What Unity Is Getting Wrong • Hacker News Board

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#101

Post by Danieru » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #69

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,…

Mmm... how’s that unreal engine version upgrade going for you? break your plugins? break your blueprints? can’t actually tell because they don't fail until you run them? :) Just saying; A lot of people say this kind of stuff, but unreal isn’t all roses either. (don’t believe me? read about it yourself https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/c-gam... )

Great, nope, nope, and nope.

I've been continously upgrading a couple months behind new releases on commercial projects since 2015. I've upgraded about 17 times so far. Unreal's update story is light years ahead of Unity's half-hearted "automated" mess.

Worse bug I had was back in 2016 when an upgrade lost reset the scale on weighted bones to 0.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#102

Post by frenchie14 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

mpartel wrote: post #70

voppe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 developers have to deal with if the small prototypes I cranked out were that painful. Careful adherence to best practices (often discovered the hard way), banning certain code pitfalls with a linter, and many workarounds :( It took me months to make something semi-usable out of (a subse…

If you haven't already, take a look at Mirror - open source reimplementation of UNET with hundreds of bug fixes and improvements

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#103

Post by enumjorge » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

sloopy543 wrote: post #89

I'll just sit back and eat popcorn as I work with my custom handmade game engine. None of this is a concern for me, and it has been refreshing to work directly with the graphics pipeline and in lower level languages that give me direct control. If something is wrong, it's my own damn fault. For those who want to get away from being totally dependent on third-party frameworks and tools, check out Handmade Hero. It was…

Once you know how to do something, it’s easy to forget how much time and effort it took to get there. Making your own engine comes at a cost, and if you’re an artist or new to development, it’s a pretty high barrier of entry.

Unity initially presented a good value proposition. You lose some control, but the engine will do a lot for you. Even for experienced devs this meant saving time. And I think Unity got this popular because they largely delivered on that promise. It seems the problem is that they’re butchering the evolution of the platform. Judging by the comments here, if Unity we’re doing a better job of rolling out and documenting changes, and stabilizing the product I think people would be happy choosing it.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#104

Post by michaelbrave » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

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,…

It's not just the instability but it seems/feels like every cool new feature they implement is then never updated again.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#105

Post by username90 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

machisuji wrote: post #96

_bxg1 wrote: post #12

I'm so frustrated that Unity and Unreal are the only two real options. And it's all because of console vendors. Unreal is just way too inaccessible, as an individual, non-C++-veteran (used it a bunch in college, but modern C++ looks nothing like what I've seen), non-games-industry-veteran. It's also fairly opinionated towards first person/third person action games. And then Unity is of course a dumpster fire. It's mu…

I was always ruling out Unreal as an option due to C++ because I'm no good with C++ and it seems scary. But in the end I got so frustrated with Unity that we did do the switch to Unreal. So far I actually had to do a lot less coding in Unreal than in Unity. There's almost nothing you can't do in blueprints. The only thing I had to write C++ for is some JSON parsing because the existing JSON blueprint libraries (from…

How much C++ you need depends on what kind of game you are making. You probably wont make a game like Civilization in blueprints.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#106

Post by Danieru » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #53

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,…

In my opinion, studios using Unity were always the ones too cheap to hire external freelancers to help their development, but instead going with copy&paste from (outdated) internet tutorials. I mean with Unity's deprecation speed, a tutorial from 2018 is basically unusable now. So effectively, my work was mostly UE, because that's where the customers were. But just out of curiosity, can you give me a hint where you f…

I'm Tokyo based so bunch of local multi-billion dollar companies doing Unity. Mobile games for the most part. A good chunk of their developers or either outsourced to smaller local studios, or contractors themselves.

Unreal contracting is even better. Most of the AAA studios switched from in-house engines to Unreal. Thus constant unmet demand for expertise and production on big console projects.

Granted what counts as okay money here might not match what you are hoping for. With the up side that Tokyo is never going to run out of gamedev work.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#107

Post by cpeterso » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #81

hosh wrote: post #28

I support CI for my team's Unity builds. I don't know much about the engine itself, but I can tell you that the tooling for automating Unity builds really sucks. I had a long list of reasons why, but my impulse blocker cut me out. Oh well. Here's a much smaller list: - You have to jump through many hoops to run Unity in headless mode - I cannot separate out build processes into discrete stages - Linux version is behi…

Requiring Mac OS to build binaries is unfortunately an Apple restriction. Apple has a large number of both technical and legal barriers allowing cross compiling.

Mozilla cross-compiles Firefox's macOS (and Windows) builds on Linux. Build times are much faster on Linux and build scripts for macOS, Windows, and Linux can share more common code.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921040

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#108

Post by partyboat1586 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

bullen wrote: post #80

partyboat1586 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with writing your own engine is cross platform support. The grunt work that goes into that is something only a big studio can afford. That said It has been done, see Heaps[0]. [0] https://heaps.io

If you take a long-term perspective; console and mobile are going away, you can't have a computer that you cannot produce on. That leaves Windows on Intel and Linux on ARM. That is two platforms to support, not that hard really! And really long-term Windows on Intel is going to go away too because of energy prices. Another thing to consider is that CPUs and GPUs are not improving that much, so the engine you build no…

That is an interesting and certainly very long term perspective.

I want a device I can also produce on but do most consumers really want that? I think they want something simple that does one thing. This is one of the reasons I think the switch has been so successful. I can't see my portable tablet / laptop / workstation incorporating joysticks. Also with GPUs stagnating as you mentioned high end games will still need to run on high power devices like consoles.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#109

Post by cableshaft » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

dgb23 wrote: post #24

_bxg1 wrote: post #12

I'm so frustrated that Unity and Unreal are the only two real options. And it's all because of console vendors. Unreal is just way too inaccessible, as an individual, non-C++-veteran (used it a bunch in college, but modern C++ looks nothing like what I've seen), non-games-industry-veteran. It's also fairly opinionated towards first person/third person action games. And then Unity is of course a dumpster fire. It's mu…

I'm looking forward of what becomes of the Jai programming language.

I'd love for there to be some way to start experimenting with it. I understand it still has a long ways to go, but I'd like to get more of a feel for it outside of Jonathan Blow's 4 hour+ work sessions on Youtube.

I understand the likely reason why he isn't, because he doesn't want to have people bugging him for support on it, but if I could sign a "I promise not to email you any questions about it and I'm using this at my own risk, pinky swear" and get access to download the latest version of it, I would.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#110

Post by tomc1985 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

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 tried to write stuff in Unity as someone with a working knowledge of C# and who wrote code in it professionally in the past. No environment was as infuriating as Unity as seemingly everything I wanted to do was overridden by the Unity API, and their given alternatives both didn't work as advertised and were barely documented