Last week Unity announced their new Unity Runtime Fee, which was met with more or less universal hatred. News got worse after that, when it was discovered Unity had quietly altered their terms of service and that Unity reps were reaching out to clients saying they wouldn’t have to pay with the new fee if they switched to Unity/IronSource offerings. Obviously this attack didn’t exactly please AppLovin.
Fast forward to yesterday and we have the launch of Project UniFree:
The current version of the tool is a proof of concept. I wanted to demonstrate that we can utilize modern LLMs to ease the transition between Unity and other engines and I think early results are positive. It makes sense, because fundamental game engine structures are similar, but language and APIs can vary a lot. This is exactly what LLMs are good at: generalizing and translating an idea.
Once we implement static asset migration, and improve LLM prompts, I believe this tool has the potential to help hundreds of developers ease the daunting task of re-writing the entire game from scratch on a new engine.
While an auto-migrated project is unlikely to work out-of-the-box, the translated business logic, re-imported assets, auto-generated comments, and hints will spare engineers from days of tedious, repetitive, and formulaic migration work.
The first three engines we would focus on are Godot, Cocos, and Unreal.
But we need help from the community to get there.
Essentially it is an open source project utilizing ChatGPT and other existing tools to migrate entire projects from Unity to the Godot Game Engine, Unreal Engine and Cocos Creator, with other engines possible in the future. The project is available under the MIT license on GitHub and currently can be used to translate Unity C# to Godot GDScript or Unreal Engine C++ code. You can learn more about AppLovin Project UniFree in the video below.