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What Unity Is Getting Wrong

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Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#81

Post by Jasper_ »

hosh wrote: post #28

I 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 behi…

Requiring Mac OS to build binaries is unfortunately an Apple restriction. Apple has a large number of both technical and legal barriers allowing cross compiling.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#82

Post by rr_aa »

mpartel wrote: post #60

As a Unity user emphatically sharing these frustrations, I'd be really curious to hear from long-time Unreal devs whether the grass really is greener on the other side. How's Unreal's - API stability? - Editor stability? (I have some old experiences of it being quite crashy too, and you know, C++ ...) - Backwards compatibility and upgradeability?

For having used both Unity and Unreal, Unreal does crash often.

Unreal can also become very frustrating very fast if you are going for anything different than a standard fps or third person game, and I percieve it as being extremely bloated compared to Unity. The force of Unity lies it its modularity and flexibility, in my opinion.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#83

Post by LudwigNagasena »

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…

I am not sure what this is supposed to prove. Obviously, there were tons of games that weren't on Steam before that. You should compare apples to apples, i.e. games that got accepted in the past to games that would get accepted in the past.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#84

Post by brobdingnagians »

troughway wrote: post #52
drawkbox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I recently read that Tim Sweeney still writes code for UE, something absurd - 80% of the codebase is his?

That's awesome. Lead from the front. He does it becomes he loves it and knows what he is doing. I really admire those kinds of leaders.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#85

Post by lgl »

troughway wrote: post #52
drawkbox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I recently read that Tim Sweeney still writes code for UE, something absurd - 80% of the codebase is his?

I don't know if this is true but I don't see why it would be absurd. The man is pretty much an absolute gaming and coding legend and from what I've read about him, he's genuinely interested about code and tech so if that's true I find that actually pretty awesome.

Absurd would be if he had to just stick to management and bureaucracy just because he has a few billions on his bank account. You do you Tim!

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#86

Post by fiblye »

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,…

God, and whenever something is deprecated, they don’t update the documentation with new info and sometimes they remove pages of older info that’s still usable.

I also had a free edition installed on an old laptop and wanted to make a quick edit to an old game to send to someone. But nope, needed to update my license first to open the engine, but the version was old enough that the reactivation button somehow became invalid and rendered it unusable. Basically had to tell the person “I know exactly how to fix the issue with the game but Unity won’t let me.”

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#87

Post by bullen »

Jasper_ wrote: post #79
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…

Why would using a compute shader mean mesh data is sent every frame? Compute skinning is mostly the same as doing it in the vertex shader but you don't have to skin again for the different passes, instead you store to some GPU memory (so up the tradeoff is extra memory bandwidth on the GPU). No extra CPU/GPU traffic should be used here.

Well if you analyze Unity you'll see they send all meshes every frame. It might be because they want to be able to apply the same shaders on characters as on objects, but still vertex GPU skinning is the way to go and Unity does not. So you can't build a MMO with Unity!

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#88

Post by rr_aa »

jamesu wrote: post #38

I got stuck into a few unity projects recently, and I've been surprised how poorly documented and undiscoverable things can be. Why is the whole rendering pipeline stuff such a mess? I've bumped into far too many unexpected gotchas because a pipeline doesn't support a particular feature, or it renders stuff in such a way which isn't clearly documented. And whats worse is there is no real easy way to debug it since th…

Unity does have built-in debug tools for rendering, I'm not sure what leads you to affirm the contrary? Or do you consider the exisiting tools to be unsufficient for your needs?

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#89

Post by sloopy543 »

I'll just sit back and eat popcorn as I work with my custom handmade game engine. None of this is a concern for me, and it has been refreshing to work directly with the graphics pipeline and in lower level languages that give me direct control. If something is wrong, it's my own damn fault.

For those who want to get away from being totally dependent on third-party frameworks and tools, check out Handmade Hero. It was life-changing for me, the difference between making a game I'm happy with vs. not.

I also have a YouTube series discussing how to get setup on a Mac, if that's that platform you're starting with.

https://youtu.be/M5l6CvHwWsc

I'm not really sure why more people don't do their own thing. It has been really satisfying for me. Overall, the process of making games is way more rewarding, and I think I'll have something better on the other end of all of this.

Plus I'm getting better as a programmer, which helps with other aspects of employment.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#90

Post by rr_aa »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #61
_bxg1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a programmer, who feels most comfortable writing code, so that was the route I took, and that route ended up being inaccessible. I've also heard that you can't really do everything for an entire game in just blueprints. Unity's C# scripts on the other hand - despite all of the engine's problems - are incredibly straightforward to write, set up tooling for, build, plug into a project, and you can use them to contr…

>I've also heard that you can't really do everything for an entire game in just blueprints. I wouldn't do networking in blueprints. But for your core gameplay ? It can absolutely do anything you want.

You can do anything you want if you are into managing a huge spaghetti node system. Sometimes its more efficient and especially flexible to be able to write code, and easier to maintain, update and edit.
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