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What Unity Is Getting Wrong

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Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#91

Post by lgl »

busterarm wrote: post #74
lgl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [0] https://youtu.be/cOI-cjdULmk

Clicked expecting a Matt Workman video...was not disappointed :D

I didn't know the guy before this, just came across his video somehow after the recent UE5 demo and was thoroughly impressed by it. That mixed reality camera and lighting demo at the beginning of the video was seriously cool.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#92

Post by reedwolf »

_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…

Pygame?

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#93

Post by bullen »

andybak wrote: post #44
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 f…

The only thing that Unity provides that has any chance of saving you time is the skin mesh animation = FBX or Collada to Mech Anim pipeline.

If you don't need that you should _never_ even consider using Unity.

If you are not interested by the underlying tech of any category of computing, you are not a programmer.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#94

Post by Jasper_ »

bullen wrote: post #87
Jasper_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I suspect that you're analyzing the frame trace wrong and thinking that since pre-skinned data is showing up in the draw it's being sent from the CPU, but feel free to send me a renderdoc capture or something and I'll take a look. Compute skinning and vertex skinning are both competitive; for games with many passes, zpre, multiple shadow passes compute skinning can beat vertex. Compute skinning is used by Frostbite and most other large engines too.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#95

Post by partyboat1586 »

pjmlp wrote: post #72
joshstrange wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no doubt they are doing "quite alright" but I always look at these types of posts as the canary in the coal mine. There are far fewer developers than players and the players don't care about Unity vs Unreal vs Insert other engine here . If developers are frustrated then it will take a long time to migrate off but once someone is burned they aren't often willing to take a chance on the same thing for their next…

I usually only see these type comments in forums like HN. In game development communities, it is another universe.

And what is the word on Unity in game development communities?

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#96

Post by machisuji »

_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…

I was always ruling out Unreal as an option due to C++ because I'm no good with C++ and it seems scary.

But in the end I got so frustrated with Unity that we did do the switch to Unreal. So far I actually had to do a lot less coding in Unreal than in Unity. There's almost nothing you can't do in blueprints.

The only thing I had to write C++ for is some JSON parsing because the existing JSON blueprint libraries (from the marketplace) are terribly slow. What little C++ I had to write is fairly simple. Just using core APIs form Unreal itself (FJsonObject). It's just creating structs and calling APIs. Easy enough even for me.

Everything else we implement in Blueprints. No C++ required.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#97

Post by corysama »

samsaga2 wrote: post #51

There is also Amazon Lumberyard. Which is totally free, you only have to pay if you use AWS for multiplayer. It is a fork of CryEngine. It looks really nice.

It might be good, if... you can manage to install it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j271YAjW5wA tldw: The download and install process can easily take an entire workday. Then there's the plugin system...

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#99

Post by drawkbox »

DethNinja wrote: post #58
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 think UE and Unity has complete different markets. Unity is focused on small mobile game developers, those small shops don’t have expertise to work with UE C++ source code and most of them are new grads themselves. I’m not sure what is the overall strategy of Unity but I don’t believe they care much about the PC/Console space and frankly at this point I don’t believe they will ever manage to capture it from UE.

> Unity is focused on small mobile game developers

Someone remind Unity of that.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#100

Post by haydenlee »

ortusdux wrote: post #54
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,…

One of my on-boarding tasks at my first tech job was to evaluate the merits of upgrading to a newer version of unity. I installed the new version, imported our code base, fixed a few bugs, and everything worked. We gained a few niceties, we could remove some of the hacks we had to program in to bypass unity weirdness, and we could start keeping our product up to date. I gave a presentation, we went over the pro/con l…

We are a tiny dev team using Unity on a non-gaming project and we basically have to dedicate 2-4 weeks of the year to updating Unity and all the mess that it entails. But if you don't update then you have to spend even more time the next year catching up. Then we end up being too scared to use their new features cause they aren't supported well or cause bugs. Its lose-lose.
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