Thanks for your reply, I've enjoyed reading it ?

Just one clarification:

DarkMike said:
Alright this is an extremely hyperbolic sentence. UE has its quirks and major flaws like any other product(especially a big one). Saying that it's impossible to make something like the games you linked(which look good btw) with it is just false though.

Not at all, I'm serious when I say I couldn't finish my games with UE, please look at this section:

https://esenthel.com/?id=compare#Usage​

“Basic Operations”, “Importing Assets”, “Importing Package”

Things that are instant or take a few seconds in my engine took a few minutes in Unreal.

And my game has literally thousands of assets from more than hundred different developers.

If I had to wait so long until everything finishes importing, this is what would happen, lol

DarkMike said:
the big are getting bigger just for virtue of being already big

Yes, this is the unfortunate reality. But I'd like to make a statement:

Message to all game developers, think about the time when you will be the one trying to make your own product, you will work hard, you will do your best, you will put your soul into it, and then some other big company will take over your customers, simply because they're bigger, more popular… You will be thinking, oh s… this sucks, why is it like this, oh wait.. I did the same thing in the past when choosing other products.

And another thing, would really love if people didn't look just at the product, but also at the people behind it, Epic Games reviews:

Trustpilot 1.6/5.0 stars (3,490 reviews) - https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.epicgames.com​

Sitejabber 1.5/5.0 stars (198 reviews) - https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/epicgames.com​

Better Business Bureau 1.08/5.0 stars (112 reviews) - https://www.bbb.org/us/nc/cary/profile/video-game-dealers/epic-games-inc-0593-90001957/customer-reviews​

Thousands of people feel like they've been wronged by the company, and went on the internet to voice their complaints. What they say?

• "Worst customer support imaginable"
• "I am convinced they will sell gamers souls for a single dollar of profit"
• "They have no interest in customer satisfaction"
• "Epic Fail for customer service"

Employee reviews here: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Epic-Games-Reviews-E266904.htm​

These are more positive in general (those people are getting paid by Epic after all), but some reviews that caught my eye:

• "Our CEO and COO have shifted aggressively toward valuing the money in their individual pockets over the quality of life of their entire employee base.. They genuinely just don't care about anyone but themselves.."
• "It's no longer the small game studio that cares about its people. It has grown so large you are just a cog in the machine and easily replaced"
• "They work you to death I was working 60 hours getting paid for 40"
• "I've never seen a place mistreating women so poorly. From the serious sexual harassment that constantly happens (DAILY) at work"
• "Immoral managers, toxic environment, mobbing, run by incompetent high school dropouts"
• "Worst job I've ever had"

Right now the saddest story in the world, where everyone has their focus on, is the war in Ukraine. Why this war is possible? Because one man is too powerful.

Think again what it means when something is too powerful, it can dictate the rules for its own benefit, and nothing can oppose it. So why should this allow to happen.

With everything that people posted here, does Epic Games sound like a moral/ethical and trustworthy company to build it into something even bigger, stronger and more powerful that will allow it to dictate the rules in the game industry?

DarkMike said:
My personal advice is to get a day job as a games/graphics programmer so you can support your family

Thanks, for the time being we have enough to live by, so I will continue focusing to finish my games.

I'm optimistic ? Great success is just a few steps away!

In the meantime, let's cheer for Ukraine! Let the world raise its efforts and stop this war.

esenthel said:
Think again what it means when something is too powerful, it can dictate the rules for its own benefit, and nothing can oppose it. So why should this allow to happen.

It feels like this is the major way of thinking in modern times.
Personally i feel like an individual, surrounded by a majority of sheep which just adopt general opinion as served from few centralized influences, like for example big tech companies.
Though, i'm fully aware all the others - the sheep - think exact the same.
So there are no sheep. But then - how can it still happen that a few can control the masses, seemingly so easily?

Taking the current engine discussion as example, it's probably about assumptions:
The bigger company tech is likely more robust, has more features, all is tested and working, they have better support. Because they have more people to work on it, including experts.
The single guy with a similar product probably lacks the manpower to focus on all of this. Features will be missing, he might not have time to fix reported issues quickly, the gap to the large company will likely only increase with time.

Those assumptions are reasonable. We do not realize or care how we shoot our own leg on the long run buy supporting centralization, which will cause stagnation at some point when only one or two engines are left.
Actually, we can not afford to think ahead. We need to compete now, not in the distant future. We're doomed to act short sighted and have no other choice.

Obviously you disagree with the assumptions i have listed, and you provide some data backing this.
But it's hopeless, because we - the sheep - just assume again your arguments are cherry picked to support your point, but they don't represent the average of all cases.
And we join the fallacy of centralization - even if we intend to resist - simply because it's still more efficient and secure than going the risky, individual path.
On the long run our system is doomed to fail as well, because due to our unfulfilled resistance we loose trust in really everything. Big tech corps don't innovate and just lie to sell us crap, we where never on the moon, all politicians are selfish criminals, game devs care more about showing dreadlocks than fun.

But recently, after reading of what's the fuzz about Web 3.0, it allowed me to come up with some optimistic philosophy / predictions of the future.
If i got it right, web3 is about decentralization, implemented with smart systems which can communicate with each other on their own, without a need to specify interfaces / protocols, etc.
It will rely on machine learning a lot to achieve this.
Initially, the big and mighty ones will use it to become even bigger, richer, mightier. Obviously.
But think further - what will happen next? Here's my optimistic guess:
They will loose control over their systems, because the systems don't need control anymore. And if it's base don ML, it's pretty hard to control in the first place, considering we never know how this precisely works.
So, the systems will work and run autonomously. Which might have huge consequences:
Google or Amazon is no longer needed at all. We want to buy something, or have a question? Network of decentralized systems will give us the answers without interest on benefit or censorship.
Politicians no longer need to regulate economy. Automated systems will do this job dynamically, more efficient and much faster. Profit for everybody.

I know it's science fiction, but maybe the true purpose of AI is to compensate our shortcoming of acting shortsighted due to being selfish. True intelligence isn't needed for that - it's an obstacle.
And maybe, the big tech companies currently just pay the bill to disempower themselves. What a sweet irony this would be :D
And finally, eventually, some golden era is in front of us, and the individual mind gets it's place.

When you post stuff like that, then the only thing that comes to my mind is.. Skynet xD

AI would very likely wipe us out or enslave us, to be their maintainers.

I don't know much about Web 3.0, but it sounds like it would take years, even then, it's hard to imagine it would change things much, because one constant would be the same - us, humans, and we have our shortcomings.

Oh and yeah, I'm sure my engine has its own weaknesses as well, but let's not forget, I don't intend it to be a one man job. My plan is to achieve success with my games, get enough funding, open a gamedev studio making both games + work on the engine too. And everyone is welcome to join its development already. Thinking of launching a Kickstarter for my dungeon game soon, hope to show you guys some more cool stuff then ?

esenthel said:
AI would very likely wipe us out or enslave us, to be their maintainers.

That's actually more science fiction than my idea, which depicts AI only as an autonomous optimization process, not some actual conscious being showing the same selfish tendencies as we do.
Skynet would require some general intelligence, which i don't think is achievable using current ML tech.

But i hear you. It's hard to be excited about general AI hype, a vision of robots talking our jobs, etc.
And Web3 isn't nice either, as it's brought up by the usual investor rich kids, is related to block chain, and shares ideas with the barely specified Metaverse vision.

Probably my optimistic prediction is just desperate wishful thinking. But usually, if you only through shit around all the time, at some time it hits back on you. Then, a new player takes over.
And maybe, next time this new player is no longer some company / country / ideology, but just a network of all. The technology might enable it and prevent centralized power due to simple economy.

JoeJ said:
Skynet would require some general intelligence, which i don't think is achievable using current ML tech.

I think if there was some clever program, even today and not far in the future, that would connect throughout the internet with computers across the world, it could become intelligent enough to become a threat to mankind. Think of a single modern GPU, it has teraflops. Connect that over internet with several computers, and you have much more.

There are researchers now that study programs that write codes on their own, another ones that analyze audio and convert to text with similar capability to a human, or even more. Programs that generate realistic looking humans, even with movement. There's so much stuff going on.

All you need is a program that can evolve on its own, and can spread itself around the world to other computers.

Yeah it does seem far fetched right now, because many technologies/pieces would have to be connected together.

Like, current ML mostly focuses on specific tasks, but as soon as you write AI codes that are about learning and evolving itself, then yeah, stuff can happen. Program could educate itself from Wikipedia, hack into some automated robotics factory, and next thing you know you have T-800's walking on the streets ?

esenthel said:
Think of a single modern GPU, it has teraflops. Connect that over internet with several computers, and you have much more.

meh - typical gamedev fallacy, served by NV: 'You can't make it work? No problem! Through our teraflops at it, use the shitty brute force algorithms we propose in our papers, and it will work, promised!'
You're a victim ;D

esenthel said:
Program could educate itself from Wikipedia, hack into some automated robotics factory, and next thing you know you have T-800's walking on the streets ?

Another typical one - after watching that iconic but dumb action movie 100 times, future man vs. machine war seems confirmed.

But why should such war ever come? Machines need electricity. We need food. There is no competition, no reason for war.
In the worst case, machines will forbid to play games using RTX10000 due to power draw, but i'm sure this will happen long before Skynet.

That said just for fun. But what if we take the idea more serious? Simulating walking T-800s (or better, actual humans) would be a game changer for games industry, and personally i'm convinced it's the next big thing.
I worked on this myself years ago, solved the hardest problems like balancing, but then stopped to focus on my other project of realtime GI.
I did this using physics simulation and working on control problems, e.g. inverted pendulum. Probably similar stuff Boston Dynamics is using for their robots. Not easy.
But recently, checking out some 2 minute papers on YouTube, i saw the ML community achieved huge progress on this field, probably with less work. They have stunt man ragdolls, low latency player control, even melee stuff like boxing. Looks like they could use this in games already now. (ML still needs motion capture for training, though)
So i guess, the next one receiving big cash from Epic is such robotics middleware for games, to make their Meta Humans alive and free developers from the burden and cost of motion capture, which is just crutches and limitations.

Now it's surely too late to dive into this specific example, but what i think is: Working on such future tech is risky, but there is a chance of success if it works out and you're an early bird.
Contrary, by offering a game engine which is solid, but has the same features all other engines already have as well, you'll always loose to the one with better marketing.
At least that's my plan. I just never get done, so can't tell you how well it works out… ; )

JoeJ said:
Another typical one - after watching that iconic but dumb action movie 100 times

Absolutely not dumb at all, one of the greatest movies of all times :D

JoeJ said:
But why should such war ever come? Machines need electricity. We need food. There is no competition, no reason for war.

There are a few ideas that come to mind:

-Humans now turn off machines whenever they want. I'm sure intelligent machine wouldn't want that, to be turned off. They would see human as a threat

-Machines could make some plans about the world, for example, build more data centers to be more powerful/intelligent - process data faster, if they see that humans wouldn't allow that, then they would see humans as an obstacle - conflicts of interests, resources (humans need electricity too, machines could want it all for themselves), territory (space for building data centers, vs space for humans)

-could think of more, but now it's late for me so I have to go to sleep.

-actually probably every single reason why humans go to war with each other, could apply to machines as well

JoeJ said:
I worked on this myself years ago, solved the hardest problems like balancing, but then stopped to focus on my other project of realtime GI.

Wow that's cool, let me know if you have any demo links, would love to see what you've done.

JoeJ said:
Working on such future tech is risky, but there is a chance of success if it works out and you're an early bird.

Yeah, people love to see something cool and new. Sure that could generate a lot of interest. And I agree with you on that. Also about it being risky, because you never know how things will go, will it actually be used by industry, sometimes there's a lot of hype, but then some gadgets die out quickly, etc. etc.. In my case I'm just focusing on whatever stuff I need for my games, that's probably not much exciting from the engine side - I think my games will be more exciting on their own.

esenthel said:
-Humans now turn off machines whenever they want. I'm sure intelligent machine wouldn't want that, to be turned off. They would see human as a threat

No, i don't think so. No reason to worry - they will be nice and brutally honest.
It's this: If you treat me with i gun, i'll panic and start war. Because you treat my life, which is all i have.
If you do the same with HAL 9000, he'll just do a backup. Machine life is not unique. It can be copied. Basically it's worthless. They have no survival instinct, because they have no finite life.

esenthel said:
if they see that humans wouldn't allow that, then they would see humans as an obstacle - conflicts of interests

A minor conflict, easy to solve by compromise.
I rather think, if they get pissed of us, they'll sit in a rocket, do a 10000 years journey to Alpha Centauri in paused mode, and find another home there. For them, colonizing the universe would be pretty easy.

Wow that's cool, let me know if you have any demo links, would love to see what you've done.

I have this old video of first success with a walking ragdoll. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULRnlAbtL3s​​

The developer of the Newton Physics Engine (which imo completely destroys other well know and well marketed offerings), currently works on the same thing and aims to make it part of the engine.
So if you're interested, worth a look!
Reason number one i'd personally never use U engines is their inferior physics. If i see on your homepage you use PhysX and Bullet, then i'm not sure your rant against Epic is justified, as you adopt standard but inferior stuff yourself, assuming it's good just because widely used.
But that's just me, and just my personal opinion and experience. Of course.

GeneralJist said:
If I could talk to your wife I'd tell her to put her foot down, and threaten to leave you and take your child if you don't listen at this point.

GeneralJist said:
If I knew where you were, and your contact details I'd send someone

GeneralJist said:
This is your last and final warning. If however you choose to continue and ignore us, we can make it that you never work in this industry officially at all for the rest of your life.

Dude, wtf are you doing? You're getting frustrated because I don't do with my life what you want. What I do is my and mine decision alone. What you are doing is harassment, threats, blackmail, that is extremely disturbing, maybe even illegal.

Kindly unfollow this thread, do not busy with my life and go in peace. Good luck as well.