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What Unity Is Getting Wrong

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Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#191

Post by zubspace »

georgeecollins wrote: post #184
redisman wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Unity professionally for 5 years, then I took a 15 month break from game development and went to work on a hobby project and the latest version has completely changed to the very core. Made me give up and I'm currently looking for a game engine that's basically what Unity was 3-4 years ago. Pretty simple with a robust multiplatform support. Godot looks the most promising (and open source) but the lack of conso…

Godot is less featured, but it is so much simpler to work with.

For indie game devs Godot [1] is huge. Great scene graph, scripting and debugging inside the editor, wonderful 2D tools (animation, physics and tilemaps are really great). It does not come with as many features as Unity or Unreal, but actually this is an advantage, because you don't have to learn a new way of doing things over the years. And you even have a dark theme out of the box! [2]

[1] https://godotengine.org/

[2] https://www.zubspace.com/comic/unity-vs-godot

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#192

Post by vvanders »

haydenlee wrote: post #100
ortusdux wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly I've never seen this problem solved well for any game engine short of in-house engines(which obviously wouldn't break titles they were supporting).

It's been a while since I've been in the industry so maybe things have changed but last time I was there unit tests weren't even a thing. Smoke tests where if a set of levels loaded and didn't crash was considered success from an automation validation standpoint.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#193

Post by _bxg1 »

dgb23 wrote: post #149
_bxg1 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me clarify: Unity gives you high-level APIs for things like graphics, audio, input, networking, that work across all supported platforms automatically. There may be some platform-specific quirks, but roughly speaking, you can just click "build for X" and get a working X build. There's a huge gap between compilation and that.

I don’t know how Jai will do this. But my gut feeling says that the meta programming capabilities will could help doing this sort of thing. My understanding is that it enables one to say „build my program in this particular way“ expressed within Jai itself. Please correct me if I‘m completely off.

I honestly think this is outside the scope of a language; it's really a library/framework/toolset thing. I'm sure it will be possible to do this with Jai (maybe it already is), but you'd still have to do it with Jai as opposed to Jai doing it.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#194

Post by shafyy »

avolcano wrote: post #164
shafyy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Curious - is your team using GDScript, C#, or C++ primarily? It seems like GDScript is still the happy path for compatibility, but I have mixed feelings about it as a language (though I've written enough Python to be relatively productive in it in my little Godot experiments).

We're using GDScript and like it a lot. I find that I'm much faster than with C# and haven't had any performance issues yet. The good thing is that you can mix and match languages as you like. So you could write 99% in GDScript and there's something where you really need performance just write it in C++, Rust, Python or any other language you want.

It looks like that they're re-working GDScript for 4.0, so that'll get a lot better, too.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#195

Post by jimbob45 »

accidentalrebel wrote: post #43
dexwiz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

Naughty Dog by Sony

> In all honesty, the biggest reason we're not using GOAL for next-gen development is because we're now part of Sony. I can only imagine Sony's shock when they purchased Naughty Dog a few years back, hoping to be able to leverage some of our technology across other Sony studios, and then realized that there was no way anyone else would be able to use any of our codebase. Sony wants us to be able to share code with other studios, and this works both ways - both other studios using our code and vice versa. Add this to the difficulty curve of learning a new language for new hires, lack of support from external development tools (we had our own compiler, linker, and debugger, and pretty much had to use Emacs as our IDE), etc, means that there are clearly a lot of other factors involved. Note, however, that these issues aren't really technical problems, they're social ones.

— Scott Shumaker

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#196

Post by fzeroracer »

_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…

Perhaps somewhat ironically, I've started feeling like Game Maker Studio is a far better choice if you're looking to make a strictly 2d game. Despite being someone who works primarily in C#, I try to avoid Unity like the plague nowadays for all of the other reasons outlined in the thread.

Unity keeps rebuilding the core foundation of the engine which means at any point the work you did could be invalidated. So now everyone's operating on a different version of the engine, trying to solve bugs related specifically to that version and it means if you actually need something from a later one you're SOL.

Whenever I've worked w/ Unity I've felt like I spend more of my time struggling with tooling than actually making a game. From a more skeptical point of view I understand why: It's because it means they can create a marketspace where you have to buy additional tools to make game creation more robust. From a developer point of view though, it results in a nightmare.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#197

Post by hashamali »

Unity does miss on a lot of things, but I'd like to point out one of its best qualities: the pricing model. Compared to Unreal, Unity is a steal. Despite Unreal's recent changes to not collect royalties on the first $1m of gross revenue, its license can get quite expensive if you have a successful game.

* Unity: $1800 / year, no royalties. (Unity Pro)

* Unreal: 5% of gross revenue.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#198

Post by diegoperini »

Curious question:

I have a few years experience with Unity. When I first grabbed it, I assumed the engine having C# scripting would give me rich tools to make game state serialization (save games, streaming open worlds etc) a relatively easy task, thanks to its reflection capabilities. This turned out not to be the case due to my false expectations, the programming model game objects use and the asset pipeline needing too much plumbing. Official ECS packages made it easier later but they also broke the entire authoring workflow by effectively deprecating `GameObject` in practice.

I've never used Unreal Engine but if serialization is a solved problem there, I want to try.

Does anyone here have experience with similar use cases?

Are there other AAA-ready engines good at this? Giving value types first class support, promoting data oriented design and building the artistic authoring tools around these priorities is what I will appreciate the most.

I don't care if the high level scripting language is non-existent, C++ heavy or Brainfuck. That can be circumvented by building muscle memory in a few months.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#199

Post by gentleman11 »

fiblye wrote: post #86
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 i…

by comparison, ue4's documentation is just almost absent. Even lumberyard has better docs than ue4

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#200

Post by m_t »

gentleman11 wrote: post #172
fxtentacle wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest grief with Unity is that they only made the C#, but not the C++ part of the engine open source. So there can be release-blocking bugs that you cannot fix yourself, due to lack of source code. And when I tried to purchase Unity source code access, I was just ignored. Unreal Engine on the other hand has source code available for everything, so you can be sure that if such a bug hits, you can just patch it yo…

None of that is open source

Part of it is. It's not free software, but part of the source code cab be accessed by the game devs.
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