Unity Engine Stuff
Recently I've been seeing a surge of projects attempting to revive old games
by recreating them in the Unity engine, most importantly for the reasons of
it being supported on modern platforms.
Projects like Daggerfall Unity, "Open"Mafia and UnitySA.
It's a shame that they don't go the OpenMW route and actually use a free and
open engine with a real license attached instead of the proprietary, platform
locked and telemetry collecting Unity engine.
Calling something "Open" when only the game-logic scripts and asset loaders
that still rely on the proprietary Unity engine, are on github somewhere...
that is not really open.
OpenMafia actually started out as a project that looked for competent C++
programmers, but it seems that no one had stepped forward or focus has
changed.
It's just very bizarre how a game like Mafia, with no technical issues running
in a VM and or Wine needs to be desperately recoded in an engine like Unity.
20 years down the line, OpenMW will compile on whatever operating system we
are using on whatever architecture we want. OpenMafia however, and the other
Unity engine ports, may or may not go under with drastic engine changes,
change of management of the Unity developer or the closure of Unity itself.
I just don't see how relying on a proprietary component will help anyone in the long term, especially considering the original versions more or less run on our current systems still. Maybe I am missing something?
-- Marco