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What Unity Is Getting Wrong

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Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#201

Post by [deleted] »

voppe wrote: post #56
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,…

I agree with the first statement. I'd go as far as saying that Unity is the JavaScript of game development. Sure, when you start out you get out results FAST, but then you run into limitations, weird behaviours and quirks that have to be worked around, and soon everything becomes a mess. Mind you, I'm a hobbyist in this field so maybe you could chalk it out to inexperience, but I shiver to think to what professional…

[deleted]

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#202

Post by carlosdp »

The multiplayer thing is my biggest gripe. It is unfathomable to me that Unity has seemingly ceded multiplayer functionality to Photon, considering the most valuable games on the planet right now are all multiplayer-first.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#203

Post by nucleardog »

gentleman11 wrote: post #199
fiblye wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah a friend of mine tried to get into UE4.

When he came back asking questions that I would have expected to have been answered by the documentation, turns out... there just really isn't any. And the stuff that's there is various stages of incomplete or out of date.

When he got the point where he was like "Okay, I have to take this year old tutorial that doesn't work anymore, review the documentation to see if it's out of date as well, then grep the change logs for all the things it references to see where and when breaking changes were made and then go off on another Google-journey and hopefully find some sort of reference on how I'm supposed to use this new thing..." he just gave up. It wasn't interesting or fun anymore.

I can imagine UE4 is fine if you have an existing codebase and are just staying up to date with each new release. I was pretty flabbergasted that the documentation for a project of that size was so poor. I can't imagine how anyone would jump into a new project now.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#204

Post by hn_acc_2 »

sloopy543 wrote: post #89

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…

I definitely support making your own game engine if you enjoy it as a programmer.

But it shouldn't be a surprise that it's not the best choice for the most developers. Every moment you're debugging and improving the engine is another moment you could have been working on the game itself, because almost all engine improvements are orthogonal to improving the game experience.

So given a limited amount of time, you will always end up with a better and more complete game if you start with a batteries-included engine than if you roll your own.

Also the fact is most peoples' game ideas are very derivative and it would be overkill to reinvent the wheel by implementing your own engine for, say, a game that'd easily be made in Game Maker Studio

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#205

Post by jokoon »

andarleen wrote: post #189
jokoon wrote: post #137

A great demonstration of how unity is bloated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y Unity is targeting students and gamedev wannabees. You don't make a game with a framework. Programming is not simple. Same debate of framework vs libraries. I'm even against Godot, which you cannot even use as a rendering library. You end up being too dependent on those platforms and all their assets and plugins. Of course if y…

ok but can you please recommend some decent alternative engines for xbox development? i am having so many issues with unity i am running out of hair to pull out!

Turn to c++ maybe if you can.

Godot would seem like a wiser solution than unity, too.

You can also ask and search in various gamedev communities, on gamedev.stackexchange, reddit, etc, and ask around.

I know I'm trying Urho3d that seems like a complete modern engine with everything included, and many samples. It's inspired by many other other engines like Ogre3D and seems to support modern graphics api like vulkan.

If you're on 2D, stay on things like SDL or SFML. If you want better effects, I don't really know.

I really depends on what you want to do, what are you skills, if you want to release quickly or not, if you have large assets, etc. Do not neglect the tools and libraries you use so that the code you write today will still work on the same libraries in 2 years.

If you're indie and you don't have a lot of money, skills or experience, AIM LOW.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#206

Post by pkalinowski »

redisman wrote: post #167
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,…

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…

Console support is not there by default due to licensing, but I heard that one of Godot developers runs a company which provides console builds for Godot.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#207

Post by antiuniverse »

Impossible wrote: post #177
Danieru wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, nope, nope, and nope. I've been continously upgrading a couple months behind new releases on commercial projects since 2015. I've upgraded about 17 times so far. Unreal's update story is light years ahead of Unity's half-hearted "automated" mess. Worse bug I had was back in 2016 when an upgrade lost reset the scale on weighted bones to 0.

Really depends on your code base and project. Unreal upgrades can be painful if you're using APIs that can or are rewritten, and if you have made engine level changes. Unity often feels like rolling the dice with upgrades, basic things can break from version to version, but I've done many Unity upgrades with no or minimal issues, and seen extremely painful Unreal upgrades

It’s true that you really, really want to avoid making changes to the engine. Even for AAA studio source licensees in prior UE generations this was widely agreed upon. The good news is, you really shouldn’t have to.

In my mind, the big win from having the Unreal source code is understandability. But also, in contrast to Unity, if you should for some reason need to—say a critical bug that’s stopping your game from shipping at the last hour—you at least have the option.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#208

Post by thrower123 »

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,…

I'm not sure why larger headcount would ever be indicative of higher quality.

It's usually a negative signal. If you tell me a team of a dozen worked on a product, it is almost always better than if a gross of developers had their finger in it.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#209

Post by rhblake »

redisman wrote: post #182
ohgodplsno wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has anyone ported to a console? The wording here is a bit confusing, I thought they meant you have to pay a 3rd party to port your whole game (from scratch?) but maybe it means they'll have to compile a special version of the engine for you instead with the devkit or something?

It's the latter. A third party provides you with the stuff you need to export to consoles, e.g. export template(s) and such that for legal reasons can't be included in the normal version of Godot. Here's a recent thread about having a Godot game built for Switch: https://twitter.com/monolithofminds/status/12599133551769272...

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#210

Post by Pfhreak »

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.

As someone who was on a AAA team making a game on Lumberyard, I'd caution against it. The tooling, support, and community just aren't there (and it doesn't seem like Amazon is investing much in making it happen.)
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