Interesting Vice article about how Unity isn’t only about games anymore.
I find half of the article mislead and misleading because of the false ethical dilemma*, but nonetheless interesting.
“empowering” military projects is easy: work almost anything open source and your code easily can end up in a war simulations if you’re good enough and working on interesting projects. Also I think expecting authority over your work when you’re working for a company is bull.
But really interesting to gain some insights regarding Unity’s internals.
Conspiracy theory: Unity was offered to be featured in a positive vice article, but declined to sign the insane contracts that vice insists on, so they wrote a hitpiece instead.
No, lets not be those people who guess and jump at shadows. I use Untiy for game development and so long as Unity serves that market, I’m happy. Because I’m realistic and know that in tech, a vacuum is quickly filled. Unity abstaining from a given market changes nothing in the world.
To be honest I’m grateful Unity hasn’t branched out to pig farming. One @superpig is enough bacon methinks.
Just to be clear, I’m not. I don’t mind that Unity stepped out from the game market to do other work as well and don’t think that Unity will become the next Raytheon.
I don’t know, I’m from Central Europe, I like pork rinds with my beer / ale so Unity can’t say they wouldn’t have their skin in the game.
This doesnt surprise me because… I am somebody who worked on UK military projects using unity as far back as 2017, and it was being used for that for years beforehand (and I mean YEARS).
This isnt news, its been the case for a long time. Its not unity doing military projects so much as it is their customers doing military projects.
Also unreal does military stuff too, as does pretty much every game engine out there accessible by the masses.
In the article it talks about the DOD using unity as their main platform. It doesnt say unity themselves are doing the work on the projects other than what they already do for all paying enterprise projects. I dont know how that constitutes anything but a customer using it? They are licensed unity users using unity for unity projects.
Unity already help out on a variety of enterprise customer projects, this is no different.
Thats literally no different to what they do for majority of enterprise customers as I said. Perhaps you have never worked on an enterprise license project?
Either way, my point stands, none of this is new and has been the case for ages. And all engines are doing the same.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I am not saying I am happy with it - I left the previous company specifically because I did not want to work on military projects anymore.
I think the point isn’t what they do, but who they do it for… Of course they do it for other customers but the point is some people aren’t happy they do it for DOD.
Ah yeah the one by bohemia? They used a custom engine, interestingly it spun off into a product for the military to use for training for things like communications (not the same as arma just based on the tech)
