10 ms·

Unity has learned all the wrong lessons. Their success was largely from the verdant asset store and the asset developers who augmented a creaky platform with wo

Unity has learned all the wrong lessons. Their success was largely from the verdant asset store and the asset developers who augmented a creaky platform with wonderful and useful tools to shorten development time. They never figured out how to maintain sane compatibility for these tools version to version, nor a way to sustain and compensate these authors. Which brings us to today: a shady acquisition to sneak malware tech into games while they continue to neglect the community that made them who they are.

mordae 4y ago
Good times for Godot, nice!
- extrememacaroni 4y ago
  People keep bringing up Godot but there's no way around the fact that it feels like some guy's homebrew engine through and through, especially once you try to use the native C++ side. But you don't really need to get that far to realize how janky it is. You can't even delete assets that may or may not be used in scenes without running into errors and warnings that may be benign but eat away at your trust that things will still work fine later down the line. The GUI tools are atrocious compared to Unity's and they fail at the most important thing: make sure that when you play the game the GUI looks exactly the same as in the designer. There's also some weird jank with the GUI, where you have to reload the scene to see some changes being applied (like, imagine setting some property in, say, a winform, and having to close and reopen the winform's editor to see it actually having an effect, wtf) but I don't think it's limited to the GUI, I forgot what those were exactly. But there's no indication that you need to reload the scene, you google the problem and the answer is "reload the scene". There's a loooooooong way to go for Godot to reach Unity's level. They'd have to essentially become the next Blender, which I use as the benchmark for open source community driven projects. Godot == Unity at home. The best thing about it is that you have access to the source for free, so you can fix bugs yourself. "We may run into issues three years down the line with the project but at least we can fix them ourselves". How attractive this sounds to you depends, I assume serious developers who want to build large games for profit, will choose either Unity or Unreal because they're expected to work better overall.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    > You can't even [common action] without running into errors and warnings that may be benign but eat away at your trust that things will still work fine later down the line. To be fair, in my experience this is par for the course in Unity too
    - noobermin 4y ago
      Caveat, this is a meta post. I'm not a gamedev (not professionally at least), and don't have experience in either. This reminds me of something I rant about often, linux naysayers on HN. Because of them, I tried buying a macbook in 2015 and had some of my most frustrating experiences in my life, culminating in a talk for a national conference I had to redo on a friends windows laptop in half an hour because it failed to display on the projector. Turns out the HN crowd who kept saying "mac is unix like linux but better since it's not a bazaar open source mess" aren't always right after all. People have some bad experiences with X product where X product is often open source and being open source explains the bad experiences. However, when Y product also offers similar bad experiences (and even worse ones) but they paper over it in their minds because "it just happens" although it's probably just because they're used to it. Repeat for photoshop and gimp (my SO is an animator and adobe products crashing is a common experience, as is redoing work in case a save was forgotten), linux and mac, etc. Anyway, I'm not a gamedev, I just see a similar pattern and it's hard not to notice.
      - dkonofalski 4y ago
        >I had to redo on a friends windows laptop in half an hour because it failed to display on the projector What situation would possibly require you to redo a presentation because it can't display on a projector? PowerPoint is cross-platform and Keynote can export to PowerPoint. This seems like hyperbole.
      - entropicdrifter 4y ago
        As a Linux user on my daily drivers and a Mac user on my work-issued machine, I agree with this sentiment completely. Linux has weird issues a good amount of the time if you're trying to do unusual stuff, but so do Windows and Mac, and on those platforms you're less equipped to pop the hood and fix the underlying issue.
- ensignavenger 4y ago
  Another option that is still young (young as an Open Source project, but has a lot of historic development behind it) is O3DE (https://www.o3de.org/ https://www.o3de.org/) I think this has a lot of potential if it gets enough attention and development.
  - fyrn- 4y ago
    I don't have much hope for it, I know several people that worked for amazon lumberyard (it's old name), that have quit because that organization is collapsing in on itself, losing engineers way faster than they can hire, and the engine is still buried under a mountain of tech debt inherited from Cryengine (that real Cryengine has resolved a long time ago) One quit because the new render was so performance intensive, an rtx 2080 super was min spec for the lightest of scenes to achieve 60fps. Another because he became the last engineer on his team after all the others quit and moved elsewhere at Amazon. Even hoping open source saves it is unlikely, as it's only in name. The CI and infrastructure to meaningfully develop it open source does not exist. As a final nail, the install process takes over two hours, which is just not competitive.
  - beepbeepcabbage 4y ago
    C# vs C++ Godot is C#
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      Godot is C++. You can use C# (among others) to write game logic in it.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  but also, maybe it's a good time to try dropping the scene graph/ECS way of doing things—there are other ways to make video games!
  - nomel 4y ago
    > there are other ways to make video games! Any interesting, practical, examples?
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      I'm having trouble understanding the question—there's plenty of open-source games that do not use ECS or a Unity-style scene graph. this mode of thinking being the default is relatively recent in the history of video game development. if you've never tried something like that before, PICO-8 might be a good starting point. this blog post might also prove useful: https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265481-oop-is-dead-long-live-oop/ https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265481-oop-is-dead-long...
      - nomel 4y ago
        > I'm having trouble understanding the question I've only slightly dabbled in game engines, and have only been exposed to ECS and scene graphs, so I was asking for other methods, since they don't seem to be nearly as popular. Searching gives me results, but I can't qualify them, so maybe aren't "interesting" to actual game devs. I added "practical" because this is HN, where sometimes theoretical tangents take hold. :) But thanks!
        ummonk 4y ago
        Honestly I think most sensible ways of organizing renderable entities end up approximating either ECS or scene graphs. The difference is that you’re doing the management yourself instead of relying on engine’s functionality, so you get way less features but way more performance due to lack of unnecessary overhead.
    - 4y ago
SXX 4y ago
You could guess how Unity will end up after John Riccitiello became it's CEO. After all Electronic Arts was one of most hated anti-consumer companies ever.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
BoorishBears 4y ago
I'd argue the asset store was the beginning of the (very slow) end. Before the asset store Unity's community was a hotbed of openly shared innovation. The moment Unity gave people an easy way to slap together what would have been a quick post to the forums with a webplayer link, some code samples and a few paragraphs explaining it... into a paid package that sells for $5... that ended quickly. And the worst part is, the skillset to manage a paid library is not the same one needed to develop some cool tech! There are so so many packages on the asset store that are practically abandoned, or poorly suited for integration into someone else's codebase (some people have no issue with warnings everywhere in their code for example...), or are poorly documented, or will break on any platform that wasn't the original dev's personal machine. The list goes on. - I don't have anything against indie game devs making money, I know the struggle of slaving away at something and ending up broke for your trouble... but I really wish the asset store had been restricted to game assets like 3D models, sounds, etc. It's not like people wouldn't be able to sell their code then either. It's just before the asset store if you wanted to create a paid distributed library, the inertia you'd have to overcome was a pretty good filter against low-effort attempts. There were still successful libraries that were worked on full time and sold as products
sauntheninja 4y ago
The compatibility between versions has always bit me when trying to learn unity. I find a tutorial on a short game and when I try to open that in Unity its incompatible with a newer version and you have to then go browse unity forums for an answer

mordae 4y ago

Good times for Godot, nice!

extrememacaroni 4y ago
People keep bringing up Godot but there's no way around the fact that it feels like some guy's homebrew engine through and through, especially once you try to use the native C++ side. But you don't really need to get that far to realize how janky it is. You can't even delete assets that may or may not be used in scenes without running into errors and warnings that may be benign but eat away at your trust that things will still work fine later down the line. The GUI tools are atrocious compared to Unity's and they fail at the most important thing: make sure that when you play the game the GUI looks exactly the same as in the designer. There's also some weird jank with the GUI, where you have to reload the scene to see some changes being applied (like, imagine setting some property in, say, a winform, and having to close and reopen the winform's editor to see it actually having an effect, wtf) but I don't think it's limited to the GUI, I forgot what those were exactly. But there's no indication that you need to reload the scene, you google the problem and the answer is "reload the scene". There's a loooooooong way to go for Godot to reach Unity's level. They'd have to essentially become the next Blender, which I use as the benchmark for open source community driven projects. Godot == Unity at home. The best thing about it is that you have access to the source for free, so you can fix bugs yourself. "We may run into issues three years down the line with the project but at least we can fix them ourselves". How attractive this sounds to you depends, I assume serious developers who want to build large games for profit, will choose either Unity or Unreal because they're expected to work better overall.
- brundolf 4y ago
  > You can't even [common action] without running into errors and warnings that may be benign but eat away at your trust that things will still work fine later down the line. To be fair, in my experience this is par for the course in Unity too
  - noobermin 4y ago
    Caveat, this is a meta post. I'm not a gamedev (not professionally at least), and don't have experience in either. This reminds me of something I rant about often, linux naysayers on HN. Because of them, I tried buying a macbook in 2015 and had some of my most frustrating experiences in my life, culminating in a talk for a national conference I had to redo on a friends windows laptop in half an hour because it failed to display on the projector. Turns out the HN crowd who kept saying "mac is unix like linux but better since it's not a bazaar open source mess" aren't always right after all. People have some bad experiences with X product where X product is often open source and being open source explains the bad experiences. However, when Y product also offers similar bad experiences (and even worse ones) but they paper over it in their minds because "it just happens" although it's probably just because they're used to it. Repeat for photoshop and gimp (my SO is an animator and adobe products crashing is a common experience, as is redoing work in case a save was forgotten), linux and mac, etc. Anyway, I'm not a gamedev, I just see a similar pattern and it's hard not to notice.
    - dkonofalski 4y ago
      >I had to redo on a friends windows laptop in half an hour because it failed to display on the projector What situation would possibly require you to redo a presentation because it can't display on a projector? PowerPoint is cross-platform and Keynote can export to PowerPoint. This seems like hyperbole.
    - entropicdrifter 4y ago
      As a Linux user on my daily drivers and a Mac user on my work-issued machine, I agree with this sentiment completely. Linux has weird issues a good amount of the time if you're trying to do unusual stuff, but so do Windows and Mac, and on those platforms you're less equipped to pop the hood and fix the underlying issue.
ensignavenger 4y ago
Another option that is still young (young as an Open Source project, but has a lot of historic development behind it) is O3DE (https://www.o3de.org/ https://www.o3de.org/) I think this has a lot of potential if it gets enough attention and development.
- fyrn- 4y ago
  I don't have much hope for it, I know several people that worked for amazon lumberyard (it's old name), that have quit because that organization is collapsing in on itself, losing engineers way faster than they can hire, and the engine is still buried under a mountain of tech debt inherited from Cryengine (that real Cryengine has resolved a long time ago) One quit because the new render was so performance intensive, an rtx 2080 super was min spec for the lightest of scenes to achieve 60fps. Another because he became the last engineer on his team after all the others quit and moved elsewhere at Amazon. Even hoping open source saves it is unlikely, as it's only in name. The CI and infrastructure to meaningfully develop it open source does not exist. As a final nail, the install process takes over two hours, which is just not competitive.
- beepbeepcabbage 4y ago
  C# vs C++ Godot is C#
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    Godot is C++. You can use C# (among others) to write game logic in it.
adamrezich 4y ago
but also, maybe it's a good time to try dropping the scene graph/ECS way of doing things—there are other ways to make video games!
- nomel 4y ago
  > there are other ways to make video games! Any interesting, practical, examples?
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    I'm having trouble understanding the question—there's plenty of open-source games that do not use ECS or a Unity-style scene graph. this mode of thinking being the default is relatively recent in the history of video game development. if you've never tried something like that before, PICO-8 might be a good starting point. this blog post might also prove useful: https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265481-oop-is-dead-long-live-oop/ https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265481-oop-is-dead-long...
    - nomel 4y ago
      > I'm having trouble understanding the question I've only slightly dabbled in game engines, and have only been exposed to ECS and scene graphs, so I was asking for other methods, since they don't seem to be nearly as popular. Searching gives me results, but I can't qualify them, so maybe aren't "interesting" to actual game devs. I added "practical" because this is HN, where sometimes theoretical tangents take hold. :) But thanks!
      - ummonk 4y ago
        Honestly I think most sensible ways of organizing renderable entities end up approximating either ECS or scene graphs. The difference is that you’re doing the management yourself instead of relying on engine’s functionality, so you get way less features but way more performance due to lack of unnecessary overhead.
  - 4y ago

SXX 4y ago

You could guess how Unity will end up after John Riccitiello became it's CEO. After all Electronic Arts was one of most hated anti-consumer companies ever.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

BoorishBears 4y ago

I'd argue the asset store was the beginning of the (very slow) end. Before the asset store Unity's community was a hotbed of openly shared innovation. The moment Unity gave people an easy way to slap together what would have been a quick post to the forums with a webplayer link, some code samples and a few paragraphs explaining it... into a paid package that sells for $5... that ended quickly. And the worst part is, the skillset to manage a paid library is not the same one needed to develop some cool tech! There are so so many packages on the asset store that are practically abandoned, or poorly suited for integration into someone else's codebase (some people have no issue with warnings everywhere in their code for example...), or are poorly documented, or will break on any platform that wasn't the original dev's personal machine. The list goes on. - I don't have anything against indie game devs making money, I know the struggle of slaving away at something and ending up broke for your trouble... but I really wish the asset store had been restricted to game assets like 3D models, sounds, etc. It's not like people wouldn't be able to sell their code then either. It's just before the asset store if you wanted to create a paid distributed library, the inertia you'd have to overcome was a pretty good filter against low-effort attempts. There were still successful libraries that were worked on full time and sold as products

sauntheninja 4y ago

The compatibility between versions has always bit me when trying to learn unity. I find a tutorial on a short game and when I try to open that in Unity its incompatible with a newer version and you have to then go browse unity forums for an answer