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What Unity Is Getting Wrong

garry.tv

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Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#11

Post by pjmlp »

jimbob45 wrote: post #2

What's the primary draw of Unity? Valve, Epic, and id learned a long time ago that the real money to be made is in engine licensing rather than actually making games (unless the goal of said game is to show off your engine). What is it that Unity has that these companies have been so unable to replicate? Surely they don't want another player in the scene to compete with their engines.

Tooling, a deep belief that there is more than C and C++ as means to develop games and being able to target low end devices without turning them into frying pans.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#12

Post by _bxg1 »

I'm so frustrated that Unity and Unreal are the only two real options. And it's all because of console vendors.

Unreal is just way too inaccessible, as an individual, non-C++-veteran (used it a bunch in college, but modern C++ looks nothing like what I've seen), non-games-industry-veteran. It's also fairly opinionated towards first person/third person action games.

And then Unity is of course a dumpster fire. It's much easier to get started and hack something together with, but you'll be hacking and fighting with the engine for the entire project.

Open-source libraries/engines exist, like Godot, but none of them properly support consoles because console APIs are apparently proprietary (??) because the console vendors are apparently stuck in backwards, draconian software practices from 2002.

The whole state of indie-accessible tooling is just deeply depressing.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#13

Post by pjmlp »

Looking at its adoption by Hollywood and TV channels for 3D based animations, Unity is getting lots of stuff right.

I guess there is always Godot for those that don't feel the same way.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#14

Post by DizzyDoo »

I'm a full-time independent game developer who's been using Unity for the last 6 years and sadly Garry's very correct. The render pipeline debacle has been painful to watch, Unity announced that the Universal Render Pipeline (what is still planned to replace the default renderer) was 'production ready' in early 2019, and it was lacking... so much. No ability to use multiple cameras (one for the game, one for the UI, for instance - a common use-case), they've rewritten the post-processing stack multiple times. Having more than one Directional Light was supported only very recently. Some of these have been and are being addressed, but it feels like Unity is in this odd no man's land, grey-area between the old legacy parts of the engine, and the new ones that just aren't ready for prime time, with many glaring gaps in the functionality. You would expect something as straight-forward as SSAO to be available out-of-the-box, it's hardly cutting edge tech, but two (three?) years into URP's development and it's not in the Standard Assets yet.

I do sympathise, it must be very difficult to bring an old engine up-to-date, but it's quite infuriating for developers like myself to work and know when to upgrade and when not to.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#15

Post by drawkbox »

SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #9
Danieru wrote: post #3

Unity has gotten so painful I've sworn off ever taking another Unity project. Since mid last year I am 100% exclusive on Unreal Engine. Unity wants you to think this instability is temporary. It is not. Unity has been unstable since at least 2014 when I first worked with it. Every year there is a new-new thing, "please stop using the old-new thing". Meanwhile those upgrades are always painful, not sometimes painful,…

> Unity has more engineers than Epic. It's funny. I see it (anecdotally) all the time. More engineers doesn't mean a better product. In fact at my old shop, things (product, quality) really started declining once we 'rapidly' scaled the team. Communication and consistency really suffered from lack of solid processes among other things.

I think it comes down to power in the company. Unity was extremely simple and small before, once they got John Riccitiello it become a management/business focused company over engineering leaders in terms of power and direction.

Unreal has Tim Sweeney, and old school guy that understands how to make a game engine and has done it over and over. They learned alot from Unity, and are now doing it better than them once they turned towards simplicity over complexity.

When Unreal 4 swapped out UnrealScript for C++ it went into overdrive in terms of performance and clean.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#16

Post by ReticentVole »

drawkbox wrote: post #7

I have been using Unity since 2008 version 2 before the Unity iPhone even and I have to agree. It is a mess. There has never been a time in Unity where systems aren't changing. APIs should be simple facades to ugly systems underneath, abstracting away the pain, but Unity puts it right in your face. Their editor is pushed over code first solutions. I thought when they went subscription that it would calm down, as befo…

There is another factor to consider which is that the 2017 gold rush when Valve opened up Steam to anyone with $100 is absolutely over.

The median game launching on Steam now will make only $1,400 (5 year gross revenue): https://twitter.com/greyalien/status/1227557601786912769?lan...

Unity's business model was selling $100 worth of starter assets to wannabe-developers then taking a 30% cut on that.

Now, browse gamedev subreddits and all you will hear are tales of financial misery. Who would want to get into that as a paid hobby or quit their job to do it?

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#17

Post by pjmlp »

drawkbox wrote: post #7

I have been using Unity since 2008 version 2 before the Unity iPhone even and I have to agree. It is a mess. There has never been a time in Unity where systems aren't changing. APIs should be simple facades to ugly systems underneath, abstracting away the pain, but Unity puts it right in your face. Their editor is pushed over code first solutions. I thought when they went subscription that it would calm down, as befo…

Looking at their market share across Switch games, first party support from Google, Nintendo and Microsoft for their gaming platforms and AR/VR devices, ongoing Hollywood adoption, I would say they are doing quite alright from business point of view.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#18

Post by busterarm »

pjmlp wrote: post #13

Looking at its adoption by Hollywood and TV channels for 3D based animations, Unity is getting lots of stuff right. I guess there is always Godot for those that don't feel the same way.

And yet Unreal has the nascent real-time in-camera VFX market completely locked in.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#19

Post by _bxg1 »

pjmlp wrote: post #13

Looking at its adoption by Hollywood and TV channels for 3D based animations, Unity is getting lots of stuff right. I guess there is always Godot for those that don't feel the same way.

Can you give specific examples? I've only ever heard of this happening with Unreal.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#20

Post by pjmlp »

ReticentVole wrote: post #16
drawkbox wrote: post #7

I have been using Unity since 2008 version 2 before the Unity iPhone even and I have to agree. It is a mess. There has never been a time in Unity where systems aren't changing. APIs should be simple facades to ugly systems underneath, abstracting away the pain, but Unity puts it right in your face. Their editor is pushed over code first solutions. I thought when they went subscription that it would calm down, as befo…

There is another factor to consider which is that the 2017 gold rush when Valve opened up Steam to anyone with $100 is absolutely over. The median game launching on Steam now will make only $1,400 (5 year gross revenue): https://twitter.com/greyalien/status/1227557601786912769?lan... Unity's business model was selling $100 worth of starter assets to wannabe-developers then taking a 30% cut on that. Now, browse gamede…

Gold rush has been over every couple of years, when developers flock to a new platform, dumping a couple of remakes during the first waves.

Game development is like any other art form, be prepared to jump from failure to failure and one day one might hit gold, or maybe not.

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