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What Unity Is Getting Wrong

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Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#41

Post by steveklabnik »

ReticentVole wrote: post #8
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.

Unreal requires C++ and runs poorly on mobile devices and Nintendo Switch. Unity uses C# and runs pretty well on weaker devices (dev and client side). It also crashes a lot less. Freelancer Unreal Developers are approximately double the cost and 1/20th as plentiful as Unity developers. And no, you can't develop a complete project in Blueprints: https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ Unity had no choice but to split i…

> Unreal requires C++ and runs poorly on mobile devices and Nintendo Switch.

Interestingly, as someone who started playing Fortnite on Switch, one of the pros I enjoy listening to has said that he actually would prefer playing on mobile to playing on the Switch, because the mobile version is more streamlined, so it actually performs better even though the hardware is weaker.

All I know is that it's way, way nicer on PS4, but I would expect that of course.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#42

Post by _bxg1 »

dx87 wrote: post #32
_bxg1 wrote: post #12

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 mu…

For Godot, there are actually some companies that you can work with who will make your game playable on consoles[1]. It's a pain that it has to be done that way, and the devs said it isn't a trivial amount of work, but I remember seeing at least one game on /r/godot that was launching on PC and Switch. [1] http://www.lonewolftechnology.com/

Yeah. Sounds expensive though, which makes it a tough sell for many indies. Maybe if your game makes it big on PC first that could make sense, but that won't apply to everyone.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#43

Post by accidentalrebel »

dexwiz wrote: post #6
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.

Each of those studios started with a game. There are 10x many more small companies that rolled their own game engine around this time that are now dead, or bought for their engine. The best tools grow first alongside a real product. Building a tool without a target product almost always misses the mark.

I am curious, which companies were bought because of their game engines?

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#44

Post by andybak »

bullen wrote: post #36

There are two main reasons to avoid Unity: 1) As your project grows, it becomes unmanageable because the resource pipeline is hidden and you want to be able to improve that. 2) Skin mesh animation, which is the main point of using Unity in the first place, uses a compute shader which means they send all meshes from the CPU to the GPU every frame! On the other hand Unreal takes 5 hours to compile and even Godot takes…

> Skin mesh animation, which is the main point of using Unity in the first place,

That's an odd thing to say. I've never used it personally. Even if it's used in the majority of games saying it's the "main point of using Unity" is overstating things. It's simply one feature out of many that Unity provides.

> The only option is to fold your shirt sleeves up and build your own engine. It's not that hard really.

Maybe for you. I wouldn't even know where to start. And I wouldn't want to - that's not the level that interests me.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#45

Post by mpartel »

adamnemecek wrote: post #29

DOTS 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.

I'm not so sure that would have been impossible. Nothing fundamental seems to prevent the compiler+runtime from:

- laying out instances of the same Component next to each other in memory

- Burst.Compiling their Update() functions

- adding backwards compatible APIs to do parallel loops etc over multiple components

Given the culture of constant rewrites Unity has displayed (and I'm sure they have lots of techdebt to make rewrites feel appealing), its seems far from certain that they explored avenues like this sufficiently.

Or maybe they felt their earlier modification of Mono, which kept them on an old version of .NET for so long, was too painful to even consider touching the runtime ever again.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#46

Post by j_4 »

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.

I'm a solo indie developer in the late stages of developing a small 2D game for PC and mobile. [1]

Unity enables you to double dip on your engine knowledge to work on anything from simple 2D games for WebGL or mobile devices, to large AA productions, yet remains relatively lightweight as a tool, even on the large scale end of things.

It uses C# for scripting as the one true way of doing things and not some second class citizen. C# is just incredibly good. It's performant, exactly in the right spot on the rigid-flexible axis, and has fantastic tooling and learning resources.

I'm keeping a close eye on Godot and will be trying it for some tiny projects after I'm done with my current game, but it doesn't look like it's quite there yet.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1142080/Pawnbarian/

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#47

Post by mpartel »

thedirt0115 wrote: post #40
pjmlp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity source code is available to anyone that actually wants to have it. It just isn't available in FOSS sense.

This is correct, they released the source code a couple years ago under a reference license. https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/03/26/releasing-the-unity-c-s... https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference

The reference source is pretty much useless for anything directly under namespace `UnityEngine`, because it consists mostly of forwards to C++, and the C++ was never released.

At least that was the case around 2018. It might be getting better as Unity is migrating away from C++.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#49

Post by Mirioron »

ReticentVole wrote: post #8
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.

Unreal requires C++ and runs poorly on mobile devices and Nintendo Switch. Unity uses C# and runs pretty well on weaker devices (dev and client side). It also crashes a lot less. Freelancer Unreal Developers are approximately double the cost and 1/20th as plentiful as Unity developers. And no, you can't develop a complete project in Blueprints: https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ Unity had no choice but to split i…

Mobile and C# are probably the biggest points. Another one is the community. Unity has a very large community which makes getting help easier.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#50

Post by shafyy »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #33
_bxg1 wrote: post #12

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 mu…

It all depends on what you're planning to do. Godot is a fantastic engine for 2D stuff, with the ability to publish pretty much anywhere. And it does support consoles, in a way: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/platform/co... . It's not cheap, I agree with that. I'm surprised at the idea that Unreal is inaccessible though. Especially as an indie, UE4's blueprint system will do absolutely anything you…

Godot is also great for 3D, and increasingly so. We're already making great VR games with it, and it's only going to get better with Godot 4.0 which will support Vulkan (to be released this summer).

I've switched from Unity ~7 months ago and never looked back.

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