Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right? Game developers can agree on it too, since it is a great utility for playing multimedia in games, and/or have a video player included. However, disaster struck; Unity has now banned VLC from the Unity Store, seemingly due to it being under the LGPL license which is a “Violation of section 5.10.4 of the Provider agreement.” This is a contridiction however. According to Martin Finkel in the linked article, “Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies! Unity is built on libraries such as Lame, libiconv, libwebsockets and websockify.js (at least).” Unity is swiftly coming to it’s demise.
Edit: link to Videolan Blog Post: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html
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Found the article where the screenshot came from, and wow it’s even more infuriating! The VideoLAN folks tried to work with them for months, and Unity seems to have cranial rectal inversion.
Wait, people are still using Unity after they clearly demonstrated they’ll fuck you on a whim? Honestly, seems like everyone’s been given a fair warning about dealing with these scumbags. I get migrating a codebase is a motherfucker, and sometimes it is even easier to redevelop much or all of the project. But again, if you’re renting retail space from someone who is a psychopath, bipolar, and an arsonist (Unity in this case), and they might burn your shop down at any moment, sometimes you gotta move!
New stuff would go well to end up under Godot. Porting your old s*** over and replicating all the assets and plugins is an insurmountable feet for most.
Uh… Ofc they are?
Even after all this I’m about to start a new game using unity. Why?
Because there’s no way I can bring it to market with the ecosystems available in any other major engine given the type of game that it is. I’ve already prototyped for almost a year using various options to narrow it down.
I would be forced to build so much from scratch for the mapping tech that I’d never ship it in say Godot.
Do I want to use unity? Hell no, but am I going to give up on my dream because screw unity? Hell no. I’m not into pyric victories.
There are a lot of ways to bring a game to market without Unity or Unreal. But if you can’t envision doing an input mapping system yourself just stop right now. It’s only going to get worse, engine or not.
I get migrating a codebase is a motherfucker, and sometimes it is even easier to redevelop much or all of the project.
This is the price they pay for not doing things right the first time.
What pisses me off about the whole Unity thing is that if Unity makes itself eat shit then it just further consolidates engines into fewer hands. Godot is great and all but it doesn’t have everything Unreal has (I’m not throwing shade it’ll get there dw) and I really really don’t want Epic to have a bigger stranglehold on the games industry than it already does.
Unity had its niche and if the executives could stop fucking around it would be lovely to have as a competitor in the landscape.
Also to everyone saying “just don’t use Unity”: there are a lot of people who have put a lot of time and money and effort into learning Unity and it’s not exactly as easy as you think to just switch to an entirely new workflow. You also have to consider how impractical it is to switch engines mid-development. There’s a reason why Unreal 5 has been out for multiple years and we’re only just seeing games developed with it now. Developers (especially ones with big budgets and all the caveats they come with) don’t want to ship a game with the latest and greatest engine if there’s kinks to be worked out. This is why you still see Unreal 4 in games released today.
Epic donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Godot when Unity was being dumb this summer, so either they think an open-source project is on the brink of making their competitor unprofitable and collapse, and think enough of the studios jumping ship will come to Unreal to cover that sum, or they’re concerned that someone will start enforcing antitrust laws and want something to point at to say they’re not a monopoly.
Epic is just a troll company. They donated to Godot when it served as a jab in the side of their competition (unity). Their entire business model is to inflict Stockholm Syndrome on their users via free games.
Their entire business model is Fortnite
Both. Definitely both.
I think they saw it as an opportunity to wash their image. “Look, we’re the good guys” kind of thing.
You are 100% correct of course. I do want to add that depending on the works/software of others is also a risk as well. It’s the tradeoff made when the developer decided not to build an engine from scratch. If the game engine company becomes shaky, the developers have to weigh that in when looking at the cost of switching or not. Or maybe everything will be fine.
there are a lot of people who have put a lot of time and money and effort into learning Unity and it’s not exactly as easy as you think to just switch to an entirely new workflow.
Honestly, that’s the price they pay we pay for not doing things right the first time.
I’m not sure why people have convinced themselves that they can just ignore problems and they will go away. Software licensing is an issue that pervades all development. Ignoring it is asinine and will lead you to wasting time and money on bullshit.
When I was picking an engine to learn, I chose Godot. Now I’m not bitching when Unity is dying because I said it was going to die years ago. People just like to ignore problems until they can’t.
Lmao they really don’t want anyone to keep using their engine anymore
Go help out Godot or perhaps Bevy, financially, by contributing code &/or bug reports or by any other means you may be capable of.
When Unity dies you’ll be thankful you did.LGPL requires distributing the license with any code. I imagine unity does that with the core code, but it would be difficult to enforce that for assets distributed in their store, which they would be liable for legally. I imagine this will be resolved, but I no longer use Unity so idfc
No it won’t. This is 5.10.4 of the Unity Provider agreement, it’s total bullshit.
Provider represents and warrants that its Assets shall not contain (a) any software licensed under the GNU General Public License or GNU Library or Lesser General Public License, or any other license with terms that include a requirement to extend such license to any modification or combined work and provide for the distribution of the combined or modified product’s source code upon demand so that Customer content becomes subject to the terms of such license; or (b) any software that is a modification or derivative of any software licensed under the GNU General Public License or Library or Lesser Public License, or any other license with terms similar thereto so that Customer content become subject to the terms of such license.
Just report every other package that includes ffmpeg.
Their asset store will dry up faster than a puddle of water in Death Valley if you do that. ◉‿◉
Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right?
cough mpv cough
Yeah, VLC is great and has been great for a long time. But the MPV-based stuff is amazing too and just seems faster, cleaner, etc. Which I’m sure is due to being much more focused, just using ffmpeg, without decades of legacy code, etc.
My biggest problem has been that I find nearly all of the MPV-based players I’ve used (mpv-player itself, or stuff like IINA or Celluloid) either have a massive lack of configuration options, overly minimal UI, or both. On Windows, Mac, or Linux
I don’t need integration with some obscure external timing system by default like VLC offers, and that kind of thing. But it’s weird that so many players don’t offer you the ability to enable basic plugins. Or change playback speed. Or configure keybinds. Or continue playing the next file in a directory automatically. Or even offer the ability to display the most basic info about the file being played, like codecs. Etc etc.
Or in a couple of cases they seem like more of a mess than VLC.
My biggest problem has been that I find nearly all of the MPV-based players I’ve used (mpv-player itself, or stuff like IINA or Celluloid) either have a massive lack of configuration options, overly minimal UI, or both. On Windows, Mac, or Linux
Have you checked the manual? The amount of options is staggering, bordering on esoteric. The only catch is most of them need to be setup either through CLI or .ini files.
But it’s weird that so many players don’t offer you the ability to enable basic plugins. Or change playback speed. Or configure keybinds. Or continue playing the next file in a directory automatically. Or even offer the ability to display the most basic info about the file being played, like codecs. Etc etc.
I can’t say anything for the frontends, but you can use plugins for basically anything in mpv itself, including the issues you’ve listed. Again, you need to setup the whole thing and read the manual, but it’s there. And yes, I see the irony in all the effort needed to do basic stuff like this when something like VLC just works™, but to me that’s the beauty of mpv, it’s basic and minimalistic yet you can make it work however you like given time and patience.
Btw you can check the file info by pressing
ion the keyboard while playing something.
Why does VLC need to be in the Unity store when you can download it directly from videolan.org?
It’s for including it in Unity games as a component.
I thought we all agreed that building games in Unity was a bad idea.
Not a game developer but I have a hunch that its for displaying videos within the game. Like a cut scene.
Ohhh no, VLC has some problems with… who’s this Unity fellow again?
Some of these comments are wack. “Just stop using Unity” bro some people don’t get that choice.
Unity has an app store?
So does most popular game engines (like Unreal and Godot) to give game developers easier access to certain content they can use in their games.
Fuck Unity. Their engine sucks anyway.
Why don’t people just use Godot?
In my case it’s because I’m too far along in my project and would lose probably a years worth of work. My next project will be Godot or something else though
I don’t envy you that miserable decision. And I get that you’ve evaluated everything and personally feel it’s worth gambling that they don’t fuck you and make it pointless, all that effort, bringing the game to market.
I’m rooting for you here, and I hope everything works out!
I feel just as awful for anyone who has an overwhelming port or even an impossible port. It’s just miserable.
Even if they’re currently shipping some LGPL components, they may want to prevent new LGPL components from being added if they eventually want to be LGPL-free in the future.
