Interesting acquisition for sure…
Since Xenko is a direct rival, what does this mean for the future of Enlighten in Unity?
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Yeah, that is an interesting development.
I doubt they would try to strong-arm Unity, as Unity is likely one of their bigger licensees, but I guess you never know.
Never heard of them, are they small enough to hope for Unity to buy them now?
It’s fresh out of beta. I hope you’re joking.
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lol
It’s far from what Unity proposes, if you add Unity Asset Store Xenko is years behind in terms of features and tools.
While this is very true and will continue to be true for quite some time, they’ve come a long way since they were called Paradox engine. If you look at their roadmap they still have years of work left to catch up with many engine features, but at the same time big things like being set up heavily for multi-threading both in the engine and your scripts was in from the very beginning.
When they do get an asset store off the ground it’s also a lot simpler to port since both engines use C# and their API is very similar to Unity’s.
I totally hope this doesn’t happen. I’m sure Xenko would get killed off if that were to take place and while it’s still early it looks to be a good start at something fresh. Unity is getting pretty old at this point and it’s approaching that moment in most software where a complete rewrite should start to be considered but yet it has so much invested in it that I doubt that will ever happen. This happens in all software that has been around long enough, I’m not knocking the work Unity has done.
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Really weird! Never heard of Xenko.
Looks like they have tried to basically emulate Unity’s business model and Editor structure. Seems awkward that they own Enlighten and are responsible for maintaining it for existing customers (Unity) - if its something Unity even needs maintenance from or is even entitled to. Maybe they have a one-off license.
Dunno. Unity always seems to work around these sorts of things - if its even a thing.
Yep, i think Unity is already moving away from Enlighten with Octane and new stuff.
can not wait for OCtane!
OMG: Nested Prefabs
Best to tamper your expectations. For everything that is awesome built into the core (async scripts, nested prefabs, C# 7, Lists/Dictionaries supported in inspector, etc) there are going to be things not yet implemented that will be missed (no editor plugins, no custom inspectors, no movie textures, lack of platforms, etc.). It’s a good start but is at least a year away to do much more than prototyping. If they hit their roadmap targets though things could get interesting in 2018.
Any idea what commercial games have been created with Xenko? I checked their website, but couldn’t find any info.
It’s worth noting Xenko is owned by Silicon Studios, which is currently porting a beta of their Yebis post processing to Unity. I think they understand there is money to be made with Unity even if their own engine is being constructed as a competitor.
There’s something about Xenko that makes me want to love it, and I don’t know why.
@Peter77 Off the top of my head Bravely Default and Bravely Second. Children of the Galaxy is an indie title on Steam built with it.
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As far as I know the Bravely games were made with orochi 3 and 4 (I think there was a gundam game made with orochi 4 as well). Their Yebis post processing was in a lot of stuff as well (substance, modo, etc.). I’m sure a lot of the tech that made up Yebis and Orochi made it’s way into xenko but I’m sure there are tons of differences from their earlier tech as well.
AFAIK, the indie title Children of the Galaxy (early access) is the only one so far. I’m sure more will pop up but it’s early days for the engine with a lot of things you’d expect to be there still not implemented.
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I think you’re right. I tried to look up a source but everything is titled “Bravely Default Dev releases Xenko” which got stuck in my mind as Bravely Default as a made in Xenko.
My understanding is Octane will be for offline rendering, not realtime?
Perhaps it will be able to bake premade lighting or bake maps to simulate real time lighting like Enlighten is doing, and i think Unity is already on something new, CryEngine will not be the only one proposing some real time GI without baking.
In addition to this, the biggest challenge will be community and 3rd party vendor support.
As it is, most 3rd party vendors, ad networks, etc have a Unity SDK, but it would take market validation and time and effort to build a ‘Xenko’ SDK for their product.
It’s a bit of a catch 22, vendors will only support the engine if it is widely used, but developers will only use the engine if there is reasonable 3rd party support.
Everyone has been focusing on the buyer but no one seems to be interested in the reason behind the sale. ARM originally purchased Geomerics to advance their console and mobile graphic department. If ARM no longer saw value in holding onto Geomerics what does that say about the future of Enlighten in general?
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