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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Yeah, I expect that it might. Nope, I’m an engineer working on the engine side of things. I joined Unity because I believe in the work we’re doing, like my colleagues. The last couple of weeks have been a distraction, but my team is still pushing ahead and building the engine of tomorrow. Believe me, I’m personally just as frustrated with how things were communicated. I have a lot of faith in my team and the positive impact of the work we are doing. All I can say is that we’re continuing to build functionality and features which will enable developers to accomplish more and drive success. Decisions about how this technology is licensed isn’t something I have direct control over, but I hope that through our efforts we can help restore the trust which has been eroded. I’m still bullish on the future road map.


  • Context, I work for Unity, but this is my own understanding of things and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of my employer nor should it be considered “official” positions of the company. We have folks where communication is their job. Mine is helping build a better engine. There’s been a lot of misinformation since the changes were announced and hopefully I can help straighten some of this out, but again if there are other questions, there are others who are better qualified to address that.

    The limit for using Personal was 100k. That has been raised to 200k. For the original terms, and these new terms, it is the same; no per-seat price until you reach the threshold. Once you reach the threshold, then you have to upgrade to Professional or Enterprise, and then there is a per-seat charge for the editor. When you hit the revenue or instance thresholds, then there is an additional charge… But you will be doing very well at that point and the amount is insignificant for most developers at that scale. Compared with Unreal, it is still significantly less, even with the announced terms last week. Unity continues to try and make it possible to create highly portable games for multiple platforms, and devices, and to do so with terms that encourage anyone to become a creator and build your dream game. The last thing Unity wants to do is stifle innovation and creativity.

    If you watch the Q&A, the reason for the change, so that it was “retroactive” was to apply these term changes to companies pulling in high revenue, think millions of dollars, and who were releasing what amounted to DLCs and Season types of updates but without doing anything except maybe changing assets. Some of these games are even repackaged and re-released as “new” games. In other cases they may sometimes radically change the game so that it might be more accurately described as a new game, but they continue to release using an unsupported version of the engine. If a developer did this every time they approached the threshold, they could technically have millions of users, all while skirting around the TOS. Do this on Personal, delist at 90k, and release a “new” game to perpetually circumvent the licensing fees. The change wasn’t intended to harm the good developers or studios who are trying to make high quality games, it was intended to go after the businesses releasing “Banana Slots 2022.1 (updated).” If that’s the content you release, I’m sorry, but I think your games are kind of scummy. Please stop. The app stores don’t need more of this sort of cash grab content.

    If you are making great content and the terms would severally impact you, then Unity was intending to work with you to reach agreeable terms.

    Under the new terms, the same applies. If you or your studio are greatly impacted by the new trerms, Unity doesn’t want to sink your business, they are trying to find a way to keep investing in the development of tools and services which will allow you to reach the greatest number of users and want to work with you to make that happen, as that works best for the creator and for Unity.

    For those making games for charity which were told they were going to be impacted, that was bad communication and you inadvertently spoke to the wrong person who didn’t fully understand your request. Content made for charity was always intended to be treated with favorable terms. The specifics of those terms I’m not deeply familiar with, so I don’t know how that applies to per-seat licensing or the details of such a contract, but I know that Unity works hard to support humanitarian efforts and I’m sure if you were making content for charities, nothing has changed.

    The bottom line is this. If you feel like the terms are going to make you insolvent, work with Unity to resolve that. Unity is a partner, not an overbearing entity. Unity wants you to be successful.




  • Seems like that should be a problem already. I have family that was in the music industry and collected royalties. They won a few Grammys, so the royalties were substantial. Their estate should not continue to receive royalties indefinitely. Hell, as much as I loved them, they shouldn’t be collecting indefinitely. They worked hard their entire life and because of that hard work, they deserved to live comfortably in retirement until they passed, but they weren’t owed anything they didn’t deserve. And as much as I love their kids, they’re family too, it isn’t as though they deserved any income for something their parent did decades earlier, before they had families of their own.


  • This way, you can still have opinions that aren’t “mainstream”, but you won’t be removed as long as you’re civil and respectful about it.

    I mean, you sort of identified the problem, but still missed it. It isn’t “mainstream” because we’re taking about marginalized minority groups. It can only be seen as leaning mainstream because LGBTQ+ have a lot of allies that don’t fall under that identity, but it still falls short of actually being mainstream and short of a supporting majority.

    Think about the numbers this way; you have LGBTQ+ (or some other minority group), allies, “don’t cares,” “don’t want to knows,” and bigots. We think we know the bigots, those are the haters. What is surprising to most is that the “don’t want to knows” are the biggest faction of bigots, although it is an indirect association.

    A common transition for the “don’t want to knows” is saying, “I’m tired of hearing from those Zorb snowflakes only, the other side should be heard as well – free speech. We should have an open discussion.”

    This suggestion, while it sounds positive, enables those who want to troll and slander, and they get to do so behind anonymity and with the support of others. For the bigot which openly expresses a hatred for Zorbs and Narfs, they just been given an umbrella of protection under “free speech” to say hurtful things. – Oh, blatant hate speech itself is still considered a violation of TOS? – Good luck trying to moderate an influx of alt accounts which just stoke up the problem by saying, “The Zorbs and Narfs are taking over.” “It might be an unpopular opinion, but non-Zorbs and Narfs need a voice too.” “What Zorbs and Narfs practice is against the teachings of The Great Plunis.” “Plunis said that the Zorbs and Narfs are immoral.” “Zorbs and Narfs are stripping away our Constitutional rights.” “Even taking about Zorbs and Narfs in our schools might trick our kids into supporting or even becoming Narfs themselves. Think of the kids.”

    Now telling a bigot that they can’t offend others isn’t hurting them. Giving them a platform where they can be safe to constantly etch away at human decency of marginalized groups is a platform too high, especially when it provides an opportunity to express their vile dislike of a group of people that are somehow different than them with a different perspective of the world.

    So how about those Zorbs? From their perspective, anyone might be threatening to them and might want to cause them harm. How can a Narf recognize that someone else is a Zorb, a Narf, an ally, a “don’t care,” a “don’t want to know,” or an outright bigot? As a group of people already in a minority, they need safe spaces to find others they can identify with or who support them, so that they can openly discuss the social challenges they face daily. It isn’t a debate, these are challenges and problems they gave daily. If a social forum which seemed to offer that sort of protected space suddenly changes their TOS in support of “free speech,” and the maintainer of the site declares that they want to encourage discussion and multi-sided debate, that safe space has just been ransacked. Whereas the community they had joined was reserved for peers and allies, that may no longer be the case and those bigots can still be threatening even if they don’t come out and directly say “I hate you.”

    There aren’t two sides to an “I am a Zorb,” and “I can’t stand Zorbs” debate. It isn’t the same as one side saying “I like tomatoes,” and another side saying “tomatoes are disgusting,” it is more like the debate about being Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life… It isn’t as though the Pro-Choice folks are Anti-Life, but the Pro-Life folks are very much Anti-Choice. The sides of the debate can’t even agree about what they are against.

    So, as an ally, and someone who really liked squabbles.io a month ago, because it felt like a positive community, I’m disgusted with the changes made this past week. As far as I’m concerned, squabbles.io should have replaced their logo as they did, but they should have replaced Bort with a giant red tomato, to really emphasize how vile and disgusting the site has become.





  • I expect it is natural that there is a tipping point, where there is enough content that it becomes engaging for others. It’s like going to a house party. The first few people to arrive at the party awkwardly stand around and might leave early. Once there is the right number of people, the group dynamic shifts and the entire energy of the party is elevated. The Exodus brought a lot of curious visitors, but everyone was standing around. Now there’s engaging content and comments are growing. Some of those who stopped by in June will likely come back at some point if they left early – I did the same thing in the early days of Reddit. I think there’s been a large enough influx to kick things off and I expect things to continue to grow, but the active user count was probably inflated significantly over the past couple of months and will be resetting to more reasonable numbers.




  • The video cable does a similar trick with how it supports color. This is why S-Video was superior to composite video until component came along. S-Video split the intensity and color into two signals and then component split the color further into a blue difference and a red difference. If you only wanted black and white, you didn’t need to use the color signals and the image would degrade to a monochrome representation.

    The composite video, with only one video signal wire, was similar to what was received over the antenna, with the broadcast signal separated from the carrier signal and the audio sub bands removed. It was the video signal with the color signal still combined. The progression from Antenna -> Composite -> S-Video -> Component -> DVI-I -> DVI-D -> HDMI -> Display Port has been an interesting one. The changes in the digital realm have been less about the image quality, the digital signal can either be read or not, and more about the bandwidth and how much data can be sent, aka resolution and framerate. Those first four transitions in particular had significant impact on the image quality.





  • I selected “was” simply because I don’t have enough understanding of the current situation to argue it from that standpoint.

    In many ways, Chromecast is superior. Removing the rendering task from the tablet or phone, and letting the receiver manage that, it’s significantly better than making the mobile device decompress the source stream and then decompress it for a Miracast receiver. The only real advantage Miracast has in this is that it doesn’t need to receive firmware updates to keep it up to date with newer protocols. With Miracast being built in to TVs, and possibly implemented in an ASIC, it should be a universal fallback. With Android 4.2 it was a built in protocol to AOSP. What I didn’t know was that it was actually stripped back out with Android 6. I thought dropping support was specific to Google devices only.

    What really needs to be implemented is a non-proprietary extension to Miracast which goes back to the early Chromecast days when it was based on the DIAL protocol. It’s incredible that we have to deal with so many proprietary standards from Airplay and Chromecast, and then also support the wifi alliance standard for Miracast.