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Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

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Re: Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

#51

Post by natosha_bard »

mkozlows wrote: post #24

So this is framed as a "things we should have done back then", but I think that the part about case-sensitive filenames show why that wouldn't work: "Of course we tried to be smart in the early days, but if you don’t set up a way to actually verify that what you’re doing works on a case-sensitive file system, then it will never fail that some well-intentioned programmer throws a toLower() in somewhere and ruins the p…

Right, it's in the category of "things I wish we would have done back then" because it would have been easy to solve: we could have simply had everyone install OS X (which is what Unity was originally written on) on a case-sensitive HFS+ filesystem, but we didn't do that. Ooops. Oh well. :-)

Re: Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

#52

Post by carussell »

azakai wrote: post #47
carussell wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no "opposite" emanating here. I'm making no assumptions beyond what we do know, and what I describe is what we do know, sans Unity's spin. There's only me saying, "I'm a little sick of seeing Unity's going swallowed without critique." You characterize that as unfair somehow. Companies A and B couldn't come to agreement to license something under terms Y that include $X in payment. Okay. There's neutrality in…

You said > So what we're really talking about is that Unity wants the improvements that have been made to Mono, but doesn't want to pay for them. which paints Unity as the bad guy, when for all we know, it might not be. Perhaps Unity is totally OK with paying for a license, but the Xamarin terms would have bankrupted it. But thank you for clarifying what you meant. I agree there is no point in saying either party is…

> which paints Unity as the bad guy

In what way at all? Entity A doesn't want to pay entity B $X. That's the only thing the comment of mine that you quote says.

There are shops around that sell quadcopters for hundreds of dollars. I want a quadcopter. I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars. Have I just painted myself as a bad guy?

I repeat: the only reason my comment sounds pro-Mono is because, at neutral, it resists the spin of the one that paints Unity as a victim and Mono as a fiend.

Re: Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

#53

Post by natosha_bard »

justthistime_ wrote: post #3

With .NET Core, is there any reason to not just drop IL2CPP completely? (The whole thing only existed in the first place because they are stuck on a completely outdated Mono version, due to Xamarin changing the license of newer Mono versions trying to extract money from Unity.)

il2cpp has advantages other than licensing (Mono is indeed open-source, but it is LGPL so it can only be used on platforms that comply with the LGPL; Unity runs on various non-LGPL platforms). il2cpp combines ease-of-use (C#) for Unity developers with native (C++) performance. What's not to love about that? :-P

Re: Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

#54

Post by shaan7 »

rdsnsca wrote: post #46
throwaway24242 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think native UIs are overrated and just cause headaches for developers. E.g. take the most popular UI system: HTML/CSS/JS: users have no problem with the fact that all their favourite websites look different. IMHO it is a better idea when the application enforces the same UI across platforms (like QT) than the platform expecting the same UI for all programs. On top of that QT does support native look&feel.

The truth is Mac user expect a Ui to look and feel native, otherwise you will be savaged in reviews, no matter how good your feature set. You last sentence tells me you have never used a QT app on a Mac, because it does not look and feel native.

There are ones that don't (Quassel for example) and there are ones that do (VLC for one). At the end there is always some polish a developer needs to do, no matter how awesome the toolkit gets. If the developer won't do that, your app will look crap. And its not just OSX, you write your Qt app on Windows and then you run it on Linux, you will need some fine tuning to look perfect.

I still prefer it over any other free IRC client for OSX simply because the feature set rocks.

Re: Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

#55

Post by natosha_bard »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #6
ianlevesque wrote: post #2

Gtk does sound like a better choice than raw X11, particularly as Wayland, Mir, and friends continue to grow.

Just curious. Why not go for QT for the whole GUI on all platforms?

Unity only uses native UI systems for Window management, input handling, and menus/file dialogs. The rest of Unity's UI is intentionally written in Unity's own GUI.

We chose GTK over QT for Linux because Unity 5.1 ships with CEF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework) as the embedded browser and CEF already pulls in a dependency on GTK).

Re: Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

#56

Post by kuschku »

natosha_bard wrote: post #45
jebblue wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in both cases. There would be no Ubuntu today without Debian (although I've never installed it because I tried years ago and found it to be too difficult which is why I went with Ubuntu after becoming less than enchanted with RedHat) and really I thought case issues were a thing of the 90's, early 2000's at the latest. I've read that Debian has gotten easier to install though but I'm not sure from their web s…

I can totally sympathize, and we'd like to support every distribution. :-( But the simple statistics show that we get the most bang for our buck by supporting Ubuntu because of its desktop market share. The great thing about the Linux community is that it's full if crazy smart people who will go out of their way to make sure stuff is working on their distribution. And of course if something isn't working on your dist…

Even worse, on Mac OSX some people use case-sensitive file systems. So you’d have to support it anyway.

Re: Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

#57

Post by throwaway24242 »

rdsnsca wrote: post #46
throwaway24242 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think native UIs are overrated and just cause headaches for developers. E.g. take the most popular UI system: HTML/CSS/JS: users have no problem with the fact that all their favourite websites look different. IMHO it is a better idea when the application enforces the same UI across platforms (like QT) than the platform expecting the same UI for all programs. On top of that QT does support native look&feel.

The truth is Mac user expect a Ui to look and feel native, otherwise you will be savaged in reviews, no matter how good your feature set. You last sentence tells me you have never used a QT app on a Mac, because it does not look and feel native.

But do the users care? I do not think so. Otherwise a lot of famous websites would have native UI clients.

Re: Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

#58

Post by azakai »

carussell wrote: post #52
azakai wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said > So what we're really talking about is that Unity wants the improvements that have been made to Mono, but doesn't want to pay for them. which paints Unity as the bad guy, when for all we know, it might not be. Perhaps Unity is totally OK with paying for a license, but the Xamarin terms would have bankrupted it. But thank you for clarifying what you meant. I agree there is no point in saying either party is…

> which paints Unity as the bad guy In what way at all? Entity A doesn't want to pay entity B $X. That's the only thing the comment of mine that you quote says. There are shops around that sell quadcopters for hundreds of dollars. I want a quadcopter. I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars. Have I just painted myself as a bad guy? I repeat: the only reason my comment sounds pro-Mono is because, at neutral, it resist…

"X wants Z, but doesn't want to pay Y for Z" implies several things. Perhaps you didn't intend them. But almost every reader will make those assumptions.

In particular, it sounds like Y is offering Z at a standard rate, as in "Sam wants a Chipotle burrito, but doesn't want to pay Chipotle for the burrito." Sam doesn't look good here - does Sam expect to get the burrito for free? Why does Sam think he is entitled to that?

Readers may not realize that there isn't a standard, objective rate for commercial licenses for Mono. Especially for the single biggest consumer of Mono, Unity, which uses it in products that its customers ship - a particularly complex situation.

Again, maybe you didn't intend to, but it sounded like you were saying something very negative about Unity. A less biased way to say it might be

"Unity and Mono could not arrive at mutually acceptable terms for Unity to license newer versions of Mono."

Re: Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

#59

Post by zem »

TillE wrote: post #8
hyperion2010 wrote: post #5

> it’s the place where case sensitivity problems really show up Who made the decision to have case insensitive file systems? If I had a time machine they would be high on the list of people to visit and give a stern talking to.

People always bring up the point that it's supposed to be more user-friendly, but all of those concerns are really better addressed in the UI rather than in the filesystem layer.

what is the ui layer going to do when you have both hello.txt and HELLO.TXT? if case-insensitivity is to be done at all, it has to be enforced at the file system level that the two names refer to the same file.

Re: Porting the Unity Editor to Linux: Stuff I Wish We’d Done Then

#60

Post by sirtaj »

jebblue wrote: post #36
JupiterMoon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious. Why not go for QT for the whole GUI on all platforms?

It seems Gtk has won, why don't the QT developers and supporters move to the Gtk camp and work to make it better rather then keep QT alive which just wastes efforts.

Because for professional development, there's really no comparison; Qt is on a different level from GTK entirely. I just did a keyword search on Monster India - Qt: 69 jobs, GTK: 3 jobs.
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