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Unity Software Inc S-1

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Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#141

Post by panopticon »

akersten wrote: post #26
formalsystem wrote: post #22

Out of any software tools I use frequently, Unity is the one that brings me the most joy. Any reasonably complex interface is essentially a game whether it's a music composition app, simulator, MMO or even a basic form. The basic abstractions of entities and components sometimes feel like they could apply to any software project. It's seamless to animate something, add physics, style in ways that would seem mind bogg…

> Any reasonably complex interface is essentially a game whether it's a music composition app, simulator, MMO or even a basic form. I've been out of the game development arena for a while, but I can't help but pause here. Are people really writing DAWs and big desktop app interfaces in Unity ? The last time I played with a game engine, I would have said UI was its weakest aspect. Clunky, slow controls, visually unapp…

According to Bloomberg[0], non-gaming clients make up 10% of Unity's business.

> [Unity] helps Volkswagen AG train employees, was used by filmmakers to shoot the recent “Lion King” movie and by the Hong Kong International Airport to simulate changes in passenger volume.

I don't know enough about these domains to say whether it's a good (or bad) idea, but I've also heard of Unity being used for other kinds of modeling and simulations too (climatology, traffic, etc).

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-07/unity-tec...

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#143

Post by johnfn »

xex70 wrote: post #127
johnfn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll happily hear examples of things which are "misunderstandings" or "just wrong". As your post stands, it's nothing more than a long extended ad-hominem - it roughly boils down to "your post is wrong, but I'm not going to tell you why." I accept that Unity and Unreal Engine are doing fine financially and will probably continue to do so for a long time. That's no reason that they can also have issues.

Quote one sentence where I attacked you personally. I was quite careful to speak about your essay and its conclusions from the perspective of the intended audience, and if you think I’m going to engage after having that called an ad hominem, you don’t really understand the investment of time that would entail and why I’m strongly disincentivized.

A few quotes that I found particularly rough include:

> Several of your points are misunderstandings, several are just wrong

Like I said, I'd be happy to hear ways that I can improve. You saying that I am wrong but not providing specifics makes me feel bad without a way to improve my thinking.

> “that person is going to have a hard time if they pursue professional game development,”

You're passing judgement on my professional abilities, which makes me feel pretty bad. It's also an ad hominem: you've stopped attacking my argument and you've started attacking my professional character.

> “if you don’t do software like FAANG does, you’re doing it wrong and your stuff is terrible.”

Is it really necessary to include the thing about FAANG? I'm not even employed by FAANG. To me it feels like you're casting me out to be a FAANG elitist, which feels pretty alienating. It's also an ad hominem: you've stopped attacking my argument and you've started attacking me as a FAANG employee.

> all of them paint a picture which also gives a lot of AAA shops pause about hiring Web folks

Is the absolute "all of them" really necessary? That you dismissed every one of my points is pretty rough. Can you imagine if you wrote a 4000 word post and someone said "yeah I read it and every point you made gives me pause." and that's all they said, no further explanation? You'd probably be pretty frustrated, wondering what could possibly be wrong, but having no clue with which to even start understanding their different perspective.

> I’m reminded of a friend who does control development for factories and had someone come in straight from a Google internship who started trying to reimplement SCADA from first principles using Kubernetes.

You're comparing me to a friend that overengineers things. If you have specific things you think I'm overengineering, I'm happy to hear them, but a comparison like this without any concrete steps makes me feel bad without providing me a way to improve.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#144

Post by andybak »

xex70 wrote: post #136
andybak wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so you’re fighting a losing battle That's an odd way of putting it when I was stating "I've always found tons of great Unity stuff on Github - and I'm worried that might change". The rest of your answer makes sense in itself - it just seemed to be responding to somebody else. I basically learnt by downloading Unity stuff off Github and playing with it and I follow a lot of great accounts which I check regularly.

You hinted you’re worried about the perceived and hypothetical lack of synergy of GitHub and Unity reflecting on your perception of the latter, and you spoke about licensing concerns to reinforce that point. You also expanded your position in nearby comments. I’m advising you that the entire concern and approach you’re taking to source management, and your interpretation of the same as well as your beliefs about free…

> approaching it with questions like “why not Git?” or “why no type safety?” or “what about GPL?” marks you as not really understanding the industry,

Sorry - I'm trying to remember the contexts that I've said stuff like that in. You must have delved quite far back in my post history. Posting them as if they are direct quotes without context is a little unfair.

(Plus - I've got no interest in joining the mainstream games industry)

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#145

Post by _mkef »

jarsin wrote: post #109
_mkef wrote: post #93

Ehh. I really hope Unity raises tons of money , and inspires some decent competition here. Unity is the worst game engine, aside from all others. UE4 is a convoluted mess. I've tired several times , but even getting it setup with the C++ build chain is a pain. Godot ( which epic funded recently ) isn't done yet. I'm going to stick with Unity until someone else can build an easy to use game engine. Ultimately Unity do…

I think unreal is easier to use than Unity because Unreal comes with batteries included. Unity you have to fill all the gaps with 3rd party asset store plugins and deal with all their weirdness etc. Unity's recent changes into everything is a package is a total mess and reminds me of how Rails became a mess after it tried to move everything out of core and into gems.

I'd rather buy a 3rd party asset for the exact type of game I want to make.

You still have to put in effort, but if you find the right assets it can really make things happen faster.

The training material for Unity is above and beyond UE4. Any type of game you want to create already has a template on the Asset Store. UE's asset store is still packing .

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#146

Post by delfinom »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #137

In 5 years Unity will completely dominate the creative space, even outside of games you're going to be finding this tech everywhere and there is no double in my mind you'll be seeing the unity logo at the end of summer blockbuster credit sequences.

Unreal Engine is already very far ahead into the cinema space and already being used in numerous works being produced. Epic has been investing money into supporting toolchains and devices built to support Unreal Engine in cinema to boot. I simply don't see Unity catching up.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#147

Post by _mkef »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #96
_mkef wrote: post #93

Ehh. I really hope Unity raises tons of money , and inspires some decent competition here. Unity is the worst game engine, aside from all others. UE4 is a convoluted mess. I've tired several times , but even getting it setup with the C++ build chain is a pain. Godot ( which epic funded recently ) isn't done yet. I'm going to stick with Unity until someone else can build an easy to use game engine. Ultimately Unity do…

Isn't UE4 free for all use cases under a million dollar of revenue ?

My joke was it takes a much larger team to get anything done in UE4 .

I couldn't imagine solo dev on an Unreal Project .

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#148

Post by johnfn »

andybak wrote: post #123
johnfn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Here's a few examples, though I could produce a hundred more: AssetBundles. Not marked as obsolete. Not marked as deprecated. Unity docs look fine, with no references to anything else you should do: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AssetBundle.html . They are in fact obsolete anyways. See here: https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/assets-resources-and-assetb... "this tutorial has now been deprecated.…

Hmmmm. Is it possible that a tutorial is deprecated without the actual feature itself being deprecated? i.e. there's no intent to get rid of AssetBundles in the near future but they don't want people who are just starting out to go down that path? I can see that's a gray area (you are kinda deprecating it by doing this) but the strict definition of deprecation probably involves a pledge to remove that feature in a ce…

Maybe we're talking about two different things? To me, once you add a new feature intended to replace an old one, the old feature should be deprecated and should eventually be removed. Even if you can use AssetBundles, there's no reason you ever should because they've been superseded.

I've always thought that that is deprecation, but I could see your argument that it's not.

Fortunately I haven't had to deal with the officially deprecated features without a clear replacement. I can imagine that would be very frustrating.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#149

Post by xex70 »

johnfn wrote: post #143
xex70 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quote one sentence where I attacked you personally. I was quite careful to speak about your essay and its conclusions from the perspective of the intended audience, and if you think I’m going to engage after having that called an ad hominem, you don’t really understand the investment of time that would entail and why I’m strongly disincentivized.

A few quotes that I found particularly rough include: > Several of your points are misunderstandings, several are just wrong Like I said, I'd be happy to hear ways that I can improve. You saying that I am wrong but not providing specifics makes me feel bad without a way to improve my thinking. > “that person is going to have a hard time if they pursue professional game development,” You're passing judgement on my pro…

Perhaps your error is marrying yourself to your creative output and taking criticism thereof personally. Your essay is all over the place and plays a tune many folks in AAA have heard from many folks who got their start in Web development, and I was illustrating the broader context that, again, makes your intended audience develop that conclusion. Honestly, it reads like a projection of your expectations of software development, and that’s what I’m trying to tell you.

I was not accusing you of overengineering, I’m not accusing you of working for FAANG (I don’t even know you, come on), I was making the point that people default to where they’re comfortable, and if you’re going to put yourself in a a position of authority and claim that Unity is bad (and Unreal is worse), you need to be comfortable in the environment and practices in which they are intended to be used. There is a minimum level of comprehension required to criticize an implement of another profession, otherwise someone proficient in COBOL would pick up a torque wrench and ask “why is this necessary? This design is just bad.”

You used subjective indictment terms (“bad,” “worse”) to describe positions that you don’t have experience to develop. That’s fine. Elevate your argument and understand the why behind some of them. Example: we don’t give two shits about deprecations because they’re a distraction from a ship date and we ship vendored artifacts including the engine.

You selectively quoted more than one thing I said to twist a personal attack from them, by the way, but that’s your prerogative. It’s also odd to do when you’re crying ad hominem foul.

Edit: I took the time to read your essay, respond to it candidly, and we are ending this conversation with you lecturing me on tone, politeness, and productivity. Even in the face of great hems and haws I doubly endeavored to remain polite. One would be forgiven for thinking you are not approachable with criticism.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#150

Post by DonHopkins »

johnfn wrote: post #118
ImprobableTruth wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>GetComponent , possibly the most used Unity function, can easily trigger bugs because Unity does not statically verify that the component you're looking up exists I'm pretty sure checking this statically is simply fundamentally impossible since components can be removed at runtime.

That's true, but I've always thought that removing components at runtime is such a rare thing to do, and the cost of allowing it on an engine level - inability to statically verify components - is such a high price to pay that the tradeoff just doesn't make sense. If I was czar of Unity (ha!) I would never have allowed AddComponent and RemoveComponent to be a thing - I would have required the user to add all of the c…

Well so much for dynamic and procedural and data driven content, under your reign as Unity Czar. People use Unity for a lot more than Flappy Bird clones, you know.

Components do have an enabled flag.

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Behaviour-enabled.h...

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