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What Unity Is Getting Wrong

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Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#261

Post by kbenson »

drawkbox wrote: post #248
kbenson wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate. That Rust is a AAA title? It's not, as I understand it. AAA is not a designation of quality or popularity, it's a designation of resources that go into it. Large company with lots of resources putting lots of money behind it means AAA. It's less a designation of the end product than of the process going into that product.

Just mentioned that it was on the list of games in terms of popularity, never said it was AAA. However, Garry has lots of pull in games including towards AAA developers. I did not say that game was AAA but on the notable Unity list that everyone knows about. Rust is much bigger than most Unity games, so Garry's opinion on this is highly relevant and influential. Facepunch studios and their forums were also a gamedev…

I think you misinterpreted my original comment (which is why yours seemed like a non-sequitur to me).

I wasn't saying Garry doesn't have any big games, I was saying that the list of games made using Unity doesn't include many big/AAA games. I also wondered why this might be.

To clarify, I'm not saying there aren't AAA Unity games, just that I didn't immediately see one. Nor am I stating that Rust is not as good as a AAA game, I made my position clear that AAA is more to do with resources. I would even go so far as to say it's more of a marketing term. What I am saying is that is seems like (from the lists I saw) a lot more large and AAA titles are made using Unreal Engine, and I wondered what specifically leads to that.

> The point is Garry's opinion is more valid than most, even at AAA probably about Unity.

I'm not sure why that's the point. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about. This thread was about Unity being better targeted as small/indie/mobile developers, and I was responding in that context.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#262

Post by skcode »

shafyy wrote: post #194
avolcano wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious - is your team using GDScript, C#, or C++ primarily? It seems like GDScript is still the happy path for compatibility, but I have mixed feelings about it as a language (though I've written enough Python to be relatively productive in it in my little Godot experiments).

We're using GDScript and like it a lot. I find that I'm much faster than with C# and haven't had any performance issues yet. The good thing is that you can mix and match languages as you like. So you could write 99% in GDScript and there's something where you really need performance just write it in C++, Rust, Python or any other language you want. It looks like that they're re-working GDScript for 4.0, so that'll ge…

I've used Unity and Unreal Engine 4 for a while I don't think i'll want to switch from UE4 for 3D based things i'm pretty excited for Godot 4.0 and all the new nifty features I've been hearing about.

Does it make sense to hold off diving into Godot until 4.0 (for 2D-based things) or will there not be too much to "relearn"?

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#263

Post by justinram11 »

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…

Has anyone been able to get decent performance for Unity Builds out of VMWare Fusion VMs on MacOS?

We are using 2018 Mac Minis which (AFAIK) cannot install VMWare ESXi without a bunch of trouble, but Unity builds within VMWare Fusion take 2-3x as long as running on bare metal (I assume because there is no 3d acceleration support for MacOS?).

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#264

Post by hnick »

jayd16 wrote: post #166
learc83 wrote: post #34

> They hid all the hard stuff in c++ so we didn't have to think about it. The more time has gone on, the more bullshit has crept to the forefront. The've gone from hiding the hard stuff to moving more and more stuff into C#. I love that they are moving more and more stuff in C#. It's a good thing. The C# code is available for developers to view and modify, but no one is forcing you to. The problem is that a lot of Un…

I agree. Moving things to C# reduces interop overhead and I think it's the right direction. If you don't want to look at engine code, don't. Why does anyone care it's in C# if they're not looking at it anyway?

> Why does anyone care it's in C# if they're not looking at it anyway?

Garbage collection probably. Some games have noticeable stutter. But I assume there are ways around that, similar to using Java in HFT.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#265

Post by ethbro »

drawkbox wrote: post #15
SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unity has more engineers than Epic. It's funny. I see it (anecdotally) all the time. More engineers doesn't mean a better product. In fact at my old shop, things (product, quality) really started declining once we 'rapidly' scaled the team. Communication and consistency really suffered from lack of solid processes among other things.

I think it comes down to power in the company. Unity was extremely simple and small before, once they got John Riccitiello it become a management/business focused company over engineering leaders in terms of power and direction. Unreal has Tim Sweeney, and old school guy that understands how to make a game engine and has done it over and over. They learned alot from Unity, and are now doing it better than them once t…

It comes down to a truism about generally anything: it's inefficient to figure out how to do a thing without some amount of doing a thing.

It's not a huge surprise someone building games makes a better game engine than someone building a game engine. Because they solved the problems they ran into!

You see this time and time again with businesses. Dogfood, and you'll have a lot better idea of where the warts are in your product. (And most importantly, waste less time fixing things you're convinced are warts, but nobody ever noticed)

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#266

Post by [deleted] »

fxtentacle wrote: post #213
gentleman11 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that is open source

That is correct. But since I'm in the business of selling my source code, I don't find that problematic. Actually, it kind of helps me that my customers know that the engine is not free. I need access to the source code to understand hidden magic and fix bugs, but I don't need a license that would allow me to redistribute the modified source code.

[deleted]

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#267

Post by gentleman11 »

hashamali wrote: post #197

Unity does miss on a lot of things, but I'd like to point out one of its best qualities: the pricing model. Compared to Unreal, Unity is a steal. Despite Unreal's recent changes to not collect royalties on the first $1m of gross revenue, its license can get quite expensive if you have a successful game. * Unity: $1800 / year, no royalties. (Unity Pro) * Unreal: 5% of gross revenue.

If you have a 10 person team and your game makes $10M after roughly 2 years dev, with Unity you spend about $2,036,000 but with unreal you pay $2,500,000, just taking development and licensing costs into account.

If unreal gave you 20% more productivity due to being more stable, I think even successful games come out ahead by being able to release sooner (saving money on dev time), or by better sales from having a more stable and visually appealing end result.

Unity is costing me days per week right now fighting with flickering terrains or line renderers that throw errors, all stuff that ends up in the ever growing "known issues" list

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#268

Post by paulryanrogers »

hnick wrote: post #259
kbenson wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I remembered there being some bigger games, but looking at a list[1], they are all pretty indie, or at least small. Not sure I saw a AAA game on the list (which doesn't mean there aren't any, but they seem rare). The equivalent list for Unreal Engine[2] does contain quite a few big titles (along with a plethora of less well known ones). I'm not sure if that's cause, effect or marketing. It could be that usi…

Hearthstone is the largest that comes to mind, I'm not sure if it qualifies as a AAA game but it's from a large studio with a lot of experience and earns AAA money.

So a virtual card game where most of the complexity is server side?

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#269

Post by hnick »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #268
hnick wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hearthstone is the largest that comes to mind, I'm not sure if it qualifies as a AAA game but it's from a large studio with a lot of experience and earns AAA money.

So a virtual card game where most of the complexity is server side?

Hardly a complex product compared to some, yes, but time to market and speed of iteration are still important. I don't like the game but the presentation and feel was good when I tried it.

I don't know how well it worked out for them overall though, and I don't recall seeing them use Unity again on another game.

Re: What Unity Is Getting Wrong

#270

Post by codeyperson »

bullen wrote: post #36

There are two main reasons to avoid Unity: 1) As your project grows, it becomes unmanageable because the resource pipeline is hidden and you want to be able to improve that. 2) Skin mesh animation, which is the main point of using Unity in the first place, uses a compute shader which means they send all meshes from the CPU to the GPU every frame! On the other hand Unreal takes 5 hours to compile and even Godot takes…

Unity offers so much beyond your narrow experience.

I’ve made tonnes of games in Unity and never experienced either of these concerns.

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