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Why I left Unity

richg42.blogspot.com

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Re: Why I left Unity

#5

Post by zanny »

mpalme wrote: post #2

"Imagine the kinds of amazing new software that could be created in alternative cultural environments."

Game development - looking across the aisle from the Linux world - is such an insanely backwards place. Everyone reinvents everything, most developer shops refuse to even use the standard library implementation of whatever compiler they are using, and the entire process is a grindhouse for millions of lines of code, thousands of 3D models, textures, shaders, music, and dialog and all of it often never even sees the light of day once, or at best is used in one game before discarding and redoing it all over again.

The industry has gotten better on that front in recent years at least. Unreal 4 is public source, you can make modifications or contribute back (you are just bound by the royalty fee and fact you cannot redistribute source yourself) and the asset stores of Unity / Unreal / etc, while 99% garbage, at least are starting the industry on a path towards recycling rather than NIH waste at an alarming rate.

You want to talk about culture, think of what kinds of creative experiences we would have today if every game developer open sourced their engines and assets 5 years after publishing. They can keep the maps for their game, which would still give it unique retail value, but id alone created a huge gamut of free software games through the publication of their engine sources in the late 90s and early 2000s. Think of the possibilities if those resources were not inevitably lost in some discarded outdated mainframe a decade after the games release like most are, but instead were made useful long after they made their money off them for hobbyists or indies to appreciate the hours of work designers or programmers poured into these products.

Re: Why I left Unity

#6

Post by lux »

zanny wrote: post #5
mpalme wrote: post #2

"Imagine the kinds of amazing new software that could be created in alternative cultural environments."

Game development - looking across the aisle from the Linux world - is such an insanely backwards place. Everyone reinvents everything, most developer shops refuse to even use the standard library implementation of whatever compiler they are using, and the entire process is a grindhouse for millions of lines of code, thousands of 3D models, textures, shaders, music, and dialog and all of it often never even sees the l…

Those were my impressions moving from the open source / web world into games too. It surprises me still how little is shared in terms of reusable libraries, and often how little attention is given to reusability beyond a single project's scope. Automated testing too.

Those habits feel like a super power now, because at this point I naturally think in those terms and build accordingly.

We have quite a decent toolkit for VR at this point, but now I have the challenge of how to share any of it, because we do use a couple commercial libraries from the Unity asset store, and I don't know that there's any way to mark those as dependencies.

Re: Why I left Unity

#10

Post by eswat »

jakobegger wrote: post #7

I'm not getting it. Why did he leave Unity? Is this about crappy working conditions in game dev? I feel like I'm missing something.

He alludes to his goals at Unity being done while as the same time finding less enjoyment in what he did day-to-day. There’s a lot missing but the last two paragraphs shed a bit more light.

> To really improve this industry we need to upgrade our culture, not our hardware, comp-sci curriculum, or office arrangements.

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