Unity's Licensing Changes: Discover Stride a Community-Driven Open-Source Engine

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • Awesome-Stride

    Awesome resources for the fully open source Stride game engine.

  • Unfortunately, this is yet another open source game engine with too small a user base. Here's the "made with Stride" list.[1]

    A few days ago, there was a long discussion of the problems of Rust game development. There just aren't enough games per engine to get the heavy machinery shaken down properly.

    [1] https://github.com/Doprez/Awesome-Stride#made-with-stride

  • jMonkeyEngine

    A complete 3-D game development suite written in Java.

  • > Unfortunately, this is yet another open source game engine with too small a user base.

    I wonder why some engines are seemingly destined for success and others... aren't.

    Godot got really big, despite a somewhat similar feature set: https://godotengine.org/ (really nice 2D support, 3D rendering was worse until version 4, GDScript has both a nice iteration speed but also has gotten some criticism, while C# was a second class citizen in the earlier iterations)

    Stride is really nice and seemed like it should have been the Unity replacement that people would look at, if it had gotten more attention and a community would have formed around it, like Godot's.

    There's also NeoAxis which is way more Windows centric, but still seems to be getting updates and is comparatively easy to use, yet similarly never got popular: https://www.neoaxis.com/

    Weirder yet, Java doesn't really have that many game engines out there, at least the likes of Unity/NeoAxis/Stride that have nice editors, despite the language being pretty nice. The closest I can think of is jMonkeyEngine which I donated some money in the past to, which is pretty usable but similarly niche: https://jmonkeyengine.org/

    I occasionally watch videos on the Gamefromscratch YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@gamefromscratch/videos) and it surprises me that there are so many engines out there, but very few actually are in the public eye. If you don't go out of your way to look for other options, you will most likely only have heard of Unity and Unreal (or maybe also Godot in recent years). I wonder why that is.

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  • Godot

    Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine

  • > Unfortunately, this is yet another open source game engine with too small a user base.

    I wonder why some engines are seemingly destined for success and others... aren't.

    Godot got really big, despite a somewhat similar feature set: https://godotengine.org/ (really nice 2D support, 3D rendering was worse until version 4, GDScript has both a nice iteration speed but also has gotten some criticism, while C# was a second class citizen in the earlier iterations)

    Stride is really nice and seemed like it should have been the Unity replacement that people would look at, if it had gotten more attention and a community would have formed around it, like Godot's.

    There's also NeoAxis which is way more Windows centric, but still seems to be getting updates and is comparatively easy to use, yet similarly never got popular: https://www.neoaxis.com/

    Weirder yet, Java doesn't really have that many game engines out there, at least the likes of Unity/NeoAxis/Stride that have nice editors, despite the language being pretty nice. The closest I can think of is jMonkeyEngine which I donated some money in the past to, which is pretty usable but similarly niche: https://jmonkeyengine.org/

    I occasionally watch videos on the Gamefromscratch YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@gamefromscratch/videos) and it surprises me that there are so many engines out there, but very few actually are in the public eye. If you don't go out of your way to look for other options, you will most likely only have heard of Unity and Unreal (or maybe also Godot in recent years). I wonder why that is.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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