as a game programmer. I get it that working on your own schedule and your own time is attractive, but working at a studio has its own advantages - mainly you work with other people. In time, you may even team up with them and start your own studio and do your own thing. People do it all the time(though of course the risk is big).
The problem you have right now(how to make a living using your skills) is not a hard one to solve. But I don't think you're going to solve it by trying to make money in the “general purpose game engine” market. Arguing here(or anywhere) how people would use your engine if only the could see how good it was or if Unreal people were nicer, etc etc, isn't going to achieve anything, as you've already observed.
