What Unity Is Getting Wrong • Hacker News Board

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#111

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

bullen wrote: post #87

Jasper_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would using a compute shader mean mesh data is sent every frame? Compute skinning is mostly the same as doing it in the vertex shader but you don't have to skin again for the different passes, instead you store to some GPU memory (so up the tradeoff is extra memory bandwidth on the GPU). No extra CPU/GPU traffic should be used here.

Well if you analyze Unity you'll see they send all meshes every frame. It might be because they want to be able to apply the same shaders on characters as on objects, but still vertex GPU skinning is the way to go and Unity does not. So you can't build a MMO with Unity!

> So you can't build a MMO with Unity!

This has nothing to do with the skinning method, and I agree with the other poster. It should retain the same vertex buffer in GPU RAM and simply deform it in the shader.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#112

Post by etaioinshrdlu » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

samsaga2 wrote: post #51

There is also Amazon Lumberyard. Which is totally free, you only have to pay if you use AWS for multiplayer. It is a fork of CryEngine. It looks really nice.

It's UX is ... not great. I couldn't even figure out how to open a project from a folder on disk. Not joking. I really tried.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#113

Post by username90 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

bullen wrote: post #93

andybak wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Skin mesh animation, which is the main point of using Unity in the first place, That's an odd thing to say. I've never used it personally. Even if it's used in the majority of games saying it's the "main point of using Unity" is overstating things. It's simply one feature out of many that Unity provides. > The only option is to fold your shirt sleeves up and build your own engine. It's not that hard really. Maybe f…

The only thing that Unity provides that has any chance of saving you time is the skin mesh animation = FBX or Collada to Mech Anim pipeline. If you don't need that you should _never_ even consider using Unity. If you are not interested by the underlying tech of any category of computing, you are not a programmer.

> The only thing that Unity provides that has any chance of saving you time is the skin mesh animation

Unity has saved me a lot of time and I don't use the skin mesh animation system.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#114

Post by randtrain34 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

Godot Engine https://godotengine.org/ is much more user-friendly in my experience.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#115

Post by cableshaft » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

_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…

While it might not be a good fit for a some people, Monogame is still active, still ports to most systems, and it's totally free. I ported my old XNA/Xbox 360 game to that pretty much in one night (since it's based on XNA) and have been working on remaking it for desktop/mobile/eventually console.

It's still being used for some pretty mainstream Indie games, like just-released Streets of Rage 4, Flinthook, Celeste, Bastion, Fez, Axiom Verge, Stardew Valley, TowerFall, etc.

Doesn't have all the mess or constantly moving target that everything else has, either. I mean it changed so little from XNA 4 that I could easily port a game designed for Xbox 360 over to it (shaders and storage took some extra time).

https://www.monogame.net/showcase/

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#116

Post by fxtentacle » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

drawkbox wrote: post #22

pjmlp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at their market share across Switch games, first party support from Google, Nintendo and Microsoft for their gaming platforms and AR/VR devices, ongoing Hollywood adoption, I would say they are doing quite alright from business point of view.

I agree, Unity strength is their platform support. They will always be viable. However the simplicity and speed are taking a hit. This is coming from someone that got companies to switch to Unity because it was so good for a time and in many ways still is. I got the game studio I was working at to buy our first Mac back when it was Mac only in 2009. I have put up the warning to them many times but it seems to be gett…

I would like Unity a lot more if I was allowed to avoid the buggy new pipelines. But as soon as something more shiny comes along, they stop supporting the old and working way. By now, the "universal" render pipeline has know bugs, but they are considered "won't fix" because you could circumvent that specific bug by using HDRP, which of course will bring with it lots of other bugs.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#117

Post by gfxgirl » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

mpartel wrote: post #60

As a Unity user emphatically sharing these frustrations, I'd be really curious to hear from long-time Unreal devs whether the grass really is greener on the other side. How's Unreal's - API stability? - Editor stability? (I have some old experiences of it being quite crashy too, and you know, C++ ...) - Backwards compatibility and upgradeability?

I am also curious to know. I have no Unreal experience but some Unity experience. Have only made a few hackathon level games and plugins.

Unity seems amazing to me. It's like a game engine editor creation system. Every game needs custom tools and they are relatively trivial to create in Unity from small, just create a struct and get a UI in the inspector, to add a few lines of code and get a custom control for your data, to entire plugins with multi-window UIs etc. And, at least for my use cases I can do this live. I don't need to exit the editor, recompile the editor itself, and then re-run which seems to be the Unreal way?

Unreal devs tell me they don't need any tools. They just use what's built in. That makes no sense to me. Every game I've ever worked on (15 shipping AAA games over 30 years) required custom tools unless you wanted to subject your designers to lots of rote data input.

I'm sure there are some subset of games where you just fill out a world with 3d objects and use the built in systems as is but that seems like a very limiting subset.

What is that experience like in Unreal?

I know at least one indie dev what was on Unity, switched to Unreal for one project, and is now switching back to Unity. I know another that was on Unity and switched to Unreal. They haven't shipped yet so not sure what their experience is. Both are small teams, 5 to 10 people. Neither has shipped a hit title.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#118

Post by johnfn » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:37 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…

> I'm not really sure why more people don't do their own thing.

I've certainly considered it, but one thing holds me back: cross-platform targeting. I'd love for my game to eventually run on the Switch, to say nothing of more basic targets like MacOS, Windows and Linux. Targeting those platforms would be a herculean effort.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#119

Post by fxtentacle » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

partyboat1586 wrote: post #95

pjmlp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually only see these type comments in forums like HN. In game development communities, it is another universe.

And what is the word on Unity in game development communities?

My biggest grief with Unity is that they only made the C#, but not the C++ part of the engine open source. So there can be release-blocking bugs that you cannot fix yourself, due to lack of source code. And when I tried to purchase Unity source code access, I was just ignored.

Unreal Engine on the other hand has source code available for everything, so you can be sure that if such a bug hits, you can just patch it yourself and continue working.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#120

Post by mpartel » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

frenchie14 wrote: post #102

mpartel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

My main complaints about UNET could be summarized as "the order in which things happen is very chaotic" (in unbelievably many ways!). I've not checked to what degree Mirror has improved on this.

Based on a superficial look, I'm worried it might have been more concerned with adding features than fixing and simplifying the fundamentals, but I don't really know.