UPDATED 3.30PM BST: Dean Hall has explained more about his idea in an email exchange with Eurogamer, clarifying issues such as whether it uses or welcomes any form of generative AI, while offering some more strongly worded criticisms about Epic's Unreal engine and Unity.
Primarily, I wanted to clarify what Brutal's relationship was with generative AI, if any, because it's the tech topic of the moment and something both Epic and Unreal, and Unity, are all-in on. In this regard, Hall answered: "There is no generative AI inside it, no tooling or scripts for making generative AI assets. Anyone can see for themselves as the repository is public. The framework is a tool for putting a game or engine together, not for generating anything."
Hall then tackled generative AI more broadly, particularly as it relates to Unreal and Unity, and said he finds it "confusing" that both engines focus "so much effort" on it. They are human-centric workflows, as he calls them - presumably meaning designed to be easily digestible by humans. "What, specifically, is it about Unreal - which has long focused on visual scripting, blueprints, and such - that would make it good for AI work?" He asked. "If we take all the promises as true, why would a human-centric workflow without the human be better than a language-centric workflow provided to a language model?"
I don't understand some of that but the "inconsistency" bothers Hall. "Let's take their arguments as gospel and say that AI is the way for them," he went on. "What happens when the cost of making those very tools yourself is approaching zero? Why pay to work around someone else's enormous, human-centric workflow when you can increasingly make the exact tools you need? The technology they're embracing might actually be undermining the very reason developers needed them in the first place."
It reminds him of the dot-com era "when companies tried to slap a coat of paint on themselves and suddenly become internet companies". "Unity and Unreal may be accelerating the adoption of the very technology that could undermine their business models," he said. "Pretty ironic."
Think about the control companies like Epic with Unreal, and Unity with its engine, have over a game developer's project, and what happens if they make a change or perhaps introduce a fee a developer is not happy with. What can the developer do? Because those are issues people face. "Is that going to get better?" Hall asked.
"And I want to be clear," he added, concluding. "I am not saying my Brutal framework is the winner." Instead, it's meant to be a start. "I want to say developers will tear down Unity and Unreal, but it is Unreal and Unity who are tearing themselves down. Their greed and lack of accountability to developers has left them completely unable to reconcile their need to appear relevant. They have to slap AI on everything while being an encumbrance for using the very thing they are pushing."
Incidentally, on the topic of Icarus using Unreal Engine 4: Hall and RocketWerkz have no plans to remove it. The studio has apparently "sunset" Unreal as an engine it uses but switching engine for Icarus would require a lot more work. "Migrating Icarus would be very disruptive," Hall said, "and our players are loyal and we've earned their trust through patches every single week for years now since launch, not missing one. An engine switch to Brutal would disrupt that."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.eurogamer.net/dean-hall-brutal-framework-ksp-epic-unreal-unity
