Official Changes to the Graphics GitHub repository

LOL a technology desperately needed in the game industry for sure. I can finally make a dentist simulator 2021.

 

First assumption (more realistic):
- Allow source access (to all/some repositories such as Graphics) to Enterprise/Pro licensees
Second assumption (I'm probably dreaming):
- Unity will scrap HDRP/URP altogether in favor of a new renderer that scales from mobile all way up to high end. Maybe is going to sit on top of built-in renderer and one material will be universally compatible
Third assumption = first + second assumption?

 

I know I am negatively predisposed against Unity... but wtf is this?

The timing is super weird, why can’t it happen at the same time as the blog post? Why are you leaving us to make guesses? Who decided this?

What are “changes to Unity source code hosting policies”?

Unity, you don’t have any more good will to burn, you’ve used all that up, this isn’t the time for haphazard moves, and I don’t know what else to call this.

 

To what end? Make Pro appear more valuable?

 

They want more profit.

 

Exactly, add more value to Unity services.
Unity has become way too big, they need to keep growing and to grow they need to add value to the company, by providing more services, more licenses, more features, acquiring more users (this is the most important one, more users), etc.

 

They’re not going to get more profit if they keep alienating their users and we all know that compared to the real value (not having to add their terrible logo at the start of your game), they really don’t have anything else of comparable value to offer with the subs.

It’s no coincidence that when you look at the Pro benefits “ability to remove splash screen” is the first item on the list.

 

When you are as big as Unity, you don't need to care about profit, what you need to care is about growing and having more users.

 

"Let's make this incredibly powerful and awesome tool where you can customize the rendering of the engine however you want!"

Weak applause.

"----but make it totally inaccessible for 99% of our users due to no documentation. Let them look at 5 year old legacy code, and fight to the death amongst themselves."

Standing ovation.

"The investors will be pleased."



---

Hey, but for real, I know the SRP teams have a lot of talented developers, and I very much appreciate the work which they have done.

I spent several months developing my own SRP in preparation to ship my game. This wouldn't have been possible without the GitHub repository for Unity's various scriptable render pipelines, as well as invaluable resources like Catlike Coding which without a doubt are based on Unity's internal work.

Additionally, I've worked on various projects for clients which required me referencing Unity's repository. There have been certain project breaking bugs which were mitigated or eliminated by being able to access that source of knowledge.

I strongly think this is a step in the wrong direction. I realize Unity is growing as a company, and there are certain strings which are attached to becoming a publicly traded. However, I honestly believe I wouldn't have been able to ship multiple projects without this source of knowledge.

I would like to continue to see Unity's success and growth as a company. Unity has come a long way: you have a lot of talent behind you. Please don't forget the humble community developer in this process of expansion. Without giving us the proper resources, the community will dwindle and die.

Again, thank you for your work and your time.

 

It's sad.
Is this related to that the UnityCsReference repository stopped 7 month ago?

 

What? This is a mind boggingly crazy direction to go. Being able to see all of the forks, bug fixes, etc is insanely important on such a rickity and new system such as SRP, how does this have any positive impact? Another huge gain with github is being able to see what is being worked on, it's really the ONLY form of transparency that still exists in Unity. This is very troubling and disappointing.

 

Hello to everyone. I was expecting this and still expecting more dumb actions from Unity owners. Unity is PROPRIETARY programm, thats means you cannot do your changes or explore code of engine, to make it better or fix bugs or, at least, explore how engine works for understanding how to use it... this is makes you not a programmer but like a dumb user, which clicking on buttons and just spotting what will happen on screen(experimental way of learning). Also they(Unity owners) are able to make any changes in any time in policies(like this one) or engine and force you to buy subscription or other stuff, so you just spending your money for using buggy engine, which you dont know how really works and will never be able to fix it. THE ONLY ONE WAY you should choose is Free Software(not just Open-Source), because by means Free Software is owned by everyone and no one in one time, so no body can just take it and hide from others, because it protected by law, also Free Software is, actually, free and open-source, which means you dont need to pay(or you can donate if you want AND ABLE to do it) and you can modify it as you need, and learn its internal code in any time. Make look at Godot Engine, which is absolutely Free.

I expecting that Unity staff will delete(or hide) my reply, so be awared.
Let me know, if you agreed with me!

Thanks. Regards.

 

Terrible decision, going to use Unreal for my next project for sure at this point.

 

Here's my post where I was requesting exactly opposite of what happened. I've posted same thread in 5 forums, bumped it like total ~30 times and got no response from Unity. PRs to github repos were the only way to communicate, well rip:

Recently I've noticed that https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics has not only scriptable pipeline packages but also vfx and shader graph. There was a certain feature that was missing in VFX graph that required only one line change https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/2030. It was nice to see that my PR got accepted in 4 days.

I have similar changes in other packages lying around as embedded ones in my project. I could try to show them on forums but generally it's a waste of time as there's high chance of no one from Unity seeing them.

This brings up a question: why more (or even all) packages are not on GitHub? If that was the case users would also have motivation to improve them. Not to mention how much time of using messy forums would be saved.

Cheers
Me wondering if someone from Unity will read this...

 

According to the IPO earning reports Unity gets the bulk of their revenue from the few enterprise licensees, not the many Pro/Plus subscribers. Looking from that angle, it makes sense for them to move the packages' repositories behind the enterprise license paywall and treat it like they do C++ source code.

I am sure some execs would love making packages binary-only, if it could be done without breaking existing projects due to the difference in how asset GUIDs work with classes in cs files versus classes in dll assemblies.

 

Unreal Engine also proprietary and you will get same problems, its just question of time with your experience, so do not waste your time on it, if you are programmer then you need to have all source in your hands with abillity to explore and modify it as you want, not as they tell to you. As i said: make look at Godot(as best free engine which i know), with time it will be much better than Unity, because its free and open source, just like fully free Blender much better than proprietary 3Ds Max(several thousands dollars per year for subscription to use it).

Good luck!

 

You do realize that the entire Unreal Engine source code is available on GitHub?
Love Godot all the way you want, but at least get your facts right please.

 

From wiki: "On March 19, 2014, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Epic Games released Unreal Engine 4 through a new licensing model. For a monthly subscription at US$19, developers were given access to the full version of the engine, including the C++ source code, which could be downloaded via GitHub."
EDIT: "In early 2014, we took the step of making Unreal Engine 4 available to everyone by subscription for $19 per month. We put all of our source code online, available to all who signed up. We flipped the switch and crossed our fingers."
So for now its open-source(but not free, so you can expect same way Unity do in any time, Unreal Engine just not so popular as Unity, thats why)

And also do you understand the difference between free and open source software? Today they give to you access to sources for free and nextly, when user-base will be big enough, they will(because they are able) force you to spend more money(increase tax from 5% + buying required assets for you project), which is not possible with free software. And Epic Games also able to change policies and close any sources in any time, dont be fooled with it.

Thanks. Regards.

 

Calm yourself a little, ok?
Yes, you are correct - Unreal is not free...no one said it is. But that's the thing...it does not necessarily have to be to be valuable. My clients don't pay me extra for using free software. I use what get's the job done.

Some things you completely neglect:
Trust in a company is a thing. If a company operates predictable and makes reliable decisions, customers start to rely on their word and decisions. Same with Unreal - they opened up their full source-code years ago and stuck with that decision ever since. Even more so - they are super transparent about their development process and almost every key feature has names and faces that are responsible and reachable for you. Pull requests get accepted and people actually even get money from Epic for actively participating in making their product better.

Furthermore...knowledge cannot be "taken back". The full source is out there and on millions of computers. Even if they say, that they change their model and make Unreal fully proprietary, people can still finish their projects and compile their engines for as long as they need. Yes - technically you cannot continue with that process indefinitely, but it's not just a simple "off-switch" for the company.

Also...check your facts and numbers. Unreal - or more precisely Epic - is by far the larger company in terms of money/assets than Unity. Their userbase is also definitly not that much different to justify claims like "not as popular"....

 

Trust in a company is a thing.

First of all im fully good, so dont need to calm.
Trust in a company its illusion, maybe with time you will understand this. Peoples love moneys, but easiest way to get it is just steal from your wallet(lol) so its a way how peoples want to come with, its end of regression witch companies like Unity choose(question of time and abillities), with greate power comes greate responsibillity. Peoples changing and companies too.

Good luck.

 

???

Idc about it being proprietary, I care about being able to see/modify source code that later on could be merged to main repo to not have issues with updating my fork.

Source access doesn't require any subscription currently.

Good luck with your attitude.

Looking at trends so far every year they give away more money, free assets and make engine cheaper. If not Epic then Unity Learning, Dark skin, Bolt probably wouldn't be free - all of these features were free in Unreal before Unity did the same.

 

Don't be fooled... they might at any time do bad things, they haven't really yet, but they might.

Just stay loyal to Unity, the company that actively deprecates features before actually finishing them, actively makes their licensing worse, has a versioning service that they dare charge for THAT DOES NOT WORK, that says "Oh I can't make that (almost universally positive) change" because people are used to it (but other times they have 0 regrets breaking people's workflows) and that seems to be taking the promises of giving us more source code access.

 

Also why are people confused about what Unreal's licensing is?

They have no subscription. It's free up to 1million of revenue at which point you have to give them 5% of any revenue over 1m, or you can just pay them 1500per year per seat and give them nothing ever.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/custom-license?sessionInvalidated=true

 

UE has been free since 2015. No subscription required, because a subscription model doesn't exist anymore:
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/ue4-is-free

All you do at the moment is talking nonsense, to be honest. Lets leave it at that - have a happy new year.

 

Which nonsence? I edited my reply before your with that fact, did you checked?

 

Let's please stay on topic, talking about Unreal's licensing should be on its own thread.

 

It's unavoidable we drift off-topic since there's not much to discuss other than speculate and rant.

All we have is Unity going:

"We're doing something seemingly very terrible, we'll provide reasons at a later date KKTHXBYE"

And explanations could range from:

-"We're opening the whole Unity source, so we're consolidating all code into a big repo before we make it public"

to

-"Our shareholders decided that sharing code is a bad idea, so no more code access 4U"

 

We could start a poll on which of these two options will be closer to the real reason when Unity finally tells us.

I vote 2

 

2 too =)

 

It's definitely not 1, that's for sure. SRP are individual packages so putting it together with unity source would be... very strange. And of course it's questionable whether it would even be legally possible for them to share the c++ source code, I have no idea about that.

The whole point of packages was to allow for things like this, it's one reason why I was SO excited about packages - while a big chunk of Unity will always be closed source (which is understandable due to legal implications), at least with packages we get transparency!!! And then... this happens. Oof. My heart breaks. I REALLY want to stick with Unity, I adore it. But these past two years have been really tough in terms of how Unity has been acting.

 

If they really wanted to do it, they could do it.

 

In the middle of this post:

Unity whats next for us for scriptable render pipelines

Our goal is to ship verified graphics packages as part of core Unity. There will no longer be versions distributed via package manager. This means that each shipped version of Unity will have Universal Render Pipeline (URP), High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), Shader Graph, and VFX Graph that have been validated to work well with that release. This removes the headache of figuring out the matching versions - it will just work out of the box.

There is another post about changing the numbering scheme (Example: URP 11.0 will become URP 2021.1 etc to match the unity version), I could not find the post though

My guess is the github being archive is the start of moving SRPs back into core unity.

But like others have said we will need to wait for the official blog post.

 

When Unity announce SRP moving to core I had a bad feeling

 

Nah, those still are gonna be packages that build upon a unity-provided API, so at least that's something. It's not moving behind Unity Engine's assemblies or (God forbid) to the C++ side.
I don't necessarely like URP or HDRP, but I sure as hell *love* the idea of an SRP API. For what it tries to achieve, I think it does it at a very adequate level. Now if only we could delve deeper into more low-level territory though...

 

God damn, Unity just keeps getting worse and worse, doesn't it. I hope they have some major management changes soon, though I'm not optimistic.

The grass is looking pretty green over at Unity's competitors...

 

Its also seems like they used open-source way only for prototyping(and testing) purposes, and now, when it work good enough(from their point) they moving it to closed repository. Its popular way in IT-business, as i know.

 

Having a verified SRP version that is connected to a certain unity version (which sounds great) shouldn't mean we can't have access to the repo though, I'm not sure why one would mean the other. This repo will still exist, just no accessible to us.

 

Closing for arguing and off topic rambling. Check the Blog post when it happens for exact details, no point in getting all worked from guesses and speculation.

 

Hi everyone,

I'm part of the product team that owns/operates our internal tools and infrastructure including source code and Github. I totally understand the frustration around this and we did not intend to have this happen over the holiday break when a lot of us weren’t available to communicate with you. In light of this situation, we have reverted the change and set the graphics repository back to an active state.

For full disclosure, this was part of a larger source code policy change we were planning on rolling out internally to strengthen our programs and processes around source code and sensitive information. The plan was to migrate the existing source code repositories from Github.com to our GitHub Enterprise instance and set the public repos to read-only so they would still be available to reference and grok the code but not used for active development.

After evaluation, we’re going to put a pause on this whole transition and spend some time with the community to better understand your concerns and feedback.

Let's keep the discussion civil please and focused on the importance of these open repositories - what's the most important aspect for you with them? The full commit history? Being able to see all branches? Track release branches?

 

Sigh. All it needed was a single sentence in the original post 8 days ago "Don't worry. The repo will still be kept up to date with our internal version" and all the bitterness above would have been avoided.

 

I think u should keep everything that is currently have at Graphics repo. I will say for the current SRP mess this public repo is the last resort that never can be taken out.

Can u elaborate more about strengthen our programs? Does it means it will improve the whole Graphics repo code quality? For sensitive information, I think you will need to find some way to not accidentally put it on public Graphic repo while still able to keep updating public Graphics repo.

 

Being able to see full commit history and branches is very important for me. I usually read the entire diff tree every time I update any packages and Unity itself (I diff Unity's reference source code against my current version).

With this, I can more clearly understand the direction Unity is developing, as well as understand the impact the changes will have on my projects and assets. This is particularly important for pre-release versions, so that I can see the changes coming before they impact my production projects.

For me, increased openness, as well as increased focus on iteration performance, were (and are) deciding factors in my continued Unity usage.

 

Thank you! I suppose there are a lot of people lurking the repository, which may not have been evident until now. Locking us out would only be warranted if a strong alternative was presented.

Personally, I use the repository for reference on the latest version. As well as tracking the PR's, for example it allowed me to find out the ComputeScreenPos function is being deprecated and pre-emptively add backwards-compatible code to my shaders, before people really start using URP 11. This is one of those things that appears to be an internal decision, and isn't reflected in the roadmap or won't be in the changelogs. So the repo at least enables me to stay in the loop.

The file history is another important aspect, diffing software is not nearly as informative as seeing the related commits and PR's, which often provides some insight as to why things have changed.

 

So this is one of the biggest issues. Please communicate with us both before and after making big changes to how things work.

That depends on what exactly is going to happen:

If the SRP's are in core Unity and the code is no longer visible, then how am I suppose to modify it? Custom passes are cool, but I though the spirit of SRP was that you could quite literally modify it in any way you want. If the code is not visible then we're almost straight back to the old command buffer injection point way of doing things. Unless, you roll your own SRP and spend years getting it even remotely to the point of URP/HDRP.

If the SRP's are still packages with visible code, but not under source control anymore, then integrating your own changes becomes a nightmare anytime you want to upgrade the packages to newer versions.

The changelogs probably serve the same purpose, so I guess not.

Not all of them, but the ones in PR's give you good sense of where things are going and what features are being worked on, since there is no public roadmap of SRP's. The only other instances that this could be useful for me are some old branches for outstanding features like SpeedTree in HDRP that could be made to work with some TLC.

Yes. Being able to easily modify an SRP, view breaking changes, and making assets for the asset store all depend on at least having the release branches be visible.

 

Transparency as a whole. All of what you listed is important, not one thing any more than the other.

 

Hi,

Be able to see the latest URP and HDRP code helps immensely, since the libraries change all the time and nothing works between versions, as many things and functions break.

For example i had to redo my code for URP10 and then again for 11, after did it first time for 7.5.4 etc, without github would be impossible as would not know what changed and at which version.

Thanks

 

Can you or Unity give more information on this policy change in general?

I, like many others here, do want things to stay/become more transparent and Unity moving in opposite direction upsets some of us. There are a ton of reasons listed on this thread already why people want to keep the commit and PR history, I don't know if it's worth to repeat the record for these as there are countless good reasons to find use for commit and PR history.

I do stress though that simply mirroring like master branch and/or releases to some repo would be next useless and serve no purpose as you can't then track individual changes anymore.

 

Can you elaborate on what access to all branches would give you vs just having release branches in the repo?

It's primarily around the programs and processes we use internally on a day-to-day basis that help us ensure the protection of sensitive information.

 

Thanks for this. And are you tracking across all branches or specific releases? i.e. tracking a 20.1 branch vs tracking a smaller feature branch specifically?

 

Since you work on the repo, you would know that release branches don't have individual commits and PRs, at least for HDRP as they get squashed to multiple PRs (which contain multiple commits each). It's impossible to cherry-pick any HDRP related changes just from release branches.