Not easily, but if you become a game developer you can start to tell at a glance. Unity games have a very specific type of jank and look + feel. (So do Unreal, Source, and Godot games.)
Even if a game is highly stylized, a Unity game always "feels" like a Unity game. Kerbal Space Program, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl, Pokemon Go, Cuphead, Untitled Goose Game, Cities Skylines, Valheim, etc. It's a combination of physics, shaders, and input latency that's hard to put into words.
The closest I've come to seeing a game that breaks out of the "made in Unity" feel is Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, which was made in Unity but pretends to be made in Source (the original Stanley Parable was made in Source).
Unreal has explicit licensing terms that forbid them from doing this. Terms which people are going to pay very close attention to.
Not to mention that Epic gets their money from Fortnite, not necessarily the engine. They have no reason to squander their goodwill like that.
On top of that - if you want to release on a console, you need to write all the console-specific code yourself. This is quite a lot of work, especially for an indie developer.
Godot is a great start, but it's got a long way to go before it's a commercial-ready engine.
Does Jellyfin allow you to bring in your music libraries?
Also, does Jellyfin have Samsung TV clients, or do you need to cast from your phone? I've been trying to de-Google myself and I don't want to have to keep investing in Chromecasts, and part of the reason why I've stuck with Plex is because their app is everywhere.
Do you agree that retrievers are bred to retrieve things?
Do you agree that herding dogs are bred to herd things?
Do you agree that pointer dogs are bred to find things?
Surely you've been around these kinds of dogs before. It's not something that they learn; they are specifically bred to do a job and they will do that job even without training. You've seen or heard of how a sheepdog will herd small children, I'm sure. It's why the breed exists; they are specifically bred to do a certain thing and genetically their instinct is to do the thing that they were bred for over the course of thousands of years. You can remove them from their mom and not give them any training and they will naturally do the thing that they were bred to do. You don't have to train a golden to bring you back a ball.
So is it a surprise that a dog bred to kill things will want to kill things?
That's not simply because of "a poor owner", although the fact that people refuse to train their killer dogs to not be killers is part of it. It's because their dogs are genetically predisposed to kill, just like a pointer dog is genetically predisposed to find things.
It is absolutely a bad breed. Killer dogs should be banned worldwide. Every single pitbull, rottweiler, etc. should be spayed/neutered and the breed should end. They're too dangerous and dumb owners have proven that you can't rely on humans to keep them under control.
It's not the dogs' fault, mind - it's their instinct. But that doesn't mean that future generations should have to deal with it.
Unity is a game engine that is frequently used by mobile app developers and indie gamedevs. It's lightweight and easier to learn than its main competitor, the Unreal Engine.
Sometime within the last year, Unity adjusted their terms of service. It used to state that you were only governed by the TOS for the version of the Unity Editor you used. If you disagreed with a new TOS, you could use the older terms as long as you didn't update the Unity Editor. This clause was silently removed a while ago, without replacement. Nobody noticed.
This week, Unity announced they are changing how they charge for the use of their engine. It used to be you had to subscribe to Unity's developer accounts monthly if you were selling your games - this is how Unity made money. Unity has changed it so that you still have to do this, but they are getting rid of the cheapest plan (now the cheapest plan is $250/month) and Unity is now charging $0.20 every time your game gets installed. This is applied retroactively, to every game that has ever been made in Unity.
So if someone buys your game, installs it, then reformats their hard drive and installs your game a second time. You now need to pay Unity $0.40.
If you are selling your game for $1, then you effectively pay $0.30 in platform fees and $0.40 to Unity, meaning you only made $0.30 yourself. There were open questions about how this would work with GamePass, Humble Bundle, etc. - Unity has said they'll just charge Microsoft (or whoever is the distributor) instead, without giving any details as to how this works.
This also means if you sold your game in 2012, you are now paying Unity $0.20 any time someone decides to reinstall your old game - even though at the time you were bound by a different EULA, which Unity now says is invalid and they can retroactively change the terms of.
People are saying this isn't legal, but indie devs don't have the money to throw at lawyers. Bigger corpo places do, but they also likely have a special contract.
People are understandably upset by this, as they are now going to be on the hook for money they don't necessarily have. This is a threat to their livelihoods and many games are just going to remove their games from sale rather than risk losing being on the hook for a bunch of money. This means you won't be able to buy a lot of indie games in the future.
Freedom of speech. Everyone is able to be heard, even if their opinions are distasteful. It's what the US was built on and why people can fly swastikas and wear klan hoods without being arrested.
They can only be arrested if they commit a crime, not because their views are horrible. You can walk down the street yelling racial slurs at everyone and that's perfectly legal as long as you aren't being violent or inciting others to violence.
That doesn't mean society has to tolerate them - counter-protesting is alive and well, and Nazis have been fired from their jobs for their views. But the government can't arrest them simply for being Nazis.
Unreal is much more entrenched than Unity is. At the AAA level, more places hire Unreal devs than Unity devs.
Unity is popular with indies because it's dead simple (Unreal is a complex monster of an engine). But even Unreal doesn't have a monopoly, between things like Source, Lumberyard (which is now FOSS and run by the Linux Foundation), etc. Not to mention you can always roll your own engine, which many places already have.
Depending on how much money you expect to lose, that may be the more prudent option for some.
At the very least you'd have something to work with - it's not truly "from scratch".
I work in the AAA industry and I've ported code from one engine to another - it's not fast by any means, but at the very least you can assume the code that's there is largely correct. The killers are materials/shaders, porting over design work, and fixing timing issues. If you have netcode that can be tricky as well.
But at the very least you can have the core of your game running again reasonably. It's how things like Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe went from Source to Unity, and how Pokemon BDSP went from the proprietary Pokemon engine to Unity.
Indies and AAs can hire some extra hands to work temporarily with their existing engineers to port and they'd probably lose less money than Unity is charging.
Unreal licensing is explicitly tied to the version you use. So if you use Unreal 5.3, you are bound to the license attached to the code for Unreal 5.3.
If that license changes in Unreal 5.4 and you disagree with the new license, you don't need to follow the terms as long as you never move from Unreal 5.3.
Ah, yes, the peak argument.
"Here are reasons why you're wrong"
I'M NOT READING THAT
Glad to see you were here to have a discussion in good faith.
@EnglishMobster
@lemmy.world