A few years ago, as someone who has worked on physics engines for robotics simulations, I would have agreed with you. But now a lot of people are doing greenfield physics engines for games and having it work out pretty well. There's a ton of established academic and conference literature in the area now and it's not nearly as scary as it used to be.
For example, Horizon: Forbidden West uses a custom physics engine that started out as one of the core dev's fun side projects: https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics
Physics engines (at least game quality physics engines) are starting to drift in to "solved problem" territory and there's enough literature now that you can get something reasonable going yourself after doing some weekend reading.
Edit to add: Godot has had its own engine available for a long time, so it's not a totally new effort. It's a heavy refactor and a large improvement but the bones for this were laid years ago so some of that technical debt you're describing has already been paid down.
I've briefly looked into physics engines and they seem to require a lot of trade-offs. If a rock meets a hard place, what should happen? Gamers have seen the hilarity that can ensue. Designing your own engine allows you to make those trade-offs with the end goal in mind. You can do things like set global force or speed limits, because you know your game's design and the appropriate limits.
Lots of simulators for robotics use ODE or Bullet, actually, and they're quite good for lots of things that you might want to simulate. But there are some people who would argue that they aren't the best for it, especially for simulating legged locomotion, because of the way physical constraints such as joint limits are enforced (via Lagrange multipliers). A popular alternative formulation is Featherstone's Method[1], which is becoming more widely available and goes by other names sometimes; for example, Rust's `rapier` physics engine refers to this type of dynamics model as "reduced coordinates" (they don't yet support it, but it's on their roadmap). Featherstone's method is becoming more popular but it's still not widely used in a lot of physics engines because most physics engines are targeting games and Featherstone's doesn't always have the best performance characteristics, instead favoring physical fidelity. Bullet can run using Featherstone's Method, by the way. One of the few FOSS engines I know of that supports it out of the box.
Additionally, there are people in robotics who like to say that simulators are like lightsabers, you haven't become a true Jedi until you've built your own, so there's a lot of home grown physics simulators in robotics.
W4 Games's CEO Juan Linietsky is the creator and lead dev of Godot. Their primary mission, from my understanding, is providing the non-open-source tooling and support that's needed to make it feasible to use Godot as an environment for developing console games. The SDK's and their APIs cannot be included in the FOSS Godot code directly.
Often time folks say that what Godot is missing is a "killer app" that shows that the platform is viable. I think that this could potentially go a long way towards that.
I'm not sure it counts as a "killer app" since Unity and Unreal both have this feature already, but it's definitely another exciting step towards parity
By "killer app" I meant a really amazing game made with the engine that makes people stand up and say "oh hey Godot is legit".
Being a viable console target will attract more creators and increase the chances of that happening. As laid out in the blog post from my original comment, while Steam is a hotbed for indie games most of them toil in obscurity. Most of the money in indie games is on consoles now.
To me Godot became legit with version 3 adding physically based rendering like everyone else. But arguably there is one AAA game, the Sonic Colors: Ultimate remaster. Sure the studio modified Godot to some extent (but reportedly not enough to prevent e.g. scene loading in stock Godot 3) and they also did whatever was needed to port to the Switch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-RnhgZCqn4), PS4, and Xbox (4k@60hz) but a nice looking 3D game from a big franchise sounds legit enough to me. The creator of Godot was surprised though because he's intimately familiar with 3's limitations, but 4 is about done and is better in pretty much every way so maybe we'll see more of that sort of thing, and possibly with stock Godot. He did speculate that one reason Godot can be attractive for certain studios working on a franchise with an almost guaranteed minimum of sales is that it's one less thing to have a license fee for. Unreal Engine is amazing, but if you expect to gross over $1m, is 5% of your revenue each quarter forever afterwards worth it? It's not a straightforward question, but just 1.025 million units at $40 is a $2m fee, could you use that $2m to hire developers to patch up whatever shortcomings in Godot you actually need for your game and still ship on time? Or create a custom engine, as still happens occasionally?
It's also intimidating to people who have been using it for a long time as well.
The proliferation of new features some of which compete with each other, and the lack of focus and polish on some of those features make it frustrating to stay current.
That coupled with some questionable business partners and tone deaf comments by their leadership team has certainly piqued my interest in other platforms.
Yeah the IronSource acquisition and the background and statements by its CEO makes me really question the long term prospects of Unity. Which is a shame because they're doing some good stuff on the tech side and have a solid engineering team.
Clicking on "Licensing Information" and drilling down a few more links gets to the meat of what this is[1] (TL;DR: It's an archive of a Creative Commons licensed edition of an undergrad college text book. For those wondering who the target audience is: undergrads):
> What is this?
> First off, this is not the website for the original publisher. Instead, this is the archive of a small project by aschmitz to archive Creative Commons-licensed copies of all the books which were available online from a specific publisher at the end of 2012. (That publisher has asked to remain unnamed here. For more information, see the attribution page.)
> That publisher is a textbook publisher, focusing on (mostly entry-level) college textbooks. From their beginning until the end of 2012, they licensed all of their books under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 license, allowing anyone who so desired to copy them, give them away, or modify them, as long as they acknowledged the authors, released the copies under the same license, and didn't do so for commercial gain. This was an unusual model, but they hoped it would work. (They sold access to additional study materials, as well as copies of books that would fit well on e-readers.)
> In late 2012, they decided that the process of giving away access to their textbooks online wasn't working, and decided to switch to a different model, requiring students to pay for access to the books starting in 2013. (At least initially, these fees ware rather cheap compared to normal textbook prices, but still not free.)
> Because the books were still available under a Creative Commons license at the end of 2012, I downloaded them to have copies known to be available under a Creative Commons license. I then repackaged them so that they are available outside of the publisher's website, and can be used by anyone under the terms of their Creative Commons license.
They're specifically talking about a CIA textbook (Culinary Institute of America) which has a bit more structure and consistency in their recipes as its used in culinary school curricula.
Have they actually said that it doesn't work with transmitters? I'm trying to find out myself but the "dive computer" functionality comes from an app made by Huish/Oceanic; it might be able to talk to Oceanic transmitters. Dive logs and stuff are in fact available in the companion iOS app.
Looking at the FAQs they seem to know their business.
Q: Can I provide my own wood?
A: In most cases we can handle your wood. We do require all shipments to be clean, free of parasites and pass all standard customs inspections.
Personally I'm really happy to see a commercial entity with a FOSS offering that's protecting their revenue using AGPL instead of these new "open source eventually" business licenses. Don't get discouraged. For everyone that would complain about this license choice there are just as many of us who celebrate it.
I am actually no longer working for Meta. I do think the title reflects the news and is factually correct. But happy for @dang to change it back as it’s not exactly the title of the article
Ideally the submission title would have matched the blog title and then not only would it have been factually correct but it would have also not had any omissions. It seems disingenuous to me to post a submission with that title knowing how unpopular the FB account requirement is in this circle while tacitly omitting the fact that a Meta account is going to be required. It might not have been your intent but it did come across as suspicious and as it is it comes across as a Lie of Omission.
It does not reflect the news accurately. Very few people here distinguish between "Meta" and "Facebook". An account is still required to use the device, and that account is still owned by Meta/Facebook.
(As an aside, you should probably update your HN profile, it still reads "Now VP of AI at Facebook.")
Editorializing titles has become completely standard and I rarely see them fixed anymore despite the comments. Of course others also post editorialized titles when they see it happening daily on the front page.
Oh get over it, your hate for FB is noted. The title is accurate, the information is news, and IMO HN users are smart enough to know what a PR release is when they read it.
What are you worried about? That folks will walk this earth thinking you have to use a Meta account instead of a Facebook account to log into your VR app?
The post was posted by a (edit: recently ex-) VP at Facebook, and the posted title, while strictly accurate, doesn't mention that there's a brand new account type that you need to have. I read this at first as "I can finally buy a VR headset and use it as regular hardware", not "FB is still going to track my usage, just under their new name".
"Introducing Meta Accounts: A New Login for VR" is the actual title, and should be used instead of this one.
There's user accounts for almost every software business out there that has any form of online component. You have a user account on this very site. I don't get the complaint.
The complaint is that many people don't trust Facebook (or Meta or whatever they change their name to tomorrow) and don't want a _Facebook_ account. The title implies that their needs will be met: that they will be able to buy Oculus hardware without having to interact with Facebook's data-gathering. But that's a lie: they are just rebranding the name of the login system, not actually changing anything.
The title (currently "A Facebook account is no longer required to use Meta VR devices (oculus.com)" which is not the title of the article) is specifically written to get the attention of that Facebook-distrusting group and in that way is explicitly and I believe intentionally misleading.
Yea, requiring an online account to use a head mounted display makes as much sense as requiring an online account to use a monitor.
Sure, require an account to do purchases through their online store, that makes sense. But why on earth do you need an account to use an unconnected piece of hardware? I don't need to log in to an account to use my monitor, mouse, keyboard, or joystick.
EDIT, answering my own question:
The only reason these accounts are required is that Facebook wants to pretend Oculus is not just the HMD but also the whole "ecosystem" including the store, their toxic social media properties, and their ridiculous metaverse. I don't buy into this fantasy of theirs, and will never buy another Oculus until they are treated as dumb displays.
I do miss the days when I could buy hardware (or appliances, for that matter) and just use it as hardware, without signing into it. I miss not having everything have a mandatory online presence.
But the bigger issue here is that this account is owned by the company formerly known as Facebook, and that company has given me absolutely zero reason to trust them with any data whatsoever. I don't mind having a Steam account, because Valve hasn't had scandal after scandal of them abusing user data in egregious ways.
>Valve hasn't had scandal after scandal of them abusing user data in egregious ways.
Any real examples? Scandal after scandal implies there should be many, but in recent memory I can't think of FB directly abusing user data besides it being repeated as truth on HN.
For example, Horizon: Forbidden West uses a custom physics engine that started out as one of the core dev's fun side projects: https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics
Physics engines (at least game quality physics engines) are starting to drift in to "solved problem" territory and there's enough literature now that you can get something reasonable going yourself after doing some weekend reading.
Edit to add: Godot has had its own engine available for a long time, so it's not a totally new effort. It's a heavy refactor and a large improvement but the bones for this were laid years ago so some of that technical debt you're describing has already been paid down.