This has been a cultural problem at Unity for a long time. They introduce half-finished features and then never improve them. A great case in point is their VideoPlayer component which can't open a video without dropping frames because 4 years on it still can't load things asynchronously. Where's the dev assigned to that component been and what have they been doing all this time? People have been complaining for years and there's zero attention to detail.
What Unity Is Getting Wrong
21–30 of 306 posts
Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong
#22I 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.
I agree, Unity strength is their platform support. They will always be viable. However the simplicity and speed are taking a hit.
This is coming from someone that got companies to switch to Unity because it was so good for a time and in many ways still is. I got the game studio I was working at to buy our first Mac back when it was Mac only in 2009. I have put up the warning to them many times but it seems to be getting more complacent to the external view, they seem content on internal view only which screams management culture over engineering/product culture, same type that dooms companies. There is still time to fix it.
I love Unity, I make a large part of my living from it, I hate to see them not understand that breaking changes constantly, gets a bit old and it essentially offloads technical debt to every user of the system. I am using Unreal more because of some of these issues.
People use a market engine to offload the engine team. That engine team should do whatever it takes to make transitions easy, and when difficult there needs to be immense benefits. Some of those are questionable in recent years. The desire for Unity to want to be Unreal is losing the mobile side and web is essentially not even a focus anymore which is more the whole market not Unity's fault. Unity started really as a better Flash, now they want to be Unreal. Right now Unreal is winning that and the Unreal 4 rewrite with C++ backed is really clean. Unity still more simple but with the new DOTS/Rendering Pipelines it is not.
Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong
#23100% agree with this.
Everything they’ve done in the last 5 years I’ve been using Unity has felt half baked. You’ll try any number of the things they’ve released recently (networking, 2d animation, and vector graphics are the ones that come to mind for me) and they’ll work fine for their demo case but then fall apart with so many cases that you need to actually ship a game. I think one of the bigger problems with the company is that they’re not actually making games themselves and eating their own dog food.
Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong
#24I'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 mu…
I'm looking forward of what becomes of the Jai programming language.
Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong
#25Looking 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.
Yes,
"Unity wins its first Technology and Engineering Emmy Award"
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/21/unity-wins-its-first-te...
"Creators pushing the boundaries of storytelling in Sundance's New Frontier 2019"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhHuqvnAzyo
"Unite Los Angeles 2018 - Films Made with Unity"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYX8PXX8qc
"What's ahead for film and animation with Unity 2020 - Unite Copenhagen"
Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong
#26Looking 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.
There is more to Hollywood than those kind of movies, even if that is actually the case, which I very seriously doubt.
The winner takes it all is Octane Render.
Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong
#27Looking 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.
Agreed, I think Unreal Engine is much more suitable for VFX than Unity. Most people here on hn probably already seen the Mandalorian use of the engine.
I have also recently watched this video [0] of an independent film maker using some of it's features for virtual production which I found truly mind boggling.
Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong
#28I support CI for my team's Unity builds. I don't know much about the engine itself, but I can tell you that the tooling for automating Unity builds really sucks.
I had a long list of reasons why, but my impulse blocker cut me out. Oh well. Here's a much smaller list:
- You have to jump through many hoops to run Unity in headless mode
- I cannot separate out build processes into discrete stages
- Linux version is behind. Windows is slow. Macs require you to use specialized cloud (such as MacStadium)
- License server is unreliable. It always goes down with a 500 error, every day for most of the evening (California time). That means I cannot easily elastically scale build servers.
- WebGL target means running emscripten, which means running a compiler in Python. It is slow. We sped it up by using a really expensive AWS instance size to run it.
- We built our own pipeline because Unity Cloud is even slower
I think it is like this because:
- We're not Unity's core market. We're a team that can afford expertise on CI
- Unity doesn't dogfood their own tools and build a game with it. They don't fix the bugs that come from having to build a game.
- Unity Cloud probably cheats and uses a special version of the binary that does not talk with their license server. So there is no pressure to fix their license servers, and make it reliable enough to run elastic loads. (They probably don't run it elastically because they use Macs for their build servers)
I look enviously on the folks who work with Unreal Engine. I also hear that Defold is now open source. Maybe people can use that instead.
Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong
#29DOTS is in fact a major step up. It can't be done in engine code the same way you can't handle say oop to functional programming conversion in engine code.
Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong
#30I'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 mu…
I'm looking forward of what becomes of the Jai programming language.
It looks well and good, but the point remains that it won't help you build for consoles out of the box.