Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Unity Is Getting Wrong

garry.tv

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 306 posts

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#251

Post by jaredklewis »

flukus wrote: post #242
santoshalper wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is telling that in Unity world, 2 years is "Long Term". I wonder what cutting edge is? Building your entire game on the unstable weekly branch and crossing your fingers?

Not just unity unfortunately. .net core LTS is 3 years, Firefox "extended support" is 12 months, some random library from cargo/npm/nuget probably not at all. "Long Term" is becoming a meaningless buzzword. Companies cling to 40 year old COBOL because there's nothing stable enough to migrate to.

Java 8 EOL is 2030. There are plenty of stable options that are not COBOL.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#252

Post by seba_dos1 »

pjmlp wrote: post #222
santoshalper wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is telling that in Unity world, 2 years is "Long Term". I wonder what cutting edge is? Building your entire game on the unstable weekly branch and crossing your fingers?

Most software products LTS are between 2 to 3 years actually, even stuff like Java.

There's a difference between end-user software and software that you're going to produce things in.

2 years is a reasonable time to expect that the user will move on to the next LTS browser version. 2 years is not a lot of time to release a game without having to upgrade the engine mid-project.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#253

Post by seba_dos1 »

vvanders wrote: post #192
haydenlee wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, things haven't really changed...

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#255

Post by overgard »

Overall I love unity, but one thing that drives me insane is how many weird UI quirks they just don't fix, like how incredibly primitive editing arrays in the inspector is (its a nightmare to reorder anything) or dealing with asset imports that take forever. They take these huge projects on, the great rendering features and such, and theyre impressive, but somehow they won't fix small things that are seriously aggravating in day to day use.

Also while I do love c#, I think it was the wrong language choice, because you end up having to write code in a really constrained way to get around garbage collection issues. Its getting better, but for games id prefer a non gc language

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#256

Post by flukus »

jaredklewis wrote: post #251
flukus wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just unity unfortunately. .net core LTS is 3 years, Firefox "extended support" is 12 months, some random library from cargo/npm/nuget probably not at all. "Long Term" is becoming a meaningless buzzword. Companies cling to 40 year old COBOL because there's nothing stable enough to migrate to.

Java 8 EOL is 2030. There are plenty of stable options that are not COBOL.

Java has been one of the few that are more stable but I get the impression that's coming to an end. The support lifetime for the current LTS will finish 4 years earlier than Java 8 (according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history) so it's trending down fast (although still good). It also looks that 2030 is only for people paying oracle, which isn't necessarily bad but it's something to consider.

There's also a lot more to consider than just how long an LTS lasts, like the degree of backwards compatibility and the rest of the ecosystem. It was my understanding that project jigsaw broke a lot of that, but I'm outside the java world so i didn't really keep up. .net for instance was great until recently because they had decent support lifetimes and kept backwards compatibility, so updating to the latest was at least simple and painless. Even trying to do those upgrades was like pulling teeth inside corporate environments though.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#257

Post by johnfn »

sloopy543 wrote: post #217
johnfn wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not really sure why more people don't do their own thing. I've certainly considered it, but one thing holds me back: cross-platform targeting. I'd love for my game to eventually run on the Switch, to say nothing of more basic targets like MacOS, Windows and Linux. Targeting those platforms would be a herculean effort.

I don't actually think it's that hard once you know how to do it. You basically make a cross-platform C library that generates the GPU commands and sounds per frame, then you just plug that into whatever platform you're running on. My Mac Platform code is only like 1500 lines or so. Pretty small considering that it runs a 2D game full-screen on my iMac. Not sure what is meant by 'Herculean'. Once you know how to do i…

> Not sure what is meant by 'Herculean'. Once you know how to do it, you don't lose that knowledge. You literally have the code to use on the next project. No big deal

The problem with this is that even if your code is 100% bug free and works perfectly, new platforms are created all the time. The PS5 is coming out in a couple of months - does your crossplatform code target that? Unity does. How about the Switch? How about VR? How about Webassembly?

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#258

Post by aseipp »

an_opabinia wrote: post #216
kbenson wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I remembered there being some bigger games, but looking at a list[1], they are all pretty indie, or at least small. Not sure I saw a AAA game on the list (which doesn't mean there aren't any, but they seem rare). The equivalent list for Unreal Engine[2] does contain quite a few big titles (along with a plethora of less well known ones). I'm not sure if that's cause, effect or marketing. It could be that usi…

Unreal is for people who get games financed. The demos looks great and the execs don’t play games anyhow so what do they know. That’s why it’s all FPSes, it’s stuff non-game-playing adults can understand just by looking at it. They will fund the most photoreal looking pitch for the Star Wars IP. Unreal as an engine product is competing with Frostbite and Source Engine (the various engines Star Wars appeared recently)…

Jedi Knight: Fallen Order uses UE4 (I can't tell from your phrasing if you meant otherwise, but I figure I'd clarify.)

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#259

Post by hnick »

kbenson wrote: post #147
bluescrn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really do need that reminder. The people making money from Unity-based games are primarily mobile/F2P devs, and smaller indie developers. They need stability and ease-of-use/very-rapid-development much more than they need performance or the latest shiny high-end graphics features.

I thought I remembered there being some bigger games, but looking at a list[1], they are all pretty indie, or at least small. Not sure I saw a AAA game on the list (which doesn't mean there aren't any, but they seem rare). The equivalent list for Unreal Engine[2] does contain quite a few big titles (along with a plethora of less well known ones). I'm not sure if that's cause, effect or marketing. It could be that usi…

Hearthstone is the largest that comes to mind, I'm not sure if it qualifies as a AAA game but it's from a large studio with a lot of experience and earns AAA money.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#260

Post by hnick »

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…

Do you have any pointers towards good tutorials for a hobbyist on UE? I dabbled with Unity and want to see the other side and it wouldn't hurt to get back into C++ after all these years.
Post reply on HN