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Unity Software Inc S-1

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Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#271

Post by moron4hire »

alexbanks wrote: post #133
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…

This is my first time being involved in a game. Is there a way to make dependency/package management not abysmal? I was legitimately shocked when I realized that if you wanted to install a .net standard 2.0 library, you had to manually walk the dependency tree of that library and download/copy every single DLL into your app. Did I miss something? (probably)

A very cheap way of getting all the netstandard2 dependencies together in one place for the sake of Unity's bullshit is to create a vestigial .NET Framework 4.7 library that imports all of the .NET Standard 2.0 libraries you care about, and then set its output directory to somewhere within your Unity project's Assets/Plugins directory.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#272

Post by moron4hire »

MrLeap wrote: post #182
formalsystem wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 muc…

Unfortunately, you can't really count on sticking to a single version of Unity. There are so many bugs in the system that you will run into blocking issues at some point, with the only option to be either wait for Unity to release an update that finally fixes the issue, or end-run around them and write a replacement for whatever bugged subsystem you're dealing with.

I had a year long dance with Unity around a number of unrelated issues. At the beginning of the year, vLatest couldn't render with anti aliasing on the Oculus Go, no matter the level of scene complexity. That eventually got fixed, bit then stereo rendering broke. That eventually got fixed, but then JSON deserialization broke. That had a work around that doubled the size of my APK and increasef the time per game by 20%, so performance took a nose dive, but at least that was something within the realm of manageable.

Unity might be great if you are a raw beginner and you literally know nothing about suffrage development. But it is not a tool that can effectively be used to create quality, stable software that works well on a variety of user systems. If you're already know how to program and you're interested in making great products, you'll be better off leaving Unity behind and making apps without a game engine.

I'm done with it. 5 years was enough. I'm going back to WebGL for the little stuff. I'm using Veldrid in .NET Core for bigger stuff. Everything else outside of graphics is ludicrously easy in comparison.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#273

Post by staysaasy »

reaperhulk wrote: post #94
caymanjim wrote: post #60

There's no mention of Apple here, but I suspect the timing of this is directly related to Apple threatening to cut off Epic's SDK access due to the fight over app purchase fees. This was almost certainly in the works already, but now they need to accelerate it.

In my experience it is exceedingly difficult to meaningfully accelerate the timelines on publishing an S-1. There are too many lawyers, financial audits, investor roadshow schedules, et cetera. This is likely pure coincidence.

100%. It's typically a multi-month endeavor that has been planned on a multi-year time horizon.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#274

Post by moron4hire »

MrLeap wrote: post #178
brundolf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what issues it still has with version-control? I know that for a while the default asset format was binary instead of text, but I believe they made text the default a little while ago (I've used Unity in a hobby capacity over the years but never professionally)

Scene files are the biggest thing. They're merge conflict magnets. You breath aggressively and they'll "change". Our workflow tends to be based around prefabs, and a main scene we _rarely_ change. Despite never touching it, everyone on the team has to revert Main.scene before committing, pretty much every time. VFX Graphs are also pretty nuts. Cut one line and it changes 3000 lines of code. This isn't the biggest dea…

I've found additive scenes a little nicer for avoiding scene merge conflicts. Additive scenes come with a lot of baggage of their own, but it's worth it to learn to get that initial start up time down way more.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#275

Post by mariusor »

setzer22 wrote: post #176
xex70 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

Genuinely curious. You insist a VCS is not how the industry operates. But then how do those AAA devs manage synchronizing changes across a team of several hundreds of people? I imagine there must be some equivalent to VCS that better fits the gamedev indurstry. Or are people just throwing flash drives around the office?

I've seen indie devs use SVN for source and assets versioning.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#276

Post by fxtentacle »

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…

Reading your comment makes me incredibly jealous, as I can only wish and hope to one day have a pleasant experience with Unity like you.

Whenever I had to work with it in the past, we ran into bugs inside the closed-source C++ part of the engine which then delayed release or required expensive workarounds. Their sales department is ghosting us because we're a mid-sized company and their support is closing tickets for "LTS = long term support" releases as "please resubmit with current beta".

Then there's the overall st-show with Unity deprecating things as soon as they have a beta draft for its replacement, which basically forced everyone to use external networking libraries. Plus HDRP is still buggy, but they already removed the old built-in RP.

And if that wasn't bad enough already, their own built services will randomly fail if you use advanced features, because they run their OS X builts in QEMU on linux or something.

Last time I checked, they now also deprecated the ability to write custom shaders. I agree with their reasoning that I should not need them. But with all the buggy mess in their engine, I surely DO need them just for workarounds.

For fairness of comparison, we've run into equally bad bugs with UE4. But at least for Unreal, I have full C++ source code so I can fix things and move on. With Unity, you're constantly waiting for their support team to (ignore you / close your ticket / make fun of you) help you.

As for the Unity ML agents, I find that rather scary. There have been many papers about AIs exploiting bugs in the training environment. Given how buggy Unity is, I would expect AIs trained in Unity ML to wreck havoc in the real world because they're used to the physics glitching or something like that.

Unity is great to get started as a hobbyist. But as soon as you actually want to release something on a consumer quality level, it becomes walk through complexity hell.

There's a very good reason why every bigger Unity studio purchases source code access and has dedicated Unity-bug-fixing employees on staff.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#277

Post by fxtentacle »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #239
specialist wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...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.

Potential advantage to using a browser is that it actually works. Unlike Unity.

But in the end, Electron or Unity doesn't matter, both are equally bloated.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#278

Post by fxtentacle »

akersten wrote: post #26
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…

> 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…

Agree. Unity has rather verbose graphs to describe GUIs, so it is more like XAML, which I guess works, but isn't exactly elegant. And no, Unity doesn't have any accessibility by default. Plus it tends to have a few ms of mouse cursor lag, which can be pretty infuriating to power users.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#279

Post by fxtentacle »

jayd16 wrote: post #158
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…

The pain comes after you finish 80% of the game and start to work on the 2nd 80%.

Exactly my experience. That's when bugs from 5 years ago hit and block your release.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#280

Post by fxtentacle »

movedx wrote: post #240
gentleman11 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty certain they did that, even though you can in theory challenge it in court.
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