Unity bans VLC from Unity Store.

This is almost certainly the case

Spot-on, this would be my bet too.

Capitalist making decisions based only on increased ROI?

Say it isn’t so.

Fuck I hate this “single goal” system.

So fucking short sighted.

VLC is just a media player. It isn't on them if anyone is using it to watch or listen pirated content just as much as it isn't on Adobe or Microsoft if people use them to read pirated books. They aren't the one hosting or distributing the pirated content

Really, I get an off feeling just by trying to parse out what is your reasoning here. Did we get to a point that technology is so corporately-controlled that the idea of a program can freely open files of a certain type is inherently subversive, as opposed to a service or storefront where everything is tied to some corporately-owned licenses?

But I shouldn't be alarmist and make too many assumptions. What is the "legal gray area risk" that you mean here?

If Unity had a problem with VLC playing copyrighted content they should have said so, not issued a takedown on LGPL grounds. Regardless of whether they're right or not from a lawyer perspective, it's a bad look for Unity to show the double standard here.

but since their HQ was in a Nordic country (iirc)

It's French. And there's nothing shaky about it. It's even fully endorsed by the EU.

Most of the people downvoting you dont seem to understand why VLC is only quasi legal in the US.

This is a good policy, but it's not always that simple for people who have been making games on the engine. Many people have spent years of their lives working on projects using Unity, or have already released products using Unity which they are now supporting. Changing a project to another game engine is a massive undertaking, so Unity has a semi-captive consumer base in the short term.

Yeah! Everyone stop using Microsoft products today! I'm serious.

I took this same advice in 1999. Been using Linux on my desktop ever since 👍

Just like with unity: You have to learn some new skills if you switch to something else but the benefits outweigh the costs. It's so much easier today than it was back then and this seems to be a universal truth: The sooner you switch off of any abusive platform the more quickly you'll reap the rewards.

Even better: Later, after everyone who didn't switch is removed about the latest nonsense from their abusive vendor of choice you can rub it in their faces and be like, "I switched to Godot ages ago and I am so glad I don't have to deal with this kind of shit anymore." Just like how Linux users say similar things about the latest bullshit from Microsoft whenever it comes up in the news (which is often, which is why it's become a trope).

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.

It is classic internet outrage complely disconnected from what smaller game devs have to go through. Don't get in the way of a good internet outrage as a legit, actual gamedev who knows why this is damn near impossible, or you'll get downvoted.

The whole argument of leaving Unity hinge on the fact that Godot is a close replacement, it is not.

I suppose there are a lot of companies who would be glad to make you pay for their proprietary video standard, we would just pay for something formerly free 😟

According to the article, unity is literally built on software that uses this licensing, so it's weird that they'd start going against it now. Their runtime literally includes it

Depends on the reason they chose to have selective enforcement.

A good analogy is kicking someone out of a bar. If you do it because they're a dickhead... perfectly fine. But if it's because they're black... not OK.

The C suites have nothing to lose. Best case, they make more money, worst case they get replaced and hired as a C suite by some other company.

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.

Both. Definitely both.

I think they saw it as an opportunity to wash their image. "Look, we're the good guys" kind of thing.

Both and also Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Godot is fine for solo/very small indies and people trying to learn gamedev, but it is not ready quite yet. Most devs still are stuck using proprietary engines.

Is there any information on them being given a pass?

Generally stuff like this goes in waves. I have no experience with the unity store, but it wouldn't shock me to find out they haven't always (and still might not...) required "apps" to list their licensing. Meaning this would be a somewhat manual effort done by a severely reduced staff.

And I'll just add on that I expect this to happen to the other "asset" stores. In industry, "GPL is cancer" and "LGPL is herpes". GPL can straight up "kill" a project and LGPL is usually a mass of headaches that are mostly manageable but can still "cause problems" at times.

I expect they will be unless they're small enough to fly under the radar

Why is it bullshit? AFAIK, Unity wouldn't be able to comply with LGPL without supplying their own source code, so then this would be the only logical outcome.

Yup fair point I didn't know that. Unity presumably does this with dlls that a technical user can easily swap out. In principle an asset store script could do this, but it would be very difficult to verify and enforce so I can see why they'd just ban the license outright as a CYA thing.

Maybe the answer is to distribute a vlc dll separately and only ship a linking/driving script via the asset store.

Technically it can be statically linked, but then you would need to provide artifacts (for example, object files for the non-LGPL modules) enabling the end user to "recombine or relink" the program with a modified version of the LGPL code.

Dynamic linking is usually simpler, though. And the DRM issues apply either way.

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 i on the keyboard while playing something.

I thought we all agreed that building games in Unity was a bad idea.

Oh 🤦‍♂️

I saw Unity and talk about open licences and just assumed that this was talk about Ubuntu and the interface that comes with it...

No no. He's the evil robot from the Marvel universe.

You're gonna take a whole day? Why you slackin so much? Git gud scrub!

Godot doesn't have an asset store yet actually, but they're planning on releasing one soon.

Despite the name, MadVR doesn't have anything to do with virtual reality. It's a no-compromise video renderer that uses custom shaders to play media instead of the GPU's built in codecs, with the goal to display content at the absolute highest quality possible.

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

Lack of important features, no asset store, not as mature (more bugs), no native console support, no low-level rendering access, no texture streaming, and on and on.