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Unity Software Inc S-1

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Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#191

Post by Tossrock »

boogies wrote: post #167
akersten wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Are people really writing DAWs and big desktop app interfaces in Unity? I’d love to know if Unity is made in Unity. The Godot game engine’s development environment is made in Godot (which is why it was able to be run in web browsers using WebAssembly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23354286 ).

Unity is not really made in Unity - the core engine is in C++ that is separate from the userland C# scripts. However, it uses the same UI library that's available to users (IMGUI, and being upgraded to UIToolkit), which makes it easy to extend.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#192

Post by boarnoah »

panopticon wrote: post #141
akersten wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Lion king

I'm fairly sure this is incorrect.

Unsure about Lion King specifically but all of the other recent Jon Favreau titles (The Mandalorian, The Jungle Book) have done virtual production with Unreal Engine.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#193

Post by furyofantares »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #125
furyofantares wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a highly experienced programmer and I can't get started with Unity. Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now. But I just want to see some code and drive from code. The workflow of starting from objects and scenes in a GUI and attaching scripts is totally foreign to me. And then most of the tutorials seem to be videos, which I have no patience for, with text I can skip around and tailor my learning to my personal need…

Have you done any game programming before? A heavy reliance on an interactive GUI is very common because there are many things for which you want visual interactivity, such as placing 3D objects in relation to each other. That kind of task is either difficult or impossible to do effectively purely in code.

I have. Placing objects in an editor is obviously essential, I agree. I just expect to find code at the bottom driving it, loading the map etc, and it doesn't seem like any example projects or learning documentation for Unity is geared that way. Basically I expect to follow code at the bottom until it loads some asset, which may create a bunch of objects, and register some scripts. Then I return to the code which can then get those objects if it wants.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#194

Post by Tossrock »

MrLeap wrote: post #182
formalsystem wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Their post processing stack has changed like 5 times in the last 2 years, breaking old methods of post processing. Hopefully now that SRP is getting more mature that particular thing will slow down. The videoplayer component broke for a few months. Builtins got pealed out into the package manager and it trivially broke some code. I don't know how long shuriken is for this world (good riddance imo, vfx graph is so muc…

Not to mention IMGUI => UGUI => UIElements/UIToolkit, InputManager => Actions, Animation => Timeline, GameObject/Component => ECS/DOTS, ParticleSystem => VFXGraph, Legacy renderer => Scriptable Render pipeline, etc etc

edit: whoops didn't see you'd already mentioned VFX graph

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#195

Post by Vermeulen »

brundolf wrote: post #87
DizzyDoo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not - they didn't deprecate the 'built in' render pipeline, and said they don't plan to until the new one has feature parity. They have odd marketing for their new features - where they want developers to use them so they call them production ready - but they do that so they can get feedback and continue to fix them

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#197

Post by maccard »

setzer22 wrote: post #176
xex70 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

Genuinely curious. You insist a VCS is not how the industry operates. But then how do those AAA devs manage synchronizing changes across a team of several hundreds of people? I imagine there must be some equivalent to VCS that better fits the gamedev indurstry. Or are people just throwing flash drives around the office?

Perforce. You have an always online server, and binary files can only be checked out by one person at a time (enforced by the server). Its big, it's clunky, the UI (p4v) sucks more than you could possibly imagine, but it scales.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#198

Post by panopticon »

boarnoah wrote: post #192
panopticon wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Lion king I'm fairly sure this is incorrect. Unsure about Lion King specifically but all of the other recent Jon Favreau titles (The Mandalorian, The Jungle Book) have done virtual production with Unreal Engine.

From Engadget[0]:

> The workflow of The Lion King was vastly different to The Jungle Book. MPC worked on 'master scenes' in London with industry-standard tools such as Maya. It then developed an "asset management system" that could translate the scene into something that was compatible with Unity, a popular game engine.

Also, this YouTube video[1] goes over the process in more detail.

[0]: https://www.engadget.com/2019-07-29-lion-king-remake-vfx-mpc...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCnayCnM6Zk

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#199

Post by Vermeulen »

johnfn wrote: post #100
andybak wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.…

The 'Addressables' are a abstraction layer on TOP of AssetBundles. AssetBundles aren't deprecated.

Honestly most of the criticisms you've gave are you not understanding how something works - like GetComponent. I do agree with you on 'null' though! And how Unity uses it. I think that decision came from them trying to make it more beginner friendly to deal with destroyed/removed objects when it first started - then they had to live with it

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#200

Post by danbolt »

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…

My biggest thought about game programming not necessarily having the same engineering culture as the web is due to the financial/business incentives for various engineering practices. I think React and a lot of other web tools are designed for programmers creating services that continually operate and generate revenue. Meanwhile, a video game's development is closer to a theatre production or a film.

Traditionally, a video game has a point where development stops and is never resumed again. In the past this might have been lot check or "going gold"; today it might be a few post-release patches. There's a point where you don't keep working on your entertainment product and resources are invested elsewhere for more revenue. I think this means that the value of paying off structural technical debt might be always less than the revenue from your first month of sales. I think that changes the decision-making of management as their game's performance might be better off with a month of heroics and duct-tape rather than missing a holiday release date. I don't get the impression that profit incentives are the same with most typical web services.

There are big exceptions to this, of course. Many more games are service-based these days. I think we're starting to see them adopt more stable practices like the rest of software engineering at both big [2] and small [1] scales.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9HRzE7_2Xc [2] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-08-04-bungies-13...

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