Unity Software Inc S-1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#71

Post by andybak » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:32 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #62

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…

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)

Yeah. They managed to come up with an interesting innovation. Non-human readable YAML...

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#72

Post by johnfn » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

synaesthesisx wrote: post #50

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…

After watching how many SaaS companies with "weak" engineering have soared to astronomical valuations, I would say I'm quite bullish on Unity (as a stock), irrespective of what developers think. At the end of the day, fantastic marketing is what gets CXO's and decision makers to buy-in. Look at MongoDB's performance since IPO in 2017 for perspective.

Honestly, that's a good point. As an engineer I can definitely get a little too focused on the engineering side of things.

The MongoDB example is fascinating to me. I'd love to know why they're doing so well.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#73

Post by andybak » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

brett-k wrote: post #67

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…

Plastic SCM is pretty great at handling Unity projects of all shapes and sizes.

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.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#74

Post by formalsystem » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

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…

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 just very satisfying to make games with Unity that I'm willing to tolerate/ignore the issues with it.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#75

Post by DizzyDoo » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #59

DizzyDoo wrote: post #56

Like some others who are commenting, I use Unity for my job every day, and it's not been a great experience these last few years, each 'part' (graphics pipelines, documentation, Editor and tooling, and so on) has been steadily deteriorating over the versions. This article from Garry (from Garry's Mod, Rust and so on) from earlier in the year is still all accurate: https://garry.tv/unity-2020 Sadly, I wonder how much…

What I've heard is that many of the problems are growing-pains; Unity has some really deep technical debt and they're (perhaps too hastily) ripping it out and updating things, which is causing angst for devs when a) their existing projects break, and b) in some cases the old system actually gets deprecated before the new one reaches parity. But it also sounds like all of the completely new stuff that doesn't involve…

I really, really wish it did.

Here's just one concrete example: real-time point-light shadows in the Universal Render Pipeline. URP is the new 'default' way of rendering, the old renderer is being phased out, this is the new way of doing things - as you say; technical debt as they re-engineer. But how horrid has this process of eliminating technical debt been? You've got Unity proudly announcing that URP was 'production ready' in February 2019, but you still can't have a point-light cast real-time shadows. Currently that (let's face it, really basic) feature is planned for Unity 2020.2, which is still in alpha, but even if you download the alpha you can't access that feature yet, and they've announced they're not going to backport it, so bad luck if you're using 2019 or even 2020.1 for your game.

It's actually making me a bit sad to go into detail on what watching the URP fiasco, so I'll spare any other examples involving post-processing stacks, or 'camera stacking', or Ambient Occlusion, or...

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#76

Post by andybak » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

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…

Weirdly enough I got into Unity to give myself a break from the waking nightmare that front-end development seemed to be turning in to. I still dabble in back-end Django and a bit of framework-free front-end but I've been enjoying Unity/C# for non-commercial projects.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#77

Post by franknine » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #62

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…

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)

You also need to make sure .meta files are set to visible and get committed along with the assets, or the asset references will be completely messed up. Unity also makes visible .meta default now, and some would create a git hook to do a pre-commit check.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#78

Post by oblio » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #69

oblio wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hearthstone is built with Unity. I don't know if it's on Blizzard or on Unity (though, comparing things to other Blizzard games, I'd suspect Unity), but Hearthstone uses an awful lot of resources and is quite laggy on mobile, despite it presenting a pretty bare-bones 3D scene with barely any special effects.

Card games use a lot of high res art. They take a surprising amount of textures.

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.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#79

Post by wastedhours » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #11

VonGuard wrote: post #6

This should be a monster. We have no direct game development tools exposure on the stock market, unless you count Autodesk, but their tools are usable by other industries. That means it's gonna be shouldering a burden for an entire industry, and one that the stock market doesn't understand or appreciate. Potential for going either way, really. Development tools have traditionally been a poor investment long term, but…

> That means it's gonna be shouldering a burden for an entire industry > Unity is also gonna be a proxy for Unreal Why do you think it has to do all these things? Why can't it just be a stock on its own?

There's always a sector influence on the valuation of stocks - if an analyst writes a report saying the gaming sector as a whole is going to grow 1000x in the next 10 years, you can bet people will be looking for stocks to ride that wave.

If Unity is the only buyable stock in the sector, then they'll feel the impact.

Re: Unity Software Inc S-1

#80

Post by chaostheory » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

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…

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.)