Schine engine VS Unity

Starmade being overtaken?
Perhaps that will give a better perspective on this Unity vs Schine engine debate.

If Schema toughed a switch of game engine would be helpful then i am sure he would have done so by now.

The fact is this game has been under construction for years and every time things get added tweaked or removed. For better or worse we are stuck with it.

I would have wished that the basic StarMade game was just the function of the systems and everything else addons or mods made either by the community or Schema himself.

That way you would not have to reinvent the game ever single time. "Power Update" It would be much easier to maintain and debug for Schema and the few testers.

StarMade tries to cater to a lot of different play styles within the core game itself. And they clash ever so violently. Because in a sandbox game players will always go outside set boundaries or behave in unsuspecting ways.

Much of the troubles of today also come from players not willing to set hard limits on ship size, complexity or environmentables.

Computing power has its limits. A CPU can only calculate so many blocks or connections.

Lancake said:

Starmade being overtaken?

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Well no game can do what StarMade does. But the ever changing basic formula that prevents people from having builds that need little to no rework to be used in the game. Prevents a large portion of people to commit to the game in its current state.

Lancake said:

It's not relevant to why you would use Unity over an in-house made engine.

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It is not relevant at all. But any opportunity to voice objection to basic game change. That I feel is seriously damaging to StarMade. Is one to be taken.

First argument: "The whole system has to be recoded." - Please add a source or proof. You just state it. I state: No, that's not true. Not because I wanna mock you, or to make a hateful post. I say that, because I think that a big part of the system will stay and be built upon.

• Less planet lag, large structure lag
• More stable gameplay
  

Are you technically experienced to know that? What is your profession? Everything over one year of work experience with unity should start talking now. Please add profound proof to you suggesting thoughts. Or ask anyone that works with unity. And don't cite a wiki or some random forum walking stranger with 10 posts.

But lets have the noobie talk: (I have no experience about this too). Do you really think that unity can do a better job in rendering millions of blocks in a 500 diameter ship, or if a one-piece designed java engine, constructed only for this one particular job, might be better?

And stable gameplay? Do you really think unity will do a better job here? How do you know that? Do you know about the netcode of unity? I do not. We two have to assume so many things here. What if the netcode has to be written individually for Starmade anyway, because the data that gets exchanged is different from other multiplayer games? Same goes for the stability in general, not just netcode. A block game is different in its engine than typical 3d games. I think unity might be great for classical 3d engine games, but I have not seen a single big block based game that's finished for unity.

Important point: The dev has to pay extra for using unity. I hope you considered the financial aspect too, before suggesting this idea.

You know the thing is, you thought about the game. And you hope the best for the game. Be not worried. Starmade will be a game one day. The link Lancake posted is very usefull to give some insight. Anyway this "this or that engine or language" talk should really be done when there is profound knowledge involved from at least one of the participants. If I am the one with no knowledge, I have to be the one with questions to the experienced people. =)

Batavium said:

Well no game can do what StarMade does. But the ever changing basic formula that prevents people from having builds that need little to no rework to be used in the game. Prevents a large portion of people to commit to the game in its current state.

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I quoted that post from arouq, explaining why Unity is not always a good choice depending on what you want to achieve with your game. Not sure what that has to do with the difficulty of some people committing to a game that changes over the years.

It's not relevant to why you would use Unity over an in-house made engine.

Batavium said:

Well no game can do what StarMade does. But the ever changing basic formula that prevents people from having builds that need little to no rework to be used in the game. Prevents a large portion of people to commit to the game in its current state.

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versus:

I would have wished that the basic StarMade game was just the function of the systems and everything else addons or mods made either by the community or Schema himself.

That way you would not have to reinvent the game ever single time. "Power Update" It would be much easier to maintain and debug for Schema and the few testers.

I don't understand. If you want that people commit to the game, and that people don't have to rework systems, you shouldn't use mods at all.

Mods force you to make individual systems for each mod added. Mods fractionise a group of gamers into smaller ones. Example: Workshop content of Space Engineers, Servers of SE that play with mods. For each server I have to adapt to a different gameplay. For each mod that a Workshop ship uses, I have to use a bigger set of mods for SE. This sometimes doubles or tripples the loading time of the shiny game.

Commitment could also get destroyed, because the majority of gamers play vanilla, but the vanilla game takes longer to code as the API as to be maintained simultaneously. And commitment gets destroyed, because I have less people to play in my own playstyle, that required for example a shield mod in Space Engineers, where all my friends dont want to play with shields. But they want to play with another mod, that I totally despise. So I just stop playing SE completly.

Yeah, people can be more commited to a modable game. But mods are not there to expand the core gameplay. If mods are meant to expand core gameplay, to ease up the development, the mods fail. Take an example on cities skylines mods: they are just small addons. Works perfect. Still, Cities with too many mods has horrible perfomance and loading time. And non-cosmetical mods that expand gameplay for SE like shields just suck imo. Because only 1 in 20 servers even uses this additional core gameplay mechanic.

JinM said:

Are you technically experienced to know that? What is your profession?

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PSA: Not possessing X profession or Y qualification does not make Z point 100% invalid in itself.

I don't need to be a wildlife expert to know that trying to fight a kangaroo with my bare hands is not a good idea (those fuckers can literally tear you open)

JinM said:

I don't understand. If you want that people commit to the game, and that people don't have to rework systems, you shouldn't use mods at all.

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It works both ways. Everyone can choose to play the game in a way to better suit there style. Minecraft has thousands of mods.

A good mod will have a lot of players.

If StarMade has a very simple vanilla experience then I think the game would be a big hit. As a building game nothing is more stressful then having your builds rendered useless. Some people have build for years on stuff and the changes coming will not make these builds look different or add ground breaking new features. It is just the same thing done differently and all your stuff needs adapting. Everyone is getting stuck in a holding pattern.

StarMade really needs a player base greater then the current one. This will add many more players who off course will also nag and complain like crazy. But among them may be a few eggheads that make the most amazing addition to StarMade. Or help the current game forward in ways we currently do not understand.

I guess i should quote the post where schema says that he knows well java. Or maybe it is someone else in the team. Too bad i don't remember where it is.

Batavium said:

StarMade really needs a player base greater then the current one. This will add many more players who off course will also nag and complain like crazy.

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More players means more testers. More testers means more discovered bugs, maybe not something everyone want here.

If the player base is small, then focus on existing players and their experience, rather than theoretical new players. I don't really think additional ability to add mods will bring in new players atm anyway.

I am not a professional, but the linked thread has a (self-proclaimed) professional state that unity is basically all about the visuals, and will not scale or perform well in a context like current on-line Starmade universes...since we recognize that there are currently issues with laggy games and general performance, Arouq's post is probably something to consider carefully.

[btw RedAlert_007, thanks again for the timely contribution - you have saved me a roo-bitch slap, ty! But JinM was carefully not saying anything was incorrect, but just asking, reasonably, as to what position of technical knowledge Arcner was coming from when raising the issue]

A debate seems to be meaningless without someone putting their money where their mouth is. Schine would need the Professional version of Unity, so until someone donates the $125 (plus something extra for the trouble) and makes clear mention of it for the purpose of updating the engine, it doesn't matter. Keep in mind, if anyone does donate that much, it's unlikely that Schine would use it for Unity, so don't think you can go demanding things with a donation....

With that said, I think an engine change would be fun for Schine. It would be a thrill to simply port over things and then start playing with all the extra features that Unity comes with.

I would like to play with Unity myself, but alas, no Linux download for the hobby version.

Similarly, I would play Starmade more if it had an easy mod interface. Editing configs doesn't strike me as the simplest mod interface. A lot of options means the config is flexible, but intimidating. An easy mod interface also means faster prototyping of new features. I have seen a good mod interface with lots of baseline mods for the core gameplay that forced modders to create truly special mods. Sure, a few squeakers here and there, but they were quickly either ignored or absorbed by bigger mods.

jayman38 said:

I would like to play with Unity myself, but alas, no Linux download for the hobby version.

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Did you consider using a windows-vm on your linux?

JinM said:

Did you consider using a windows-vm on your linux?

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I considered it. I have plenty of linux-native game code to play with, without Unity.

RedAlert_007 said:

PSA: Not possessing X profession or Y qualification does not make Z point 100% invalid in itself.

I don't need to be a wildlife expert to know that trying to fight a CASSOWARY with my bare hands is not a good idea (those fuckers can literally tear you open)

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Fixed it for you red bby

well we can have a look at skywanderer now that it is in pre-alpha. It currently has almost no collision, no planet, almost no ship systems but multi scale blocks and the ability to make hover vehicles and mechas and a begining of built astronaut weapons.
I'll have to make some test to see if it can handle large ship (1 km) as well as starmade

El_Poulpy said:

well we can have a look at skywanderer now that it is in pre-alpha. It currently has almost no collision, no planet, almost no ship systems but multi scale blocks and the ability to make hover vehicles and mechas and a begining of built astronaut weapons.
I'll have to make some test to see if it can handle large ship (1 km) as well as starmade

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Some other players have also been mucking around there. So far I've heard that they havn't found a size limit yet.
I certiantly really like the miniture blocks they have :3

Unity has very poor physical simulation. You have to heavily mod the engine to let it have any sort of proper collision detection and clipping prohibition. You can clearly see that when playing any Unity based game with a building element. It's mostly for the looks, and if you thought Starmade is hard to optimize, Unity is much, much harder.

Changing engines would be ridiculous. The whole point of this game is have an unique engine. Java is the language but it is a Schine product. There is no way there will ever be an engine swap unless there was something super desirable. Even then it would be a tough consideration.