[stuckinhell]

I've been seeing a ton of game engines on hackernews in the last couple days.

I think many hobby game developers don't realize the astounding important of designer oriented tools. Even most game companies have coders create designer oriented gui tools for games to be more productive.

Whatever open source engine cracks an easy 3d player controller, dialogue system, human retargeted animation system, and easy editor extensions will KILL the competition asap.

[flohofwoe]

What's really missing is one (or multiple) open source "bring your own engine and asset pipeline" editor tool(s).

Game editors have pretty much all arrived at the Unity scene model and editor workflow (game object outliner to the left, scene view in the middle, property panel on the right, asset browser at the bottom, plus floating panels for things like animations, material definitions, game specific data, or anything else really - everything needs to be extensible through scripting).

The Unity Editor and asset pipeline is hackable enough to use it as editor for another engine, I did that in the past as "proof of concept" and it definitely works, but is most likely a legal minefield.

Blender is also definitely hackable enough to serve that role (see: https://armory3d.org/) (again I did something similar in the past with Maya, it kinda works, but this wasn't very popular with artists because they were overwhelmed by the unfamiliar and complex Maya UI).

PS: the Defold examples page is actually really cool, with realtime examples running in the browser:

https://defold.com/examples/animation/spine/

[raincole]

> I did that in the past as "proof of concept" and it definitely works, but is most likely a legal minefield.

I really wonder how dangerous it is legally. I'm already been (slowly) writing a rust tool to convert some Unity .meta for bevy engine before the Unity pricing crisis.

[meheleventyone]

Something language server-esque could be really cool as well as a means of exposing the engine and pipeline to the editor.

[OnionBlender]

What about Wicked Engine?

- https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine - https://wickedengine.net/

The first video on Steam seems to show a dialog system.

- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1967460/Wicked_Engine/

(How are you supposed to create lists in hacker news comments?)

[raincole]

> 3d player controller,

Unity has no this built-in.

> dialogue system,

Neither.

> human retargeted animation system

Unity has a built-on one but it's shitty.

[stuckinhell]

Yea most indies buy these assets from the unity store.

If a new game engine emerged with these, they could take most of unity's market share without needing an asset store of their own.

[swalsh]

I'm waiting for an editor aimed at the programmer. I really dislike unity.