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Unity Software Inc S-1

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Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#81

Post by TillE »

johnfn wrote: post #33

I'm quite bearish on Unity in the long run. Unity to me seems like a team with a fantastic marketing department to contrast with a much weaker engineering department. I've tried to use Unity off and on for years and every time I spend time learning it, I regret it. I'm a full-time React developer, and the difference in engineering culture and best engineering practices between Unity and React is massive. The Unity ex…

I've been using Godot lately, and while it has many flaws (an over-reliance on strings as identifiers, for example), I think the fundamental design is sound and easy to work with: everything is a node in a scene tree.

The engine code, while not up to modern C++ standards, can be pretty easily understood, modified, and then fully recompiled in just a few minutes. It's not suitable for a AAA 3D game, but it's the first engine I've found for 2D C++ development which actually helps me more than it gets in my way.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#82

Post by xex70 »

andybak wrote: post #73
brett-k wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plastic SCM is pretty great at handling Unity projects of all shapes and sizes.

And they just bought the developer. I worry about all the good synergy I was getting from Unity stuff using Github as a default is going to dry up if there's a non-open, non-public VCS as the default. I love trawling Github for interesting Unity projects.

Game development historically and consciously does not use Git so you’re fighting a losing battle. There’s good reason for that. Git remains not a great fit for managing large projects of assets despite extensions and work put in, so I’d be cognizant of your projection of Web-centric preferences on another vertical. That’s a recurring theme from the Web vertical (why don’t you do things our way) and I can tell you I’ve seen frustration with that firsthand.

Perforce and systems like it are the competition here (pay attention to how many games announce changelists in their logs), and AAA studios are quite comfortable with what they have.

If your problem with Unity is how it does source control it speaks more to your unfamiliarity with industry practice than it does a deficiency in Unity. They added Git ability because enough people complained about it, but as this thread points out, it took gymnastics to implement because it’s simply not how that market operates — web folks operate on a pile of text files and games don’t look anything like that. I’m not just talking about graphics, either. The AAA I’m working on has about 75 KB of code and 46 GB of binaries and a few hundred actively committing, so Git is very comfortably a nonstarter.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#83

Post by andybak »

johnfn wrote: post #51
OneGuy123 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing a web library to game engine is a bit of a stretch. Unity is very nice to develop actually. It's a lot more simple than UE4 for example, but UE4 is much better suited for more complicated games, but then again, Subnautica is made in Unity, so Unity is very flexible. Neither is "bad" or "worse". Unity is obviously not perfect, but video game engines move and change all the time, that is the nature of the vid…

It's really not as much of a stretch as you might think. Let's put aside everything that the two libraries actually do for a second, and just think about them in the abstract. React very clearly tries to guide the developer towards correct patterns and abstractions. It's clear that React developers have thought very deeply about how to lead engineers towards the happy path of code with fewer bugs in it. It throws lou…

> Unity doesn't mark old features as deprecated

Are you sure? My IDE (Rider) shows gives me a tooltip for any methods that Unity has declared deprecated. There's also console warnings and big notices at the top of the docs.

Package Manager also clearly marks certain packages as experimental or deprecated.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#84

Post by dgellow »

ingenieros wrote: post #54
johnfn wrote: post #33

I'm quite bearish on Unity in the long run. Unity to me seems like a team with a fantastic marketing department to contrast with a much weaker engineering department. I've tried to use Unity off and on for years and every time I spend time learning it, I regret it. I'm a full-time React developer, and the difference in engineering culture and best engineering practices between Unity and React is massive. The Unity ex…

They were the first commercial game engine to offer iOS support and this pretty much cemented their place in the market. Unreal used to cost upwards of 6 figures to license per game and this left indies nowhere left to go. Godot shows a lot of promise and has been steadily growing its userbase over the years, but its MIT license makes it really difficult to export to close source platforms and ultimately most devs wa…

I don’t see how that’s caused by their choice of license. I read your link, there is nothing related to their license either. MIT is permissive, as far as I know it is commonly used by 3rd party libraries for games, even on consoles.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#85

Post by TremendousJudge »

johnfn wrote: post #51
OneGuy123 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing a web library to game engine is a bit of a stretch. Unity is very nice to develop actually. It's a lot more simple than UE4 for example, but UE4 is much better suited for more complicated games, but then again, Subnautica is made in Unity, so Unity is very flexible. Neither is "bad" or "worse". Unity is obviously not perfect, but video game engines move and change all the time, that is the nature of the vid…

It's really not as much of a stretch as you might think. Let's put aside everything that the two libraries actually do for a second, and just think about them in the abstract. React very clearly tries to guide the developer towards correct patterns and abstractions. It's clear that React developers have thought very deeply about how to lead engineers towards the happy path of code with fewer bugs in it. It throws lou…

I'm currently learning unity, and even for very, very basic stuff it's impossible to know what's the "correct" or "intended" way of using the engine

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#87

Post by brundolf »

DizzyDoo wrote: post #75
brundolf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've heard is that many of the problems are growing-pains; Unity has some really deep technical debt and they're (perhaps too hastily) ripping it out and updating things, which is causing angst for devs when a) their existing projects break, and b) in some cases the old system actually gets deprecated before the new one reaches parity. But it also sounds like all of the completely new stuff that doesn't involve…

I really, really wish it did. Here's just one concrete example: real-time point-light shadows in the Universal Render Pipeline. URP is the new 'default' way of rendering, the old renderer is being phased out, this is the new way of doing things - as you say; technical debt as they re-engineer. But how horrid has this process of eliminating technical debt been? You've got Unity proudly announcing that URP was 'product…

That's pretty bad, but I'd still file that under "too-hastily deprecating things before the new version is at parity". Not that it isn't a huge issue, but could it be a temporary issue? Is the newer one, in theory, on a good track for the long-term?

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#88

Post by zemo »

formalsystem wrote: post #74
MrLeap wrote: post #19

I use Unity every day at work. This is a mixed bag for me. Unity gives google a run for their money when it comes to abandoning old features / letting them rot. The editor is kind of crashy, launch times get unwieldy fast. Sometimes there's subtle differences between build version and running in the editor, and solving the disparity is a death march. All that said, it's still one of my favorite environments to work i…

I started using Unity actively about 2 years ago so haven't experienced the abandoning old features part, which features are you thinking of here? 100% agree on the launch times, it gets nuts even for smaller games - I'm not sure if they're working on this. Have you tried Unity Collaborate or Git LFS for version control? What other improvements would you like to see? The Stockholm syndrome comment made me lol, It's j…

try using networking in Unity sometime. UNet has been deprecated for years and the replacement is still officially experimental. The networking situation is pretty bad in Unity at the moment.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#89

Post by iaml »

adamnemecek wrote: post #45
johnfn wrote: post #33

I'm quite bearish on Unity in the long run. Unity to me seems like a team with a fantastic marketing department to contrast with a much weaker engineering department. I've tried to use Unity off and on for years and every time I spend time learning it, I regret it. I'm a full-time React developer, and the difference in engineering culture and best engineering practices between Unity and React is massive. The Unity ex…

Unity is nothing like react.

Actually, AFAIK react event loop is based on game engines, so at least a bit of similarity should be there.
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