Mastodawn

salarua Jul 14, 2022

Unity (former game engine company) has merged with an actual adware and malware distribution company. That's not an exaggeration. Fake Flash installers, was blacklisted by Microsoft's anti-malware tool, VirusTotal entires, that kind of thing.

https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore/

https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/

Don't build your games on engines you don't have the source code to.

Adware Empire - IronSource and InstallCore

A recent Adware campaign using malicious Bing ads led me to a Chrome download that eventually deployed Adware to the user’s computer. The IPs and types of Adware connected back to IronSource Ltd., Babylon Software Ltd., and InstallCore – all Israeli companies that have connections to Adware. See her

INFOSTRUCTION

cancel Jul 13, 2022

... if you can avoid it. Pico-8, GameMaker (though they're on some crappy subscription thing now), etc. are all OK for making smaller games. If you're going to invest many months or years of your life into some long-running project, maybe consider Unreal or Godot, instead.

cancel Jul 13, 2022

Just realized I typoed "entries" for "entires" 🤦

@cancel Fucking hell, I was considering trying to learn Unity cause it felt like the only engine both powerful enough and easy enough to learn to let me maybe actually manage to make something with it...

Although I can't code so that was probably never gonna happen anyway I guess 🤷‍♀️

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot I think Unity would be a bit rough if you can't code. GameMaker is the go-to for 2D games without writing lots of code. (Though they recently switched to a subscription model... ugh)

@cancel Well I intended to learn to code before I got to that, although I have untreated ADHD and I don't even know if I can do that at all

Game Maker seems a bit too basic, it seems to not even support aspect ratios that aren't 4:3, and the SDK only runs on Windows (and maybe also macOS?) which I don't use either...

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot I'm not aware of aspect ratio limitations with GameMaker. I've seen portrait games made with it, 16:9, etc. Are you sure you're looking at the right product?

Yeah, it's a Windows-centric thing. Most game stuff is. Especially the non-programming parts. Trying to make a game w/o coding on Linux sounds like a nightmare. (I can't even imagine trying to *use* Linux without some programming skill.)

@cancel lmao why? 😅

There's absolutely no programming involved in *running* Linux, I'm a designer and I only know how to make like some really basic stuff in JavaScript and I use Linux cause it feels like the only OS I can use that doesn't make me feel like a capitalist shill (plus it won't spy on me and it gives you much more freedom than any proprietary stuff)

But yeah basically I use it for political reasons and I'm... not having any trouble with it lol. I do most things from a GUI and when I do use the terminal it's really simple stuff, definitely no programming involved lol

Also idk the only Game Maker games I've ever encountered were Ijji, Undertale and Deltarune, and they're all locked to 4:3

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot It breaks all the time, for me, and I have to repair it :P And it will break in ways like, "oh the compilation flags for this library are wrong now, and it's producing something with a mismatched ABI that this other thing wants to link against, ..."

@cancel I have no idea what any of that means

I just use it like I used to use Windows and stuff just works lmao

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot Not saying you're wrong, but the last person who said to me they have no problems with Linux, 2 or 3 months ago, after I questioned them a bit, ended up revealing that they had just reinstalled their OS a couple of weeks prior because the package manager made it unbootable.

@cancel That *kinda* happened to me one time, cause I canceled an update (ctrl-C'd Pacman) while it was updating the kernel so I ended up with just... no kernel at all lol

But I mean that was 100% my fault lmao

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot no victim blaming allowed :)

@cancel The only thing I was a victim of was my own pressing of ctrl-c lmao

Like if I didn't want stuff like that to happen I'd be using Ubuntu or Fedora or something, not Arch

@cancel It's all moot anyway, considering I can't even afford the subscription fees and I'm too stupid to even learn the minimum amount required for even that stuff though 🤷‍♀️

a bug Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot @cancel (my games are all in game maker and they are all in 16:9 https://electric-prune-juice.itch.io/

you can make games in absolutely any resolution or aspect ratio you want)

Electric Prune Juice Games - itch.io

itch.io

@fluttergirly @cancel Huh, interesting! I thought they were locked down to the same sort of resolution old RPG Maker games or Undertale are locked at

a bug Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot @cancel nope! game maker is super robust, you can make really anything you want in it, though the easiest type of game to make tends to be platformers or top down adventure games, but its capable of anything

a bug Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot @cancel Undertale has that resolution either out of choice, or because toby fox didn't know how to change it, hehe,,

@fluttergirly @cancel The two games I have *some* design docs for are an RTS and a Metroidvania, so it technically should suit me for at least one of them, although unfortunately it doesn't have very good Linux support (pretty much none at all) and I don't have Windows on anything 😅

Csepp 🌢Jul 14, 2022

@cancel @hazelnot I remembered some news about a gambling company (Playtech) buying them up a few years ago and it looks like that did happen but they have since been sold again to Opera. 🤔
Similar problem as in the OP.

Btw aren't there some web based low-code game dev tools? I'm not a huge fan of games that only run in browsers, so I haven't looked too deep, but I think I've seen tools like that.

Ertain Jul 13, 2022

@cancel Yes, Godot is the best. 😁

Zykino Jul 14, 2022

@cancel
Is unreal open source? Or do you talk about all this other engines and only Godot give you their source code?

cancel Jul 14, 2022

@Zykino Unreal Engine is "source available" which means you have access to the source code, and you can modify it for your own usage/purposes, but you cannot freely redistribute the source code.

Zykino Jul 14, 2022

@cancel
Oh I did not knew that. Thank's

calutron Jul 15, 2022

@cancel I tried Unreal recently and the install size was so massive I had to uninstall it. Over 100GB for Unreal 5, and that's with no platforms or add-ons.

cancel Jul 15, 2022

@calutron I mean, it's going to be big. But I thought it was like 35gb with just the base stuff? Are you sure you didn't opt for a bunch of extras? (Are you on Linux?)

cancel Jul 15, 2022

@calutron some random googling shows 55gb if you also opt for some starter content and extra stuff https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/f/a/d/fad9f29a4d20fe6f439220287223e1da8331d1a1.jpeg

calutron Jul 15, 2022

@cancel Mac. 35 GB is the size of the....like the bundle you download? But when the process is over, it's over 100 GB. I've seen the tips about extra stuff, but the recent installer for the recent version doesn't even have that as an option. It just downloads as an un-editable chunk.

calutron Jul 15, 2022

@cancel You can see people mentioning this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/veashb/freshly_installed_unreal_engine_5_is_taking_115/

Freshly installed Unreal Engine 5 is taking 115 gigs of space?

Everywhere on the internet, it is written that unreal engine takes about 17-50 gigs of space on the drive but idk for what reason it's taking 115...

reddit

cancel Jul 15, 2022

@calutron It's probably downloading both the Intel and ARM versions, *and* the debug info for both. (The Mac and Linux debug info formats are somewhat space inefficient when compared to Windows .pdb debug info files.)

calutron Jul 15, 2022

@cancel Ah interesting. Maybe there's a way to then remove that extra stuff. Hmm.

cancel Jul 15, 2022

@calutron You probably need to uncheck debug symbols, uncheck the platforms you don't need, etc., then run the cleanup thing (does that exist?) so it prunes out the stuff it doesn't need.

cancel Jul 15, 2022

@calutron Debug symbols are usually the largest part of the engine binaries. They're usually 20x-500x the size of the app code itself.

calutron Jul 15, 2022

@cancel The 5.0.1 install has this "options" dropdown where you can uncheck things but 5.0.2 does not

calutron Jul 15, 2022

@cancel sorry if I'm missing something obvious

cancel Jul 15, 2022

@calutron I don't know, I haven't used it in a few years.

calutron Jul 15, 2022

@cancel Ah ok it's a bummer because I don't code really and Blueprints looks great

calutron Jul 15, 2022

@cancel I tried again just for fun. Same result. Oh well!

Aral Balkan Jul 13, 2022

@cancel Mmm, the sweet smell of surveillance capitalism 😋

@cancel
I'm glad the last Unity-based release of #KerbalSpaceProgram is already out.

Serge Matveenko ♻️☮️ ⩜⃝Jul 13, 2022

Frost, wolf of winter 🐺🎄

@cancel Um, YIKES.

Latte macchiato

ablobcat_longlong

@cancel How is EPIC GAMES suddenly a *less evil option???*

touch fluffy tail Jul 13, 2022

damn if only someone had warned us about the dangers of proprietary software

imagine how different things could have been

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@fluffy open source games are generally not economically viable because anyone can just rerelease your game for free

touch fluffy tail Jul 13, 2022

sounds like you're reciting something you heard elsewhere. renpy is MIT, nekopara has sold 5 million copies

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@fluffy the game isn’t open source, which is what I thought you were including in your statement about proprietary software

touch fluffy tail Jul 13, 2022

This is a thread about game engines. you have misconstrued my statement if you meant it to be about anything else

neo Jul 13, 2022

@cancel @fluffy
that's not how it works, actually.
you can basically ruin someone's entire life for doing that if they don't at least asset flip everything, including the writing, since that's all intellectual property

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@neo @fluffy you’re talking about “open source engine but not the game content” which doesn’t count as “open source” by any of the “open source” groups. The assets etc all have to be open source, as well, otherwise they cannot be distributed with the other open source software.

neo Jul 13, 2022

@cancel @fluffy
I don't know how to tell you this, but there are very very very few open source games for a reason. Even in an ideal world, most games would probably not be open source for at least a year or two after release

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@neo @fluffy you’re agreeing with me.

neo Jul 13, 2022

@cancel @fluffy
I don't like the way things are.
I think it's possible to release games as open source and have a healthy ecosystem.

Despite not actually releasing source, ZUN and the Touhou games are as good of an example as I think you'll find for how it could work in practice.

ZUN (nominally) owns the IP, but basically lets people play around to their hearts content

🍄🕷️🌺Jul 14, 2022

@cancel @neo @fluffy turns out that actually isn’t necessarily true for GPL (i struggled with this exact issue a couple years ago) - at least in a lot of commentary they do seem to make a distinction between code and content, cf. sprite fixes etc. that are included in GZDoom

it’s definitely not true for non-copyleft permissive licences

cancel Jul 14, 2022

@apophis @neo @fluffy so if I'm wrong, why isn't DOOM available in Ubuntu's package manager (the whole game)

CyberSpook Jul 13, 2022

@fluffy @cancel

D S Jul 13, 2022

@cancel hilarious, this company is like a ship hitting an iceberg over and over again for ten years. VC will fuck up your brain

Alina Yossimouse Jul 13, 2022

@cancel many oof!