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A warning to new indie developers in general

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by arkon, Apr 21, 2019.

  1. I propose to set up a fund and every time someone brings up this very old and very BS trope force them to donate a couple of bucks into it and then at the end of the year we could donate it to the able gamers or something...

    Unbelievable that it's is too hard to grasp that you don't have to develop games to know how games are made if your clients are game developers, 90% (I'm guessing here, maybe just 75%) of your staff is or was game developer and you're frequently talk to game developers, since they're your clients.
     
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  2. Billy4184

    Billy4184

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    It's still impossible, because engine features are not isolated from eachother. And the last thing you want are ghosts of old engines floating around in a codebase and making you work overtime to keep them resting in peace.

    It's not at all clear that this would have the effect you expect. I'm not much of an Unreal user, but they are notorious for making breaking changes every other week. There's nothing wrong with this, of course - they operate on much faster timescales than Unity as a result - but there's always a trade-off involved.
     
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  3. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Nah, instead they have multiple update streams for multiple versions of the most popular game dev engine, which not only produces all the games all the developers ever make on all the hardware that the developer wants to support, but does that all the time, weekly, mostly.

    Can't agree with you.

    Unity has a way harder job, targeting not only 20+ platforms, but all the developers' random code, bad code, endless drivers and operating systems etc etc...

    Huh.
     
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  4. arkon

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    Not impossible. Lets say you have a million users of Unity, as it stands Unity (1 developer) makes a change and 1 million other developers all now need to make work to accomodate the change. The engine should be making our lives easier not pushing work on to the masses. I had a team of 50+ engineers under me and a prime consideration I had whenever making a change to the engine, core or libs was how to minimise the effect on the majority, preferably so as they didn't even know I'd done something. As a result I saved eons of time by not forcing my engineers to have to accomodate my whims.
     
  5. arkon

    arkon

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    I'm just saying it's not impossible, If a change unity forces on us costs us 1 hour of work, across a million users its a million hours of work. The onus is on them to minimise this, not on us to be less lazy,
     
  6. Billy4184

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    It's a great thing to aim for, but very difficult to achieve in practice on anything but the most superficial things (such as using GetComponent<Rigidbody>() instead of .rigidbody).

    I try to minimize upgrade damage and increase modularity and flexibility with my space game kit, but sometimes you just have to change the guts of the thing and deal with the consequences. You can't abstract parts of a software away so much that other parts don't have to depend on the design and implementation of it and can still have a meaningful relationship with it.
     
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  7. Antypodish

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    I think here is going so much about blaming a tool by OP, but not looking at hand which is making.
    Why not using own engine then, if so much praising on it? There never would be an issue then. Or I missed already explanation in earlier posts?

    I mean, it is very positive aspect, that OP is trying maintain older games. Weather is feasible, is different story. I can only imagine exponential growing cost, of keeping all up to date.

    Yet, talking about dozens of games, but only 3 of them are listed on OP website.
    Or we talking not about OP games, but owned by somebody else. Then why worry about maintaining them with own cost? At least it is how I read it / get confused.

    However, with such long claimed experience and released games, sure there must be some good tricks learned, of how to optimize and automate update processes. Specially using own reusable assets, when applicable.

    Sure, if something changes like particles, then perhaps quite few titles would be affected. Yet probably could now make universal particle asset, which will fit all. Easy to update later. Just a example thought.

    Or, maybe better move to Unreal then, or Amazon Lumberyard? Sounds like better options, to keep games compatible with evolving mobile market. Maybe?

    However, as somebody already mentioned, seams more sensible, just remake version 2, 3, etc of the game. That would automatically generate better portfolio. This way older version is still compatible with older devices. Just a thought.

    Now I as customer could be as well happy for updated version, working on new devices, as be unhappy that I can not install on older devices anymore.

    But hey, is anyone knows what tech become on top, in 5-10 years?
     
  8. Ryiah

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    There is a massive difference in scale here. Unity isn't simply a game engine for a single team creating games of a one type. Unity is a game engine for millions of developers spread across many teams creating games of countless types.

    Only if they were all approaching the problem in the same manner. We keep seeing mention of quick property accessors and how they were removed, but the proper way to access components was always available. Some people choose to avoid using the accessors and when the change was made they weren't affected as much if at all.
     
    Last edited: Apr 24, 2019
  9. arkon

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    I don't keep the website up to date (Lack of time!!!Lol) If you click on any of them on iTunes, then click more from same author, there is currently 26 on there live.

    I don't think some people on here understand that a change from one particle system to another isn't a trivial affair. I've not discovered any simple technique that helps. Sure Unity did eventually release a tool but you still have to find every single one used in your game and convert it, test it, does it look the same (usually no it doesn't). I tried this method on one game and it took me days to convert them all and get them looking right. So when I came to the next game to update I kind of lost the will to do it. so just #pragma'd out the warnings.
     
  10. arkon

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    Unity does indeed nag you when you update a project and asks if you have made a backup. but it seems to only really update a project with what seems trivial stuff, replaces the rigid body and audiosources with get component code which is great. I just wish it extended to more things like things that are in your prefabs, resources and game objects. You know, detects an old particle system use and changes it to the new one, finds the code you have used to access them and change that too.

    Saying that the updater messes up with AudioSources and makes them all fully 3d spacial. even if they were 2d before. Thats what I've fixing at the moment. This seemingly trivial task involves finding everywhere in your game that makes a sound and checking on its Audiosource. It's just taken me 3 hours so far and I still have places that should make a noice but are silent.

    It all adds up.
     
  11. AndersMalmgren

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    I wouldn't complain if the QA was better. They really need to get better on that department.
     
  12. Arowx

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    I wonder how many older games made in Unity become abandonware. I looked at revamping an old game that was only available in the old Unity WebPlayer to a new Webassembly version and got swamped with asset store issues and compile errors and broken UI as I used NGUI for the project.

    The project was an RTS style game and ended up using NGUI and Astarpathfininding for dynamic navmesh and good in game UI as at the time Unity did not have either.

    It's an interesting proposition could Unity upgrade older projects and even change out older assets for newer ones or newer in built systems.

    With regard to unsupported assets, what if Unity had an asset clause that allowed unsupported, to be discontinued assets to be transferred to the community as free as long as we support them and upgrade them. So developers who have invested in assets could work together to keep those assets up to date as long as they need/use them?
     
  13. neoshaman

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    Well it's al up to the asset dev, I mean segi has been turn open source, there is no loss and people are actively working from this (example nigiri).
     
  14. Murgilod

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    Plenty. I'd wager than 95+% of webplayer games never got an update, same with iOS games from when 64 bit became the minimum requirement and they got cast off the store.
     
  15. hippocoder

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    Yeah pulled my mobile games, couldn't spare the time to update them. Unity didn't do anything wrong, but Apple changed the landscape not once but many times.

    Unity didn't actually break anything, instead they slaved away night and day to bring IL2CPP so people could ship their games. It's my fault if I didn't bother pressing compile.

    Also, Unity deprecated unityscript (with good reason) and this affected my titles. I knew it was coming. I knew I didn't want to bother porting it. Unity still made a unityscript to C# conversion tool anyway.

    I mean, how much more do they need to be doing? They even have script upgraders. They even bothered making a particle system upgrader for the 3 people in the world that needed it. They blogpost every time a change might cause a halo.

    I'm done on this topic, but I can't see a single logical reason to blame Unity at this point. A single person making even 3 games is an achievement.

    Making 50 tiny ones then expecting Unity to maintain them for you is a little naive if you're a single developer. Isn't it supposed to be a full time job maintaining them? Maybe I should have 50 kids and let the state bring them up.
     
  16. Aiursrage2k

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    Is it really worth the headache of maintaining it for 300/month
     
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  17. ShilohGames

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    I get what you are saying, but we should be fair about whether your current situation is a typical use case or an edge use case. For example, I have developed and maintained some backend systems over large periods of time (decades). I definitely do not enjoy being forced to make changes to long term backend systems as the result of external changes (OS, DB, app layer, etc), but I understand that some external changes are needed for progress.

    For client side games, what is the typical lifespan of usefulness for a typical game? And how many years should a game be expected to be updated? I realize that some of the grief is caused by mobile platform companies changing rules/requirements over time. There will likely be many more discussions in the future about what the correct lifespan should be for game updates. I think a lot of people view games as something to release once, update a few times if needed, and then move on to another project. But as an industry, there has clearly been a shift toward longer support cycles for games.

    You mentioned that some of your games were built in Unity 3 and then converted to newer versions over time. Unity 3.0 shipped in 2010, and Unity 4.0 shipped in 2012. That is a long time ago. If you are still making money from those old titles, congratulations. But one thing to consider is that the current version of you is vastly better at building games than the version of you from 7-9 years ago. At what point do you decide to cut loose the old projects and dedicate all of your time to new projects?
     
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  18. AndersMalmgren

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    I play SCUMMVM games still. Some of those date back to the 80's
     
  19. arkon

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    Ok to clarify the why of it all. This one on its own makes me $300 per month, so on its own not worth it. Add its income to the others which also don't make much, but collectively they pay enough not to need to have a day job. Also any game I created in the old days got millions of downloads, my newer (better) games are lucky if they get any downloads. If I update an old game that had millions of downloads, I can even change the game or add other games into it and I get thousands of downloads.

    So old U3/4 games = millions initially and thousands now.
    New 2017 games = 0-100 if I'm really lucky.
     
  20. arkon

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    Show me 1 person prepared to close down more than $25000 per annum passive income. (I use the term passive loosely as it wasn't passive to create and maintain them)

    See above, an indie creating a new game nowadays is unlikely to get many downloads un less very lucky.
    My best and most recent games in all regards were HARM and Invaders TD, I can count the number of daily downloads on one hand.

    If I add a new game play mode to Torpedo Run I get tens of thousands of downloads. I released that one way way back. Hence my very real need and reason to keep them all alive, so far seemingly indefinitely.
     
  21. arkon

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    Yes.
     
  22. hippocoder

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    Right soooooo your job is to maintain them. Hop to it.
     
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  23. arkon

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    Yeah but when I'm just having to re write existing code and other peoples assets just to get one back out there it feels more like I'm a janitor cleaning toilets than a game designer creating games. Like I say this depreciation thing is sucking all the fun out of it.

    The Good news is, during this forum venting exercise I've just finished updating this U4 one. Through studious use of #pragma's, and re doing my entire terrain, changing all the shaders, writing my own IAP and advert plugins, the game works again albeit on 2017 LTS.

    Hippocoder if you have had games on 32 bit apple then I implore you to spend some time to update them, it might be one I've paid for and can't play anymore and that is as annoying as getting your Dxxk stuck in your zip!
     
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  24. Ryiah

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    I have to imagine there are people out there that would be willing to upgrade your games for you for an affordable rate. A college student or someone similar that wants to make some money on the side and get some experience too.
     
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  25. arkon

    arkon

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    God no, My days of employing people are long over. A life I never want to return to thanks. No I've had my rant I'm much better and I will try what someone on here suggested and see about getting ownership of the discontinued assets and bringing them back to life.

    I did actually try this with one asset and the guy wants tens of thousands for it! It was depreciated, got hardly any buyers yet he didn't want to let someone else have it. I'm going to try again tho. I really don't believe I'm and 'edge' case.
     
  26. neoshaman

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    Well at least you could sell app on appstore, I learnt today for my internship that google don't allow people in my region (martinique) to process payment (I need to verify it formally) and we are like part of france supposedly ... :( deeply unsettling (it's not the first case, there many apps I can't download despite being french,etc ...).
     
  27. Actually, you're an edge case, because you don't want to work on your own application, you don't want to hire anyone to do so, you expect everything just work without touching it after five years and just count your money.
    This is what I understand from your posts. Oh and you're complaining that it's not the case. And also you can't decide if you want to retire your app or not.
     
  28. ShilohGames

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    If you are making $25000/year by keeping your old games updated, then you should probably keep doing it. A lot of indie games make no money. It would boil down to how many hours per year were needed to maintain that "passive" income. Good luck with it.
     
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  29. angrypenguin

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    I agree with what you've said in general, except for this bit.

    Back when this started both mobile platforms with their crackin' rate of change and engines like Unity supporting many platforms while being affordable and project agnostic were unprecedented. Come to think of it, so was the Asset Store.

    Calling someone naive because they couldn't accurately predict the impact that a bunch of unprecedented stuff would have on their work half a decade into the future iN a rapidly changing industry is a little unfair, I think. And @arkon has explained their background enough that it's clear why they expected what they did, even if it doesn't fit with our experience.

    I agree that it's unrealistic for Unity to make everything work forever without changes. The old particle system, for example, has to work with every available renderer (consider combinations of API's, platforms, underlying lighting/shading models...). Since its creation a bunch of those have been deprecated and dropped, and dozens have been added.

    Just keeping it functioning would require ongoing work for all of those, and that's not the only cost. Having multiple systems that do the same thing is an opportunity for error for all users, it's bloat (when a focus at the moment is making stuff smaller), and it adds requirements which can impact future development or updates.

    Basically, Unity would eventually be in the same situation the OP is now in, where maintenance costs become prohibitive to new development.

    Also, they certainly don't do these things on a whim. Stuff is usually marked as deprecated for at least a year.

    I agree it sucks, I just don't see a way around it. All software I've worked on either reaches End of Life or reaches a maintenance stage. Maintenance isn't fun, but it's a reality of successful long life software.

    This is going to sound harsh (and I'm sure you already know it), but one of the things I regularly point out to young people getting into game dev is that if they're doing it commercially then there will be large amounts of unglamorous grunt work, like any other job.

    Out of interest... Does anyone have an idea of what the maintenance load might have looked like without Unity over 5+ years?

    Also, it sucks now but will moving everything to 2019 get another 5+ years?
     
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  30. ChazBass

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    That presupposes that the architecture of a complex piece of software such as Unity could be designed to perfection from day 1 which is nonsensical in my opinion.

    If you have worked on complex software, then you know that leaving old code and APIs untouched can create massive technical debt and that that debt significantly hinders new development. That is why companies mark things as deprecated, leave them for a period of time, and then remove them. Today, I can call Random.RandomRange() in my code rather than Random.Range(). I know its deprecated, and Unity tells me this. Someday soon Unity will remove the method. I can choose to make the change today, or I can continue to call the deprecated method as I write more code, knowing that some day I will have to atone for this. This is the way it is supposed to work.

    I do acknowledge that Unity has broken a few things over the years (user since 2009) between releases and without warning, but those have been pretty rare, in my opinion, given how much the engine has evolved.

    Back to your problem. You bought assets to speed development, and now those assets are unsupported.... Unless you do not have access to the source code for those assets (I have never bought one where that was the case), you could go into the source code and fix the issues, rewriting code where needed to deal with an evolved engine. I have done this many times. Yes, it is work, but it is the price you pay, in some cases, in order to get the benefit of the asset when you buy it. Regarding changing engine API's, most of the time as hang a release or two behind current, which means that the upgrade path is largely automatic, and only requires work on my part occasionally. You on the other hand let a considerable period of time go by and then were surprised that there was no direct upgrade path from where you left off to a recent release. I think that is expecting quite a bit from any commercial piece of software.
     
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  31. zombiegorilla

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    Indeed.

    ---

    While the whole thing may be frustrating for you, it is better than not having the problem due to no revenue. It would be awesome if Unity was perfectly built over the last 10 years for silky smooth upgrades, but it never works that way. The whole ecosystem has radically changed over time. No one has managed it seamlessly, not even Apple or Google. It's just game development. I get the frustration, but it is what it is. In fairness, it appears that you basically have been building games since nearly the beginning of the platform/industry. Radical change was inevitable and frankly, could have been worse. (Unity has made your life way easier over developing native). Quite probably a developer building a game today is going to have it a lot easier maintaining that game over the next 10 years than any of us did over the past 10.
     
  32. zombiegorilla

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    Arcade system boards have been using specialized graphics chips since the 1970s. In early video game hardware, the RAM for frame buffers was expensive, so video chips composited data together as the display was being scanned out on the monitor.
     
  33. Murgilod

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    Either I'm very tired or somehow you're working on a metaphorical level I'm not grasping because I'm having a hard time seeing how these statements connect.
     
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  34. zombiegorilla

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    I thought based on the quoted comment and a previous one, that we were just posting completely unrelated things as a "solutions". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
     
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  35. Owen-Reynolds

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    I'm not saying Unity could have done this, but maintaining older versions is a real thing: 3.x and 4.x can have features frozen, but get back-patched with bug fixes, 64-bit updates and the like to keep it running on the latest systems. The OP isn't wishing for some imaginary thing.

    Unity is still young, their pricing structure was clearly "as-is", and they never would have made it if they'd tried to keep 3.x current. But at some point this is something for them to think about. Maybe a more mature game designer market can see longer support as a selling point. I suppose they would charge something for the "5.x 2025" update instead of putting all of the cost up front.
     
  36. arkon

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    Here's an idea, make the Unity source code freely available when they do a yearly revision bump!
    This way you can freeze your own development and make the fixes yourself for stuff that gets changed externally line new iPhone screen resolutions etc. as long as we aren't forced to go 128 bit any time soon, this would fix it for me.
     
  37. Murgilod

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    You know this is impossible and you know why.
     
  38. Ryiah

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    We know they're capable of doing it to at least some degree as that's precisely what LTS releases are. It's just that they're currently limited to two years. Who knows what could happen in the future though. Unity could end up with customers that want lengthier support cycles and we could end up with longer LTSes.

    We'd all stop updating and just be happy with our older releases? :p
     
    Last edited: Apr 25, 2019
  39. Murgilod

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    More like "Unity's base engine could probably be open sourced but its reliance on closed source implementations of things like Enlighten, Havok, and other technologies mean that this idea is fundamentally impossible to act on."
     
  40. BennyTan

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    After reading all these posts, maybe i'm slow, but I have a stupid question, so please humour me. Whats stopping you from building and updating with the old version of unity? Its all available in the unity archive. Thats the version it was made with, unity still makes it available to you, and your plugin's still work with that version etc etc.

    If it can be done, problem solved. If it can't be done, why can't it be done? Is it that the apple store does not accept old xcode builds/versions ? If so, isn't this more of a case of apple forcing you to change rather then unity? I mean, unity isn't forcing you to use 2017 LTS or to accept their changes and designs... they make the old versions available. So where does the buck stop and why did it specifically stop at unity?

    Also, maybe its all well said that the unity engine could be more will designed and implemented such that updates could be better implemented, but well, it is what it is. Its been built and in its current state. If they did a complete overhual/rewrite now which would break tons more project and require major rewrites wouldn't that cause you even more problems? As mentioned by another poster, I think some of their new features such as package manager are working towards your dream engine architecture, but probably in a more piecemeal fashion and at a slower pace. (just the architecture, they probably still wouldn't keep your dream implementation of keeping or maintaining older modules because of cost and bloat.)

    PS: I get that you are just venting, and just want to let of steam and bitch about stuff, and this is a nice place to do it cos we're all lovely people, so some of my comments above might be rhetorical and just me adding my $0.02. Interesting information about the old games vs new games downloads though, as well as the 50 people engineering team in the gambling industry. I've worked with some local company developing games for casinos and the one's here barely have 10 people in the entire company (BTW, they use unity now too so. Yay!).
     
    Last edited: Apr 25, 2019
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  41. AndersMalmgren

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    Yepp, thats alot less work than just make sure the game works on every new version. Logic
     
  42. AndersMalmgren

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    That version is not supported on his target platform anymore
     
  43. BennyTan

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    I think that was specifically my question, why did the buck stop at unity? Unity makes old versions available. I can even get v3.x now if i wanted to. Apple dosen't support them. Why is it unity's fault and not apple/google for not supporting older builds projects etc?

    It really depends on the license and what is still in use. They do have a bunch of stuff available including components of the UI system which might be useful for you.

    https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/

    i've worked with unity since it was first released for windows in version 2.5, and coming over from older engines like Torque Game Engine (TGE, TGEA, T3D), which was paid and had source access, let me tell you that source access isn't necessarily always a good thing. There's are ups and downs to everything, one favourite example being responses to bug reports:

    User: I would like to report a bug in XYZ
    Dev/Community: You have the source, fix it yourself.
    *Waits for some community user to fix it then just roles it in*
     
    Last edited: Apr 25, 2019
  44. BennyTan

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    @AndersMalmgren
    Did you delete your post or was it the butler who did it O_O

    Anyway, I do get where you are coming from, but i think the main thing here is probably a matter of perspective. Your idea of professional might relate more to your experience with corporate, enterprise or industry. Nothing wrong with that as people experience and learn different things depending on where they've been. However it also means its contextual and might or might not be applicable to all situations. I mean, you do have to admit there is a cost involved in maintaining that many branches.

    OP on the other hand as mentioned multiple times treats it more as a hobby which pays his bills, so that cost might be more then what he is willing to pay or maybe he just didn't think to much about it since it was a hobby kind of thing till it was too late. Nothing wrong with that either as it's his experience and people learn from experience.

    All he's doing now is mainly ranting to let of steam about losing a gamble and sharing his experience which he hopes will help other new developers. I mean, I was there with plugin's in my early days as well and now mainly roll my own code. Of course if some one told me not
     
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  45. arkon

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    Apple forced every app to be 64bit. Unity introduced 64 bit into Unity4.7.2, unfortunately it didn't work properly. I managed to get 1 game updated to 64bit using 4.7 so I thought great, no problem this is as easy as just re building each game. Unfortunately Unity then moved on to Unity5 and abandoned any further updates to the unfinished 64bit 4.7 so it wouldn't do any of my other games. (I've long since forgotten what the problems were)

    Since then Apple and Android bring out more and more devices that the old 4.7 wouldn't support. There were hacks on each game to try but the list just got too long and usually involved some kind of post process which you had to do manually after each build.

    If Unity had maintained 4.7for maybe 1 more year and got the 64bit implementation stable then I would have been happy to carry on using 4.7 even now. For mobile I've found every version of unity since to be buggier, make way bigger executables and generally slower on the target hardware. This last one usually can be overcome by spending usually weeks looking for the causes of frame slowdowns and finding workarounds.

    The cynic in me knows the reasons why Unity does this as do all of you. Most mobile developers would probably have stopped at 4.7 and on casual games at least not bothered to update the engine. This strategy also causes depreciation in asset store assets which opens the door for more assets to fill the gaps and we all have to buy assets again to do the same kind of task that we had already paid for previously. It's a vicious circle.
     
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  46. MD_Reptile

    MD_Reptile

    Joined:
    Jan 19, 2012
    Posts:
    2,664
    Finish the story! Now!
     
  47. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

    Joined:
    Dec 29, 2011
    Posts:
    15,616
    More to the point, just having a branching strategy does not stop software upgrades from having a cost, which was the underlying thing being discussed. Yes, it helps to keep things organised and managable, and yes it reduces the cost compared to ad-hoc approaches, but it doesn't magically make the work go away.
     
  48. MD_Reptile

    MD_Reptile

    Joined:
    Jan 19, 2012
    Posts:
    2,664
    I used to make video games, then today... well I keep making them, and nobody buys them unless they are free... and then I don't get paid... but somehow the clones always do!
     
  49. Murgilod

    Murgilod

    Joined:
    Nov 12, 2013
    Posts:
    10,083
    I'm doing alright charging actual money on PC. The premium mobile market collapsed years ago though. Like, god, five years now was probably when it was even something you could maybe consider, but even that's late to the game.
     
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  50. MD_Reptile

    MD_Reptile

    Joined:
    Jan 19, 2012
    Posts:
    2,664
    Me and some freelancers are talking about doing that because of the unfair $#!tshow it has become on mobile. I've been doing relatively happy work on both ios and android for.... just about as long as I can remember lmao... it has been a losing battle for far too long.
     
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