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Unity Software Inc S-1

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Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#181
post #82
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they just bought the developer. I worry about all the good synergy I was getting from Unity stuff using Github as a default is going to dry up if there's a non-open, non-public VCS as the default. I love trawling Github for interesting Unity projects.

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’…

> The AAA I’m working on has about 75 KB of code

Do you really mean 75KB of code or is that exaggeration for effect? That comes out to, I don't know, about 2,000 lines of code? I assume you're not including engine code in here, but still - 2k just seems orders of magnitude off from what I would expect a AAA game to have. Is most of the logic not implemented using code, but rather some other method?

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#182
post #19

I use Unity every day at work. This is a mixed bag for me. Unity gives google a run for their money when it comes to abandoning old features / letting them rot. The editor is kind of crashy, launch times get unwieldy fast. Sometimes there's subtle differences between build version and running in the editor, and solving the disparity is a death march. All that said, it's still one of my favorite environments to work i…

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 much better.)

Shadergraph adds and loses nodes every version.

If you start a project in the same version you finish it in, it's not too bad. If you upgrade because you want to use a new-shiny, the surgery becomes more apparent.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#183
post #97
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you played Hearthstone? It was released in 2013 and I wouldn't call their graphics "high end" by any stretch of the imagination. If racing games or FIFA run fluently on a Galaxy Tab S4, so should Hearthstone... Even their PC version is laggy, check out streamers restarting the game (!) before important and action packed battlegrounds turns.

Racing games and FIFA can reuse a lot of texture data. Same rock. Same uniform. Repeating crowd. That said, HS just runs on mobile. It's not optimized for it. It's obvious when you can only look at a chunk of your collection at a time instead of smoothly scrolling that the cards take up a lot of ram. Users also have a lot more control over what is shown on screen. For a FIFA game everything is loaded beforehand. In a…

That's really not an excuse. Doing some back of the envelope math shows that even the full collection of all Hearthstone cards would easily fit into RAM:

~0.25MB (size of a sample original artwork from[0]) * 3410 (number of playable cards in the game[1]) = ~850MB

> For a FIFA game everything is loaded beforehand. In a card game that has to hide information, it has to load as the game progresses.

During every single match of Hearthstone all the cards are also known beforehand (to the device), and they are a fraction of the full card collection.

[0]: https://hearthstonejson.com/docs/images.html

[1]: https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Card

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at MongoDB's performance since IPO in 2017 for perspective. I know that this opinion goes against the hivemind, but I wouldn't call them weak in engineering by a long shot. They obviously made some questionable/bad decisions regarding defaults (write acknowledgements, security) in order to have a lower barrier to entry, but apart from that I've had a pretty good experience with it as a stable product and good…

The important question is how does it compare to Unreal in terms of bugs, problems, and usability?

Not only Unreal. I think the even bigger question is how does it compare to all the incumbent tools of the industries they are trying to replace.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually, there is a 'no short' window after IPO. It is better to buy put options as it limits your downside risk. Unless you are a big dog (can actually effect the market). Then shorting is better because you can force the price in your favor.

put options are fine too, do you know where I can buy them?

You can only get them after they eventually IPO.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it compare to Unreal in terms of ease of use and getting the job done? (I'm thinking Unreal is better performance wise; not very interested in that.)

In these terms it outperforms Unreal. Ease of use and speed of development is main points why I have been using Unity for years.

What about Godot? The anecdotal evidence I’ve heard has seemed to say that Godot is the best for rapid prototyping because of GDScript, and maybe easier animation.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#187
post #154

Unity has completely destroyed my faith in their ability to deliver on anything other than marketing. - It took them YEARS to deliver their new input system. Think about that. A company with Unity's resources took YEARS to develop a system that takes inputs from keyboards, mice, and gamepads and routes them to C# callbacks. YEARS. - They completely abandoned their networking system (UNET) without a replacement system…

Its not that they can't build anything. URP is ok. It cuts out features that made it slower so its not going to ever hit feature parity. The problem is indeed that the marketing oversold it. They should have never suggested devs "move" to URP. For new games its alright.

URP doesn't support casting dynamic shadows from point lights[0], something which many games use and should really be a feature in a production-ready game engine.

[0]: https://forum.unity.com/threads/urp-point-light-shadows.8819...

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#189

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…

I've made a node-editor based UI heavy application for real-time texture synthesis in Unity[0], for which it is quite good. Although I agree that it doesn't integrate platform native UI patterns well.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xU4Dtp7cV8

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#190
Web developers are learning it’s all pointer math on arrays.

Which game engines happen to be heavily optimized for.

SRE tools could be VR based. Omg lookit me pretending to manage a real server. Meanwhile its just sending something that conforms to an API spec.

There’s your singularity

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