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I learned Unity the wrong way

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Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#71

Post by InexSquirrel »

andai wrote: post #5

What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code. The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap. --- As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back. https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game... There's a great list of Fun…

I was thinking about this too, and I think there are two different views you can take.

1. Do you want to work IN the games industry? 2. Do you want to make and ship your own games?

I think the overall internal engineering standard for #1 is higher, because you're ultimately assessed against that standard by others.

For #2 _as long as it works_, you can get away with some under the hood crap, but you're the one that suffers for it (and hopefully not your players). I think I'd be wary (as I'm wary of this for myself), that aiming for #2 gives you an easy out to produce crap, as no one is holding you to standard other than yourself. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it obviously, but it's a risk.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#72

Post by mixmastamyk »

lossyalgo wrote: post #44
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh... I've had two bad hires in two years that were exactly like this - if you can't follow simple instructions, how have you survived in this career for this long?

Ugh... we have a new colleague who does this repeatedly. Most recently, I said in order to build, you need to do this: - git clone - git clone - git clone What do they do? git clone repo1, 2, 3 without giving parameter, which clones into default folders named after the repos. Build fails of course because repo1 depends on repo2 and 3 being named specifically. He sends me the error log (remote colleague, yay) and I sa…

Available now, can follow directions, and yes write scripts to automate that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609859

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#73

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

I think the author's being a bit hard on themselves.

Vanishingly few people ever learn a new thing optimally. Programming in particular takes years to learn thoroughly enough to get to a level where you can consistently produce quality work. It's normal to have gaps in your knowledge that you realise would've been better to fill earlier in your journey.

Like, there would be plenty of people who spent years studying data structures, algorithms, and other fundamentals who never actually built anything in that time.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#74

Post by [deleted] »

tharkun__ wrote: post #66
lossyalgo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and there are other fun gotchas that even more frustrating and convoluted. But everything is thoroughly documented and I even explicitly pointed out those potential issues before I gave them the assignment. When the errors first occurred, I pointed out the fix, which was ignored, multiple times. Should it be that difficult to rename a couple folders? The compiler errors were fairly easy to understand: can't…

See, I would probably have been the guy that ignores the dest part. On purpose. Just to see whether this pile of poo shits itself and how much. I would also recognize what happened when I see the error messages though and then silent quit until I've been with you guys for long enough my resume doesn't take a hit just because your interview process duped me into starting at your place. Yes this sounds harsh. I know. N…

[deleted]

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#75

Post by ryandrake »

HiPhish wrote: post #50

It takes a lot of humility and strength to admit this. Kudos to the author. I was similar to that in the past, chasing tutorials and only having half-baked knowledge. What shook me out of that was this article: https://fabiensanglard.net/c/ I'm going to start with the things I didn't take too seriously: Internet tutorials, blogs and almost anything brought by Google (yes, it includes this article). I usually consider…

Knowing the literature is criminally underrated. Nobody even asks for it anymore. I used to ask candidates when was the last time you implemented something described in a paper or textbook, and walk me through how you did it, and after 2010 or so, people stopped even being able to come up with an answer. I've worked with junior developers who get stumped with basic things like what units or format for arguments to pass to some SDK provided function, and they try everything besides reading the official SDK docs.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#76

Post by lossyalgo »

tharkun__ wrote: post #66
lossyalgo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and there are other fun gotchas that even more frustrating and convoluted. But everything is thoroughly documented and I even explicitly pointed out those potential issues before I gave them the assignment. When the errors first occurred, I pointed out the fix, which was ignored, multiple times. Should it be that difficult to rename a couple folders? The compiler errors were fairly easy to understand: can't…

See, I would probably have been the guy that ignores the dest part. On purpose. Just to see whether this pile of poo shits itself and how much. I would also recognize what happened when I see the error messages though and then silent quit until I've been with you guys for long enough my resume doesn't take a hit just because your interview process duped me into starting at your place. Yes this sounds harsh. I know. N…

haha I would totally empathize with you. But see, you would realize immediately that it doesn't work and why, but you are smart enough to realize it and would just rename the folder (as mentioned in the readme as the very first thing to do), hit build and voila, everything works as expected, instead of sending me log files, letting me debug your errors, ignoring my repeated instructions, waste my time helping you debug, back and forth until finally you just rename and move on. I had to say it 4x before it finally stuck. This guy seemingly wanted to get an initial build done so he could move on to actually fixing bugs. Maybe it's intentional to waste everyone's time so that he can book hours in the system and get paid for futzing around? :shrug:

and btw the system doesn't shit itself that much: the compiler errors are fairly straight-forward: this folder doesn't exist.

Of course everyone can always do better, but it's a legacy inherited system, and works fine, as long as things are named correctly. The readme is actually very short - literally the git commands are there to copy/paste and will create the correct directory names. There are plenty of other things to get hung up on, but naming folders correctly should IMO not be one of them.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#77

Post by lossyalgo »

eterm wrote: post #61
chupasaurus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have depedent projects, they should either be in a monorepo, or delivered through a packaging system so they are not depend on the specific local naming of other repos. Git submodules is a thing ...

I'm not a fan of submodules, but indeed that also solves the problem OP described.

Our git master actually considered this, but it would have caused other issues that I can't recall right now, so we got stuck with lots of repos. The readme literally has all the git commands, all they had to do was copy/paste them into the terminal.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#78

Post by chupasaurus »

eterm wrote: post #61
chupasaurus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have depedent projects, they should either be in a monorepo, or delivered through a packaging system so they are not depend on the specific local naming of other repos. Git submodules is a thing ...

I'm not a fan of submodules, but indeed that also solves the problem OP described.

It's literally made for this specific case.

edit: removed stupid hack that wouldn't work.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#79

Post by lossyalgo »

ryandrake wrote: post #69
lossyalgo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and there are other fun gotchas that even more frustrating and convoluted. But everything is thoroughly documented and I even explicitly pointed out those potential issues before I gave them the assignment. When the errors first occurred, I pointed out the fix, which was ignored, multiple times. Should it be that difficult to rename a couple folders? The compiler errors were fairly easy to understand: can't…

I hear you, but I still feel for the coworker, and if I newly joined a company and learned on my first day that they are failing the Joel Test[1] here in 2026, I would get that sinking feeling in my stomach that I made a huge mistake. There is no longer a valid excuse for having a build like that. "It's documented..." and "Nobody wants to touch..." "Not worth it to..." "Can't justify..." are all huge red flags. 1: ht…

Nice list, somehow I missed that one. I love Joel's wisdom.

The full build literally works in one step but the main prerequisite is to perform a few git clone commands which can be copy/pasted from the readme. Can't help it if they want to manually do git clone and let it name folders incorrectly and then subsequently ignore compiler errors and my advice to rename. Changing our antiquated workflow would have required changing a lot of other sensitive dependencies. What ever happened to the old adage "never change a running system" ? ;)

And people here are concentrating on our build system, which I will be the first to admit isn't perfect, but this isn't the only instance of me telling this person how to do things, them not listening to me and doing something else, letting me debug only to realize they didn't listen, telling them how to fix, only to be ignored _again_, rinse and repeat. It's unfortunately a recurring theme. I initially thought it was a communication error on my part, but I've heard similar complaints from several other colleagues as well.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#80

Post by chupasaurus »

lossyalgo wrote: post #77
eterm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of submodules, but indeed that also solves the problem OP described.

Our git master actually considered this, but it would have caused other issues that I can't recall right now, so we got stuck with lots of repos. The readme literally has all the git commands, all they had to do was copy/paste them into the terminal.

The problem with submodules in your scenario might be the mutual dependency of repos, everything else is just extra work with git config.
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