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An Unreal Decision

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Re: An Unreal Decision

#41

Post by binarycrusader »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #39

I'm a PC game developer that's been using Unity for 2.5 years, and it was pretty clear after getting involved in the ecosystem that Unity Technologies was just resting on its laurels, and making decisions primarily on marketing to sell even more copies. Just a few pain points: 1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, bein…

Or maybe these are all difficult things to solve and you're just now seeing large projects to address them finally reach completion?

Sorry, but your "resting on its laurels" is clearly not true. If you had bothered to track the improvements made to Unity's rendering engine (or the addition of Unity 2D support) over the last two years (well before the Unreal engine subscription launch), you'd see they actually have been doing quite a bit.

I do agree that the situation around Mono is pretty unfortunate, and that is clearly a business decision they've made. But they're also trying to find a way to mitigate that as should be clear from announcements made over the last year.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#42

Post by keerthiko »

klodolph wrote: post #2

I've been bitten before by some of the problems regarding Unity and collaboration with source control. Everyone wants to test out their changes on the same scene, but it just blows up when you go to merge... even if you use a dumb merge strategy like ours or theirs (as a Git user) it seems to break things. Unity seems really cool, but I'm never going to use it again for any project with more than one programmer.

We build BitGym (www.bitgym.com) using Unity, and it has a lot of moving parts and 2-3 developers working on scene, code and assets, and we've made it work with git. It really comes down to developing and maintaining some best practices:

- Always use prefabs wherever possible. But avoid nesting prefabs

- Always save your prefabs, then save the scene before pushing. Thus the .prefab files are also updated through git: these are more robust and have higher priority than the scene.

- Make sure source control uses meta files (unless you're using Unity's Asset Server) so that scene references are stored again in separate files updated through git.

- Make sure individual developers have a lock on individual prefabs. Unlike scripts, Unity will bomb changes from one side of the merge on binary files, but this is expected when using git on binary files. Of course you can treat the scripts as any other code project, and they merge fine.

It's still not ideal, and we occasionally wind up with merge issues or a day of having to carefully iron out scene conflicts when doing larger branch merges, but they haven't been so dreadful as to make us decide never to use it again because of the collaboration issues.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#43

Post by ivanca »

binarycrusader wrote: post #41
reitzensteinm wrote: post #39

I'm a PC game developer that's been using Unity for 2.5 years, and it was pretty clear after getting involved in the ecosystem that Unity Technologies was just resting on its laurels, and making decisions primarily on marketing to sell even more copies. Just a few pain points: 1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, bein…

Or maybe these are all difficult things to solve and you're just now seeing large projects to address them finally reach completion? Sorry, but your "resting on its laurels" is clearly not true. If you had bothered to track the improvements made to Unity's rendering engine (or the addition of Unity 2D support) over the last two years (well before the Unreal engine subscription launch), you'd see they actually have be…

Not true, instead of focusing in people that are a bit serious about game development they have done plenty of bad chooses, 64 bit processors on home PCs exist since more than a decade ago, and their engine was created in 2006 for 32 bit platforms, when it was clear 64 bits processors were here to stay. Also the GUI system is one of the worst GUI systems I have ever seen, yeah yeah they say they are going to fix it in Unity 5 but we need to develop games now, not tomorrow. Also calling JavaScript to their "implementation" of what comes down as just a mask for C# was a huge marketing mistake.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#44

Post by ivanca »

christoph wrote: post #33
keerthiko wrote: post #29

My teammate and I started moonlighting on the first game for our studio about 8 months ago, right before Epic announced the current $19.95/seat pricing model. We decided to go with Unity purely because I already owned a Pro license, that we could use to make final beta builds and be responsible for the advanced visual effects that needed Pro. Additionally I already had lots of experience with Unity, and nearly none w…

You highlight one of Unity's real strengths here that is often forgotten - the asset store. Want to drop in a nice city scene? Thats 10 bucks. Want realistic car physics? That's 10 bucks. A few nice NPC's with rigged faces? Thats 20 bucks. A pack of nice shaders? 10 bucks. I don't think Unity is targeting AAA developers at all. Its targeting small studios that want to get ideas built quickly. It's got great, simple O…

Absolutely false, using imported materials and creating your own is extremely easy to do in Unreal, and there are tons online of stores where you can buy 3D models, Unreal integrates pretty well with all kinds of 3D models (including riggs) specially those from Autodesk Maya. And over top of that there is an Asset Store for Unreal, is called the Marketplace and the EPIC team is filling it itself with tons of free high quality materials and models.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#45

Post by keerthiko »

mrfusion wrote: post #19
nacs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By hiring a graphics person or by creating it yourself. There are some free assets out there but they're mostly low-quality and the few production-quality ones are used in numerous low-quality games.

Why aren't more production quality ones free or available for sale? It seems like it might encourage more foss games?

Besides the reasons mentioned, another point I've heard from talented artist friends is that specific art assets have a tiny market -- Most games require the art to be customized a non-trivial amount to suit their game's atmosphere, theme, color schemes, etc -- Even generic things like zombies, fighter jets, rocket launchers, medkits, etc. So stock art assets tend to only be used in prototyping phases, and after that an artist is contracted to finalize the asset.

Since this is the usage of their products (early prototypes), artists can't charge the premium they deserve for the quality of the product.

The only way they can is they create super-specific but very cliche/popular artwork, like planet earth, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, iPhone, Desert Eagle, etc, which can actually be sold for a premium because they can be used as-is in polished final games. And then, only the best one or two of each item rise to the top of the marketplace and obviously noone needs the rest.

The Unity Asset store is a good place to look to get an idea for the economics of free/for-sale art assets. There are very few models/art assets that can be used in production, and the most usable/popular items are either tools, customizable assets like shaders, particle effects and materials, prototyping asset packs, or the specific items like I mentioned. And none of them can sell for very much.

From Unity devs I've heard the tools category makes the most money.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#46

Post by reitzensteinm »

binarycrusader wrote: post #41
reitzensteinm wrote: post #39

I'm a PC game developer that's been using Unity for 2.5 years, and it was pretty clear after getting involved in the ecosystem that Unity Technologies was just resting on its laurels, and making decisions primarily on marketing to sell even more copies. Just a few pain points: 1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, bein…

Or maybe these are all difficult things to solve and you're just now seeing large projects to address them finally reach completion? Sorry, but your "resting on its laurels" is clearly not true. If you had bothered to track the improvements made to Unity's rendering engine (or the addition of Unity 2D support) over the last two years (well before the Unreal engine subscription launch), you'd see they actually have be…

As I understand it, the projects aren't nearing completion. The features are coming in Unity 5.x, which means over the next few years (since 5.0 isn't even out yet).

If the timing were purely coincidental, and the effort routine, you'd expect to see a big problem being solved every now and then. Instead we've gone from radio silence to a barrage of activity.

You also seem to be making the mistake of assuming that the Unreal engine subscription public announcement was the first Unity Technologies realized the threat. It's a small industry, and the default assumption should be that people talk to one another and know which way the wind is blowing.

Unity2D is actually one of the things I had in mind when I wrote the post. It seemed to me to be aimed at increasing the potential market size for Unity, rather than something that made life better for existing developers.

My post was not to claim that Unity was doing nothing; only that they were not acting like they had a fierce competitor. I believe that now they are. And that is a fantastic thing. It makes me much more comfortable being on the Unity platform, because my ideal preference is to stay on something like this for a decade. I want Unity to succeed.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#47

Post by Coincoin »

oafitupa wrote: post #20
Coincoin wrote: post #9

As someone who tried to develop a Unity game on a big team, it was hell. The collaboration is horrible, there are conflicts all the time for no reason. Simply getting the source, running the game and updating would produce conflicts. We also had to buy the cache licenses to make it somewhat workable. But the worst was the support. It was worthless. Anytime we would open a ticket, they would simply google and return u…

Wow, that's horrible. So what do you recommend?

For a big team, either use Unreal or the in house engine.

I heard good things about Havok's game engine too, and their support is the best I've ever seen.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#48

Post by sillysaurus3 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #18
vertex-four wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If, for whatever reason, you're hell-bent on producing a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL, you could always use something along the lines of node-webkit[0] and distribute it the usual way. Personally, I rather significantly doubt that people would play more AAA games if they could download them in their browser rather than Steam. [0] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

Why wouldn't you want to produce a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL? It should be the default, not some crazy thing. The best argument against javascript + WebGL is "javascript is bad." But the disadvantages of JS are sometimes strengths. The lack of static typing, for example, allows a REPL. It's true that with an average gamedev team, you'll get below average results. But with an above-average team, power…

This has been up for three hours, and it's telling that no one has replied to it with a rebuttal.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#49

Post by joeld42 »

I'm writing my own engine. That's a terrible idea, I'd be much better off with either unity or unreal. But since game dev is more of a hobby for me, and writing the engine is the fun part, I'm ok with that.

However, for smallish projects (smaller than Republic Sniper, I mean) sometimes it's the right choice. I see a lot of indies struggling with lugging around and maintaining a huge engine (unity, especially, but even cocos2d), and running up against the limitations like difficulty integrating with native sdk features, and their game's requirements are modest enough that they could probably code it from scratch in not too much time.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#50

Post by [deleted] »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #39

I'm a PC game developer that's been using Unity for 2.5 years, and it was pretty clear after getting involved in the ecosystem that Unity Technologies was just resting on its laurels, and making decisions primarily on marketing to sell even more copies. Just a few pain points: 1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, bein…

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