gamingislove

So, by now most of you will have heard about Unity's new pricing plans and the huge uproar that caused, and you might be wondering what this means for ORK's future.

Even if Unity completely walks back those plans or changes them to a less idiotic metric, this is a huge break of trust for many developers and will most likely lead to a somewhat big shift in userbase from Unity to other engines. As you know, ORK is currently only available for Unity, so this naturally also affects me a lot - if the market breaks down, I can't make a living off of my products ... and I like to eat sometimes :D


So, what does this mean for ORK's future?


1) Unity support is not going away.
ORK's still available for Unity and will remain so, including regular updates, support, tutorials, etc.
So, you don't have to worry that your projects will no longer be viable with ORK.


2) ORK will support other game engines in the future.
I had long-term plans for this (a few years from now), but I'll now have to get to work on this immediately.

This'll naturally have an impact on ORK's updates for some time. I'll cut development on ORK 3.16 a bit short and release it later this week - it's already a pretty massive update with over 100 new features, changes and fixes and a huge boost to the status system (see this thread for information).
Updates will be a bit smaller and take a bit longer after ORK 3.16, at least until early 2024.

Meanwhile, I'll be working on separating engine-specific functionality from ORK's functionality to make swapping out game engines a lot easier. I'll focus on game engines with C# support for now, e.g. engines like Godot, Stride or Unigine. Feel free to request other engine support.
I hope I'll be able to start support for other engines early 2024, but there's still a lot to consider and learn about all of those new engines.

Support for Unreal will take some time - since I'll have to port the whole framework over to C++ this is a monumental task and will probably take at least a year.


I'm actually pretty excited for this new chapter of ORK's already pretty long development, and I hope so are you, wherever your future projects might take you :)

Acissathar

Looking forward to it :) In my preliminary searching during this whole ordeal over the weekend, ORK still looks to be unmatched in just the sheer scope and design that can be accomplished.

Flax is another Unity-like C# engine too for what it’s worth, albeit a smaller user base like Stride.

Personally I have no preference, just having options alone is great to me.

Edit: Getting ahead of myself, would separating the ORK specific stuff from the engine specific stuff, in theory allow for a migration tool between engines (or if ORK uses it's own data format, just copy/paste)?

Dre788

More options are always good. I'm still waiting to see how this whole thing plays out. Regardless, I'll be releasing my project. Any future projects are still to be decided. I'll continue to support Ork and GIL.

Mino

Thank you for the positive information. I was quite surprised by Unigine. Do you think it will be difficult to rewrite it for other engines? I just feel that writing a plugin for 3 engine is a tedious activity. I think about it as a future Unigine engine.. I did not know that ORK is written separately. Anyway, I look forward to more information. Good luck to you

supportreport1

At this point I'm more committed to ORK than engine, I'll continue to support you throughout it all. I appreciate your transparency and forward thinking on this. Looking forward to the future.

omeegaa

GIL you are the ultimate G.O.A.T ^^
Your work is unmatched and I want you to know that.
Offering multiple options for the engines is HUGE ! At the moment I'm stuck with Unity,my projects are too much advanced + I bought so much asset in the Unity store and not sure I can port them on another engine properly.

But.... I can't wait to see how this will going on :)
Especially on UNREAL.ORK Framework in UNREAL is my dream as dev right now ^^

You have my unlimited support for this new journey :)

Monkey_A_C

Thank you so much for the information GIL.

I am still curious if you plan to keep your Unitys ORK support as the main task/project?
I believe that working on ORK is a full time job anyway - so i can imagine that splitting the focus on multiple engines could be an overwhelming task to do...!?
Seeing how active this forum here is it seems like a unbelivable huge challange to do the same for more engines ;D
Anyway - as other people said before - i will keep supporting you and looking forward to the hopefully bright future! Keep up the GREAT work.

Nory

ORK is one of the big reasons why I came back from Unreal, and it has been nothing but good to me ever since. I'll also stick with Unity for the next couple of years, but I'm super duper excited about the prospect of a fleshed out RPG Framework both in Godot & Unreal.

Namey

You're the best

BoostG

Ork framework in unreal engine would be excellent, there’s really not much that compares there. It would be awesome if it was more straightforward than expected and we could move to it next year

Bantichai

Appreciate all the hard work you've done over these years and also the help you have given me personally especially over these past few months. I'll do my best to support you and this great framework you have created!

gamingislove

Thanks everyone :)

My plan would be to stick with ORK's custom data format, so switching your ORK project to other engins should be possible - but can't 100% guarantee that for each engine.

On the technical side, I'll build an abstraction layer between ORK and whatever engine is used. In theory that should make it possible to switch out engines without much work on ORK's core functionality. Naturally, there are a lot of engine-specific features that need to be accounted for, e.g. UI systems or all the various nodes available in schematics will have to be separate per engine.

If this works out, having ORK for multiple engines should be pretty easy - but I might not be able to get you the same level of support in the forum for other engines, since I've got years of experience in Unity and 0 in e.g. Godot or Flax :D

RustedGames

@gamingislove count with my support for Unreal Engine port

Xavi

This is really relieving to hear! My biggest concern upon hearing the news was how much time i've spent working in and learning ORK and just assumed i'd have to start from scratch. Hearing you'll port to Godot and other C# engines makes the worst case scenario way more bearable even if i'll still have to make all the transitions from Ork2 to Ork3 :D

Jikiyal

Awesome news! I would gladly buy Ork again if it means I can get away from Unity. Excited for the future!

Mino

Hello. If you rebuilding the ORK plugin to Godot, it will include the makinom plugin ?