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Unity Software Inc S-1

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Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#231

Post by _mkef »

tiborsaas wrote: post #219
_mkef wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My joke was it takes a much larger team to get anything done in UE4 . I couldn't imagine solo dev on an Unreal Project .

We tried it for a hackathon and after a day or so we got some stuff going. Of course it's a monster engine, but you can learn it as a side project, then after a month you can start building something. I don't see why a solo dev couldn't handle it.

C++ is hard.

The available learning resources for Unity are much better than they are for UE4. I want to add X to my game, I Google it and find ether an asset or open source project within minutes .

For my current project I found a half dozen templates to start from. Everything in UDK was ether half done or abandoned.

Of course both , or even rolling your own , are fine.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#232

Post by johnfn »

DonHopkins wrote: post #225
johnfn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally and completely agree with everything you've said, but the fact that Rider - a 3rd party IDE - has to ensure all these things rather than them being baked into Unity is part of the problem.

But Unity isn't an IDE, it's a game engine. Totally different things. Better for Unity to spend their time and energy on the game engine and editor, not making yet another half-assed IDE. Developing an entire IDE simply isn't in their wheelhouse. While it's a lot easier for somebody like Rider who already has a full blown C# IDE to support Unity.

The thing is, avoiding usage of certain functions - like Find, Invoke, SendMessage, etc - does not have to be done at the IDE level. In fact, it shouldn't be, and the fact that Rider has to do these things is kind of a kludge already. These methods should be marked obsolete - or at the very least, they should have docstrings saying not to use them. Observe how the docs for SendMessage don't even discourage its use, for example: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/GameObject.SendMess...

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#233

Post by tiborsaas »

_mkef wrote: post #231
tiborsaas wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried it for a hackathon and after a day or so we got some stuff going. Of course it's a monster engine, but you can learn it as a side project, then after a month you can start building something. I don't see why a solo dev couldn't handle it.

C++ is hard. The available learning resources for Unity are much better than they are for UE4. I want to add X to my game, I Google it and find ether an asset or open source project within minutes . For my current project I found a half dozen templates to start from. Everything in UDK was ether half done or abandoned. Of course both , or even rolling your own , are fine.

True, we haven't touched C++, only the blueprint editor. It takes you far.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#235

Post by danbolt »

johnfn wrote: post #212
danbolt wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a really interesting thought. It makes a lot of sense. Here's another one I've had that I'll throw on the pile: video games are generally highly demanding of the CPU. They'll use every cycle they can get their hands on. Web apps, on the other hand, have a ton of downtime and generally don't need to hit 60FPS (with rare exceptions). This means that they can spend their extra cycles on better abstraction layers,…

My general suggestion for programmers trying to understand something strange or seemingly odd in the games industry is to check for an economic/value incentive rather than a technical one.

Unity has a lot of warts like your article indicates, but it gets a huge amount of bang/buck producing a not-big-budget multi-platform title with a multidisciplined team. I think that provides a lot of value for developers; so much that it outweighs the snags involved in Unity's technical shortcomings. Unity's roadmap is probably about expanding shipability for smaller developers and why Unreal is trying to commoditize that with Godot.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#236

Post by jayd16 »

hobofan wrote: post #183
jayd16 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Some things you might not be aware of:

Hearthstone cards have several texture maps per card for the foil card effects. When textures are stored in ram they are not compressed (not as png or jpeg anyway). Its closer to a full 4 bytes per pixel. Textures also use mipmaps which take up an extra 33%. Not to mention the animations, effects and and the texture memory they bring. Its much more RAM than you think. Just look at the (fully compressed) install size of over 3GB. The menu textures do not take over 2GB.

The game came out in 2014 when the latest iPhone had 1GB of RAM (less than 512MB usable for the whole app, essentially.) Its tuned to be under that cap, which forces a lot of disk reads instead of keeping things in RAM.

>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.

This is actually false as some cards can spawn a random card from the full collection.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#237

Post by tanilama »

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…

I don't think React vs Unity is the debate that we all cant wait for it to happen?

After all, Web has DOM tree as its fundamental data structure to fiddle with, while Games are just a series of objects that can orient/interact with each other however they like.

And obviously performance reason will affect abstractions as well, e.g. the Micro/Macro Kernel debate.

To say Unity isn't good enough because React is good at abstracting Web development away doesn't seem to hold too much ground in terms of logic coherence

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#238

Post by reitzensteinm »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #70
MrLeap wrote: 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…

Stockholm Syndrome is on my mind frequently with this engine. I’m hoping their promise of 2021 being a stability and productivity focus will come true. It’s hugely frustrating to see how poorly planned their roadmap is. I have access to core support and their private slack, and you’d be surprised how short notice some of their decisions have been.

I would not be surprised.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#239

Post by Gibbon1 »

specialist wrote: post #208
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…

"...I have a really hard time taking them seriously for UI-driven application development." It's been a long time since I've done serious UI work, so am not aware of the latest grievances. But it'd be great if stock UI frameworks were more like game (simulation) engines. Scene graphs, composition, event loops, command objects, etc. Just like sufficiently complex C programs become buggy implementations of LISP, intere…

Potential advantage to Unity is it was developed from the ground up to do all that. Unlike the browser.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#240

Post by movedx »

gentleman11 wrote: post #202
formalsystem wrote: post #22

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…

I was a fan of unity until they retroactively changed their asset store license. They revoked some of your usage rights in a cash grab in February (specifically, the right to let freelancers use your assets, so now you have to buy them their own copies). How can you depend on a company like that for the crux of your business when they use their “we can modify these terms at any time” clauses in a predatory way agains…

> I was a fan of unity until they retroactively changed their asset store license.

Pretty certain you can't do that.

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