meganoth
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Posts posted by meganoth
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12 minutes ago, Gamida said:
Did they say for every install or just the initial install when game is first bought? If every install imagine how much it would have cost the fun pimps over the years just for me.
At 20¢ a pop it might have cost them more than I paid for the game the amount of times I have installed the game since 2015 when I bought it.
Initially they wanted to be payed for reinstalls, but this was the first thing they dropped (or adapted) when the protests started. A lot of details are also missing, I think they just announced a general plan and wanted to see what they can get away with and work out the details later.
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You can find the opinion of TFP about the huge perk boni to magazine drop chance here:
12 hours ago, OneManStanding said:If the Pimps wanted to lengthen the early stage of the game, couldn't they just give you more to perk into...?
In most cases there are more than one reason and IMHO the one you mention is far from the top one for this change.
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Better now. One thing that is still very problematic is that they still want to get payed per installation. And the mention of monitoring means that Unity actually wants their library to phone home. Problem number one.
Developers who don't want their players tracked could theoretically self-report, but how can they find out the numbers without tracking themselves ? Would Unity accept unsubstantiated estimates taken from the number of sales? Does Unity expect the developers also to pay for pirated game installations?
And we will never find out if this retraction from the original scheme was planned all along so developers would accept the current rules more readily.
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1 hour ago, FramFramson said:
We don't know that. The BIGGEST players using the Unity engine are ones with huge legal departments - Disney's law firm for example is actually an entire subsidiary company which may be larger than Unity's entire business.
Just because we haven't heard any public comments from Disney, Nintendo, etc. doesn't mean their lawyers haven't been sending strongly-worded (and strongly-backed) letters and inquiries to Unity.
And exactly because they have such large law firms I am pretty sure they did not enter a state of panic. They just let loose some lawyers to deal with that.
And if there were any dubious language in Unity's contracts that would allow changing costs for already published games they would not have used Unity in the first place because they have the manpower to check every contract they sign. So I am pretty sure Disneys lawyers think they would win in court if Unity tries to get money from them for old games.
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A german games magazine did ask a lawyer now. To summarize: Changing the rules on already published games is only possible if the "specific rules of changing" are already a part of the contract and don't constitute unfair practices. Since it is highly unlikely that such terms would be already included in old contracts that Untiy used up to now, games companies would have excellent chances in courts. Also, since Unity has a dominant market position together with Epic (oligopoly) this would even bring antitrust authorities into action.
And at least in Europe getting the relevant data for their installation estimations would be either expensive or impossible with current privacy laws.
In other news: Unity pedaled back and said it would rethink their approach. Needless to say they want and probably need to increase prices somehow. We'll see what they come up with, but I think they have got a lot of bugs reports for their current plan 😉
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Hehe, just read one of the best replies, from Mega Crit the slay the spire developer: ""we have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you @%$#ed up."
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10 minutes ago, Tom Stephens said:
Maybe not "unreliable", maybe actually untrustworthy.
The install fees in some form are understandable, from a certain point of view. And maybe there were smarter ways to raise revenue. But surreptitiously back-editing away past promises in their TOS indicates they knew they were doing something of dubious character, because the back-editing itself is of such character. And I still have to learn more about their association with advertising and gambling (avarice and vice?).
The other thing I've seen attend such behavior in my 60 years is collapse. When companies (especially smaller ones, but not just) are close to failing, they do some odd things. Sometimes prosecutable things.
One thing that's on my mind is how this will affect modding the game. I notice some use Unity assets. I also notice mods can double the life of a game. What wins out here?
Once the company folds either their property is bought up or a bankruptcy court takes over. In both cases whoever calls the shots wants to get money flowing again. He can only get money out of unity code and asset store if he gives game developers and modders a chance to actually use them.
AFAIK most of the assets in an asset store are not property of Unity anyway, they just operate the store. So I don't see a reason why a bought asset would suddenly not be usable anymore.
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9 minutes ago, BFT2020 said:
True, but we are already seeing responses to this business model change. Some developers have already started looking into the process of moving to Unreal with their current game developments, others have stated that future games will be moved towards Unreal, and some have even as gone as far as removing the Unity Ad framework from their games.
Unity may make some initial money with this change (based on what the lawyers hash out), but I think this will end up biting them in the rear in the long run; especially for developers that are currently working on games and won't be able to release it prior to January 2024.
Note that the most severe reactions come from developers with millions of free-to-play smartphone installs where the bussiness model is to give out the game to the whole world and let a small percentage of players pay. A fee per installation is poison for such a model and it is no surprise that those developers have immediately launched every available ICBM 😉.
Other developers are just not hit that hard that they would enter a state of panic.
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12 hours ago, FramFramson said:
Opinions are one thing, but internal consistency is another. Sometimes it feels like the game just cannot decide if it's 7 Days After or Mad Max.
A lot of this has to do with the deliberate ambiguity of how long ago the apocalypse took place (and how bad was it - we know some areas are safe enough that they send airdrops to affected zones, and that those airdrops never stop). Shops have been looted and some buildings destroyed but nothing's picked clean and most buildings are largely intact. There's even still gas in gas pumps and cars and you can still find unrotted produce once in a while!
Some of the Mad Max-y outfits can work in a 7 Days After-type situation, but some of them are a stretch. Building weird Mad Max cars feels bizarre when the streets are littered with innumerable regular cars, many of which are almost entirely intact (incidentally, this is why I'm really hoping we see Vehicle Madness resurrected soon. Honestly the vanilla vehicle system should already involve restoring ordinary wrecks as it is).
Ultimately it seems like the devs themselves never really decided on a time period, which means different teams or individuals are going for whatever look they're interested in without any of it necessarily being consistent within the game world.
EDIT: My personal take based on the environment is that we're looking at anywhere from a couple months to MAYBE a couple years - no more than 4 or 5. There's room for weird stuff in a world like that, but there should still be more "normal" than "weird" in a situation like that, in the same sense that among the buildings and towns and cars and streets, there's far more "normal" than there is "weird". Having goofy outfits is fine as long as there's still normal clothes - plain pants, boots, shirts, etc. - too.
There are hundreds of games where most or all of the buildings are impenetrable blocks you can't step into. Those buildings are effectively decoration just like the cars in 7D2D. There are racing games where you can't even leave your car or leave the racing track. All you see around is decoration.
So yes, the cars are just there in 7D2D as scrap heaps and probably they will never move in vanilla and at the same time this will never be explained.
Similarily you will never brew a coffee in any of the coffee machines standing around or turn on any of the computers. At some level of detail the simulation ends and the "game" with its artifical rules starts.
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5 hours ago, FinkPloyd said:
The pricing for pro and enterprise is based on installs per month, Enterprise is between US$0.125 for under 100K to US$0.01 for > 1 mill (Pro is more expensive).
Depending on how the 'installs per month' is estimated by Unity it could cost TFP an extra US$10k per release.
That might have an affect on new releases / updates.
I would consider 10k as marginal for a developer like TFP. Any one of their employees costs them 4 to 10 times as much each year. It will not prevent them from doing releases they consider neccessary. Furthermore Unity already seemed to have backed off from charging for reinstalls (though nothing is set in stone yet it seems). And normally patching a game does not count as reinstall anyway.
Again, Unity's move is about getting some more money, but they know they have to keep the games developers operating if they want to earn money from them. They want a bigger slice of the cake but they know they can't have all the cake and still have customers as well.
5 hours ago, FinkPloyd said:As a dev I would be very annoyed that a 3rd party vendor I had committed to was changing the billing so dramatically years into the SDLC, without any way to avoid the increase and without accurate accounting of the new billing charges.
You can bet everyone of their customers is annoyed that they suddenly have to pay new unexpected charges. But you don't operate a successful bussiness by holding grudges and doing fights to the death. You may reduce dealings to a minimum with companies that prove unreliable and ask a lawyer what options you have in court. You surely will check your options what is the most cost effective way to still do what you want. And you will take that option even if it means continued dealings with that unreliable company.
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In our last game the first 3 of our >15 dew collectors were standing openly in the driveway of our residential home-turned-crafting base. Nothing around them at all, the screamer spike traps were all directly on the house walls. In about 50-60 days of playing not one of them got destroyed.
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8 hours ago, Tom Stephens said:
Agreed, to some extent. I think the word "boycott" is a distraction. The problem is, where does a game fit in your priorities if you suspect it has no future?
I had problems understanding your position because with "future" I thought you meant something like upwards of 2 years from now. But I just realized you probably meant something like "Can I still continue my game in 4 months when I start a new world now?"
Well, I can't forsee the future, but:
* TFP is definitely in Unity's pro or enterprise support, so they will pay much less than the 20 cent per installation.
* Even with a cash grab like that nobody in his sane mind would try to (immediately) kill the geese that are laying the golden eggs for them. So while this move may possibly kill off very small indie studios or some other special cases where a high charge because of many installs meets low cash reserves (small smartphone game developers are probably one of the corner cases), the charges are surely set up so successful games have no difficulty paying those charges.
* If TFP had any reasons to believe selling the game would leave them no profit after deducing the Unity charges they could always as a last resort declare the game finished, i.e. release it, and stop selling of the game. But since they still want to sell new games they have to stay on the good side of the players, so they would not switch off the possibility to play the game. By making it "abandonware" they could then also prevent paying any charges to Unity. But this is only a worst case scenario.
And if I had to guess I would say any successful PC game developer (who is not creating free-to-play smartphone games) would be able to pay even the 20 cent charge per installation easily.
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1 hour ago, Tom Stephens said:
Well, this is weird. I'm having problems playing the game, now, partly because I don't know if it has a future. And I'm having this weird moral issue even looking at the game knowing what kind of creatures the owners of the engine are.
It would be nice to hear from TFP about this, how they plan to manage it. It could help.
( Note: I am not speaking for TFP)
But I want to mention that if you boycott this game (after already having bought it) because of what Unity does or because of the future, you are only punishing yourself, and maybe TFP a little. Nobody else will notice, especially not Unity.
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1 hour ago, Matt115 said:
It's objective bad design. There reasonable and unreasonable design - do normal thinking person would wear "geek outfit". No. Normal person would... wear normal clothes like this - Marauders | Days Gone Wiki | Fandom .
it's not 100 years later so people were totaly random stuff because can't undestand what was their point. Here world looks like nuked 5 years ago so people still should take "patterns" from prenuke times
I don't think it is objectively bad. When you see a preposterous machine in a mickey mouse comic then it fits. If you see the same preposterous machine Days gone it won't fit.
And you still assume 7D2D to be a different game than it really is and so you come to the wrong conclusions. The geek outfits fits perfectly with a world that has a night club called "Booby Trap" and a weapon mod for the baton that throws zombies 10 meters through the air.
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58 minutes ago, Laz Man said:
Not true. There are definitely post gold plans to add more content. From a level design aspect, we have brainstormed several interesting possible packs already.
Arizona? Let me think, .... the desert pack, desert pack 2, desert pack 3, ultimate cacti pack, desert pack 4
😁
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2 hours ago, Fanatical_Meat said:
Companies, particularly large companies want recurring revenue far more than one time revenue. Pricing as originally proposed allow them to become Qualcomm a company that holds multiple important patents that relate to networking and mobile devices. As of more than a decade ago they stopped doing anything meaningful and now live quite well off their recurring revenue. This is the goal.
Yes, "owning" some market section is practically the goal of most companies. And the patent system is one way to achieve that goal as it works by giving out monopolies.
But unless you have a monopoly on something really "unavoidable" you have a hard time just sitting there like a spider and waiting for the money rolling in.
Unity can hope to benefit from the long tail of sales of games already published (if their contracts with developers provide for this option), but if they want too much those developers can as a final option remove those games from the market.
Unless Unity finally settles on something reasonable for their customers, their customers will in one way or another cease to be their customers. I am sure Unity came out with this plan months before the actual start so they could feel the waters. We as outsiders to this have a hard time judging whether the 20 cent are irrelevant, reasonable or preposterous to most developers.
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24 minutes ago, beerfly said:
I like how meganoth explained it, but apart from that I think that the CEO of Unity have some past that doesn`t really corespondent with proper thinking and hope the guys out there sit on their butts and invent a brighter solution.
What I talk about is explained here :
Riccitiello. Yes, that name rings a bell. Maybe even a doomsday bell 😂
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6 hours ago, Gamida said:
I just watched a stream of Asmongold watching a stream of a game dev talking about it.
He mentions (the dev) a lot of points that seem to show it is not that good.
Some games are going to be charged retroactively from what he explained.
You mentioned you only installed 3 or 4 times so only .80 cents but with 10's of thousands or even up in the hundreds, that could add up quickly.
If I see the devs stream I will link it here.
Did the game dev explain what he heard from a lawyer? Or is he well educated in law? Just asking, just because he is a dev and posts on youtube, it doesn't make his "facts" any more accurate than what everyone here is knowing or not knowing.
Especially the retroactive thing is something that should not be possible in normal circumstances. So before we have hard evidence of it actually being true you should use occams razor and except the normal way of things, not the sensational way.
If Unity has been losing money with their current pay model then they need to do something about it. If your grocery store raises prices it isn't because he is a money grabbing monster but he may need to because he may have more costs as well. And you always need to compare prices to similar offers. Is unreal engine really cheaper or more bang for the buck even after such a raise?
The problematic thing about this is ONLY that they seem to be looking for a new pricing mechanism instead of simply raising prices and the mechanism they showed is very suspect in quite a few ways. I can only guess they think their current pricing model does not fit the actual usage pattern, so some developers are charged right or already too much, and others can use the engine successfully without having to pay a similar percentage.
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I am ambivalent about the change as it seems to me looking for honey in tree stumps is actually a losing strategy as I seem to get more than 5% infection by the time I find the next honey while searching for tree stumps. And in the first days I might find honey but die of starvation or thirst because I can't tend to other important task while searching.
So in my last games I have just played on like normal and waited for either trader stock/lucky quest reward of antibiotics or for my deteriorating health leading to death in one way or another.
One solution I could think of would be that the trader always has some antibiotics around but he wants 2000 dukes per pill.
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6 hours ago, Yukkuri said:
Unity has backed off a bit and now claims they will magically somehow figure out what is a reinstall versus what is a new install, but anyone with any technical knowledge knows they can't guarantee that, ESPECIALLY while also not tracking individual users as they claim they will not.
Further, no matter what magic they say they're going to implement with this, someone will find a way to spoof installs and bomb gamedevs with install charges.
Good point about the tracking. Theoretically they could make arrangements with licence platforms (i.e. steam, xbox, playstation store, ...) so that they report back total number of installations on a new device (and yes, the aforementioned platforms could track that easily), but the platforms will want to be payed for that service and it doesn't work with games distributed by GOG.
So their only possible route would be to either
1) track users, or
2) forbid distribution without tracking (on GOG, etc.) or
3) ignore the gog problem completely
1 and 2 will most certainly lead to @%$# storms and lots of developers dropping them.
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1 hour ago, FramFramson said:
I wouldn't worry about it yet, not least till the dust settles.
I think Unity is just @%$#ed at this point. They can walk back this entire proposal, but they can't walk back the intention behind it, and while existing games may find it impossible to port to a new engine, you can bet everyone will be remembering this come time to make the next game.More importantly, while everyone is focusing on what a huge blow this would be to indie devs, they're missing the big players affected by this. Just to name a few:
miHoYo/Cognosphere (Genshin Impact)
Nintendo/Niantic (Pokémon Go).
Disney (a bunch of stuff).
I hear those guys got lawyers, and not ordinary ones but Lawyers, with a capital LAW.
Or how about Unity's plan on how to deal with "install spam"? They actually didn't walk back those charges - not exactly. When asked this afternoon about users on Game Pass trying to financially obliterate a dev by installing millions of copies of a Unity game on Game Pass, Unity's reply was "oh, we'll just bill Microsoft for those installs". Yes, Microsoft.
This is the moment where the lawyers employed by Unity try to apply for an extended vacation so they aren't around when their boss tries to convert his announcements into legal documents 😁
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1 hour ago, pApA^LeGBa said:
I mean i have installed and uninstalled this game like 15 times already. And if the modders keep working after gold, there will be a ton of mods. A lot to explore and with that it´s highly possible that many people install and uninstall a few times.
I wrote my post AFTER the Unity guy already declared that installing and uninstalling would not cost again (see the link doughphunghus posted)
So we are only talking about parallel installations on **another device**. Another device is NOT another directory on the same harddisk, it is another hardware altogether (like PC and steam deck or two or more PCs). The only crux or problem here might be if a virtual machine can be faked as looking like a different device.
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Ok. The complaints about the section means you have been playing a newer version where apitokens and the other sections are part of the serveradmin.xml file and then moved back to an earlier versions.
Especially when you switch between major versions but sometimes also when you go **back** a few minor versions it could be beneficial to use the launcher to clean all configuration. It probably has nothing to do with your version not showing up, but who knows....?
Is your server on the same network as your client PC? If yes, some routers have problems if you connect from inside that net to the external router address. Do the other players who connect from outside your network also see no version information?
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* Essentially this is an issue between Unity and game companies using Unity, not endusers. If anyone doesn't buy a unity game anymore because of this he will hurt the game companies more than Unity. For future games lots of developers might switch to other engines if unity's price policy is too risky or too expensive for them. If they don't change then Unity may be right with their opinion that they didn't charge enough until now.
* Still, the announced policy sounds like their brains were clouded by illegal substances when Unity came up with that plan 😉. Or they knew they would get flak anyway and wanted something to backpedal from so the developers would think they achieved something in the end. Sort of like negotiations are always started with extreme positions so the middle ground everyone agrees to eventually is nearer to the wanted result.
* If anyone thinks TFP would switch to whatever engine for 7D2D, forget it. No matter how much it costs in licence fees, switching engines would almost surely cost more, and a lot more time. 7D2D will be released with Unity.
Also they surely have a Unity Pro subscription and will pay less than the .20 cent per installed game. Statistically most players will have the game installed only once, and even if someone installs the game on virtual machines to harm TFP it would be a drop in an ocean. And Unity can simply add a limit to the maximum installations per user that would have to be payed to make it impossible for an internet mob to perceptibly harm TFP through creating lots of parallel installations.
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Errors With Modifying the Loot from Zombies
in Discussion and Requests
Posted · Edited by meganoth (see edit history)
You can find the loot.xml that results from your xpath changes in your savegame in a directory called "ConfigsDump". By looking at this you can see whether everything was changed exactly as you expected it. Also by posting the changed code you make it easier for people here finding the mistake.
Pictures of logfiles are useless most of the time. For example if some of your lines could not be adapted to the original loot.xml this would be shown much earlier in the logfile. Please use pastebin for the logfile and link to that.