Discussion Discussion on Unity as a tech service and dependable tool

Do you find Unity to be a competent piece of software?

i have used Unity for over 6 years, that is full time use of Unity every single day. And in the modern day I find the usage of Unity in every aspect to be teeth grittingly frustrating

I wonder if anybody else feels this way. Or has this experience with Unity. It feel as though every possible avenue of tediousness Unity had humoured. From 10 mins to open a project, to previous versions forcing constant online connection, the Unity hub being unable to perform. The project folder being unusable with content in it. The default packages being irrelevant or introducing crappy old Christmas art work and other clutter bulk ware to the software.

I think had it been different Unity progress at a steady pace, if Unity once offered a pro package that did not utilise all system resources all the time, whose editor was not at least 50% of the frame rate. Whose job system was not a copy and paste of Microsoft semaphore tutorial.


I just wonder if anyone feel the same about this declining piece of software. Stock price progressively falls so it does indicate that the public disapprove. But I saw recent teaming with meta, what a surprise, in order to try to get behind the hype of a VR world that meta failed to produce any development on over the last 6 years. Now Unity is standing at their side looking for investment. I feel degraded by the actions of Unity as a company, and I have definitely noticed the gradual degrading of the program itself that has taken place last few years.
It’s sad because I learnt to code on Unity but luckily now I am not confined to Unity alone. But often I pick up Unity to take a look at how something might of worked on it. And I am in modern day never happy with the results.

anyone else feel this way?

 

Uh, yes, rolling out your own engine will take a LONG time, and API is quite good, despite all the shortcomings. So, yes, it is fairly competent, because cloning it all by yourself will take years.

That's your emotions speaking.

Unity is a tool. And, for example, when you need a hammer, you do not really care about public image or stock prices of the hammer manufacturer. You buy whatever works.

Also, you're not chained to it. You can try other engines. Nobody forbids that.

 

No, totally feel not the same and have been using Unity since 2014 continuously in major projects for desktop, mobile, VR, WebGL. Certainly, there are issues here and there but more often than not the most common culprit could usually be tracked down to throwing too much or the wrong content into a project, or tech issues like firewall whitelisting.

The actual issue is often that developers quickly blame Unity for anything that feels broken because rarely does a team have time and leisure to narrow down issues to something within their own project. This gets worse as project and team sizes grow.

Stock price has NOTHING to do with public approval.

Also, once again, a rant post was published WITHOUT giving any concrete detail or list of issues that could clearly be attributed to Unity as a company or the editor/hub. There are issues for sure but no more no less than with other big software packages, especially if you consider that we can actually program/modify the editor to our hearts content whereas most other software (image or video editing) has a much more narrow task to perform.

 

While Unity is not ideal and have its own quirks, which engine doesn't have them.

As already mentioned, writing own engine is full time job. Learning new tools is not something that comes easy, as new quirks get discovered.

Socks reference is irrelevant. Need to look into whole market behaviour, not just into door mat of of the one application.

I use Unity DOTS mostly, while it is evolving rapidly piece of software, I don't have major issue to produce things what I need or want to. Still, it is not ideal, but deving is like software engineering. Nothing is straight forward. Basically need to be open on thing to emerge suddenly.

As for me, definatelly it is not something I would be able to do in other engines.

Over gineering, lack of self organisation, lack of expertise, and relying too much on the 3rd party APIs and assets may be source of multitude frustrations. Either scoping down, learning solutions, or outsource / delegate work in one or other way.

 

There's nothing else out there that's more "competent" than Unity and also available to the general public, otherwise Unity wouldn't dominate the game engine market. Good and even great games are published with it every day.

And all engines have issues, you're just not seeing them without actually using other engines. By switching engines you're trading one set of problems to another set of problems. The switch definitely makes sense to some based on which problems they're dealing with but there's no objective Unity killer out there. Arguably Unity problems are easier to deal with for a plethora of reasons be it community size, established knowledge base, stable core API, the extensibility of the editor, etc.

As for stock price - all stocks are down, most IT companies are downsizing. This is not unique to Unity and can't be used to draw conclusions about the future of Unity engine.

 

I don’t want to sound moany

Just if they made a decent piece of software I would have bought it. But it’s got to a point now; last time I considered buying Unity pro they raised the price the next day !

Unity stock is down over 85% it was valued 160 per stock unit last year. We can blame market decline, Unity is a product for wealthy people. I don’t want to get into the details, but Unity is certainly a declining product, and company with bad priorities and too much dependence on investment than it is dependent on genuine usage or sales of its service.

Sell us the engine, not the idea of a dream world like meta. Meta can only sell dreams and false realities. It appears Unity is the same.

 

Why are you considering buying Pro when you don't need it? The only reason the get Pro is if you're earning more than $200 000/year with Unity or need 1st party support which indicates at least some level of success.

I'm not sure why you're focusing on the stock pricing when it doesn't contribute anything to the game making process. Stock price doesn't impact you in any shape or form unless you've actually bought the stock but even then it doesn't directly impact the engine's quality.

Games are released with Unity every day? The engine is fully usable even if it has issues.

 

yeah I agree. I write my own engines multiple times now. And I know it’s a difficult job. But once you write an engine in VS or whatever your realise how performant it is. Editing work flow, is smooth, cpu runs silent, so much electricity saved. The amount of electricity I could save making an engine in VS compared to Unity is mega. So something is up back there in Unity.

Anyways it’s not a huge deal it’s not my business ! But from my perspective Unity engine can only sell you parts of a game, or lets you develop part of a game before a huge engine based flaw puts a halt to your progress. And you realise, well, should I make a program to make any game? Or should I make a program that is a game. And the answer is easy.

If you knew what you were doing, and going to make and had planned the game properly which I often do, then you realise the amount of bulk Unity spends resources on that you otherwise wouldn’t, and how it makes elusive a lot of the behind the scenes stuff, the simple fact that none of the Unity users know how to rotate an object using Euler angles. It is insanely unprofessional. So much so that it’s degrading for me personally to work with.

 

The games released everyday are not good games. They do one thing. Like a Minecraft it does one thing. Or a no man’s sky it does one thing, these guys built their games with assets from asset store > 6 years ago.

no Unity game has been released in the last 6 years. The company depends on investment and barely profits anywhere else.

 

Also,

what’s it doing with 8000 employees?
If VS provide tutorials for 1 or 2 people to develop a core game engine and job system, what are 8000 people employed for? To brainstorm ideas? Out of all of those 8000 people they employ, who are apparently the best of the best, why don't they have their own game studios? And make their own games? I think that’s because the engine that they would use is not truly competent at making the game. So instead of becoming millionaires those 8000 staff gave up the dream of making games, and instead get paid for what exactly? Overwhelming the software with unnecessary features not because it’s what game developers want but because showing these features to an uneducated investor who has never programmed before, and never made a game they will be impressed by the work they see, and be fooled by the stories of future wealth.

That’s the truth of it

 

The F are you on about?

Spoiler

And ChatGPT doesn't have data from the past two years, for that you can check steamdb:

Spoiler

Massive commercially successful global hit games are released on Steam every year made with Unity: https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Unity/

And No Man's Sky and Minecraft are not built with Unity, what that has to do with anything? They're also massively successful games, one of the biggest hits of all time lol.

You're living in some parallel universe where you blame Unity for your problems.

 

There's no point in buying pro, when you qualify for free tier.
And stock value is not really your concern, unless you're a shareholder.

The engine is already here, and it is not a dream world.

A "performant engine" will be specialized for one specific game only and will be completely inflexible. It will also lack toolchains for exporting/importing models.

Unity's strength is that you can do anything with it. Another strength is fast prototyping speed. You can finish in hours stuff that would take months with custom engine.

Regarding "I write my own engines", I can guarantee that you do not have feature parity with unity. You'll be lacking. For example, there could be no animation state machines, no mechanim, no extensible C# components, no visual editor and so on. This stuff takes decades with large teams.

Either way, the door is open, you can use whatever.

Genshin Impact, Dyson Sphere Program, Timberborn, Ixion, etc.

https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Unity/

 

It appears OP is not here for discussion but venting and waiting on back tapping.

Spending years on writing multiple engines (why starting over and over?), to save few $ on electricity, then spend time to actually build game. Yeah really electricity saving. While could spent same, or actually shorter time to make and release games and make multiple time over the cost. Also to build a portfolio. And that with any existing engine.

I wonder, why using Unity at all, if supposedly spent time on better custom engine was a good investment? Or maybe it wasn't in the end and Unity is still better by miles? Feeling it was an exercise nothing more but for learning purposes.

Unity also provides cross platform compatibility.

 

https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Unity/


So basically all the anime spam games on steam are Unity made. Yeah because if you look at the list of games Sub Nautica is a 3D game open world released > 6 years ago. Mostly made up of asset store stuff. Everyone else is hentai and anime. Which proves my point.

Real game developers don’t use Unity. Only weird ones selling soft porn. Or the occasional asset heavy game. Which to be honest they are not ground breaking games.

I’m not concerned for the stock I just like to watch it fall, because it reflects the decline of the engine of those 6 years.

it’s a fact, it’s a fact not speculation or opinion. It is a fact that Unity declined. It is a fact as both a user of the software, and as an investor. It is a fact that it declined. And it is a fact that real game changing games are not released with Unity.


The quantity of rubbish Unity can put out; for example it’s entire asset store; doesn’t indicate Unity is successful. It’s just spam releases, none of which have anything to do with features, and all of which will use more resources than necessary, and if it’s a soft porn anime you gotta ask was it worth it? To pay 100 bucks to steam 200 bucks to Unity to release soft porn.

Yeah.

I am experienced user of Unity, not propagandist so you won’t convince me that Unity is a leader in game development.

 

Remember Unity has 8000 members of staff all of which can release spam onto steam. What else do 8000 members of staff do? They work to legitimise the company. Through propaganda. And that propaganda is that Unity is a competent engine where games can be made. That is why you cite a quantity of anime games as proof that Unity is still a competent game engine.

 

The list is unsorted by default, sort by Peak player numbers or sort by Followers and you'll see plenty of successful Unity games that are not asset flips or porn.

V Rising, Genshin Impact, Sons of The Forest, Risk of Rain 2 and many, many other games don't fall into asset flip or porn categories you've proclaimed. All these games have released in the past 6 years.

More commercially successful games are released with Unity than ever. The decline only exists in your head. One could argue for certain kinds of decline like iteration speed decline and other problems with the engine which are true but the engine is still popular overall and arguably the best pick for multiplatform development that targets PC, Switch and the high end consoles.

Asset store is irrelevant. Unity's main source of revenue are mobile ads, not the asset store, asset flips or hentai games.

(X)Doubt, I think you're larping as one to troll.

 

Are you awere, only fraction work on the engine itself?
What is your actual point in this thread?
Initially seems you wanted an opinion of others, now you defending own narrative.
Even picking anything, which is irrelevant to the engine itself.

This thread going be closed, as is pointless wenting.

 

Why are you guys wasting time on this. This guy is clearly so super pro, he has made all his own engines, covered every aspect of gaming there is, and now, only has preaching left in life.

Pathetic.Thread should be removed, or locked. It serves no purpose aside from bait.

 

Genshin Impact is unity.

You're not. You've been registered in january, and opinions you voiced so far lack technical expertise.

Don't you have anything better to do? If you expect people to agree with you and support your opinion, that's unlikely to happen.

 

In case you didn’t know how incompetent Unity is


The CameraVector expression outputs a three-channel vector value representing the direction of the camera with respect to the surface, in other words, the direction from the pixel to the camera.
Example Usage: CameraVector is often used to fake environment maps by connecting the CameraVector to a ComponentMask and use the x and y channels of the CameraVector as texture coordinates.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/Materials/ExpressionReference/Vector/


Unities staff don’t even know how to rotate an object without quaternion.
The entire community and product is degenerate.


Yeah maybe I am venting I’m mainly venting against forum planks like yourself. You don’t even understand what you defend.

 

You can calculate that nonsense easily.

If you don't know how, you need to look for a different profession. it is fine, as gamedev is not easy. Or you can hire someone else to do the programming. That is fine too.

 

Dude you really sound like a teenager. Are you a teenager or kid by any chance? If you are then fair enough, if not then, maybe consider the tone and content of what you are saying a bit more as none of it is coming across as "enjoyable discourse" or anything of the like, it just sounds like...well... a teenager trying to pretend they know engines.

Your last comment in particular "The entire community and product is degenerate."
though really points to the fact that you dont belong on the forums in general This is a place for discussion and learning, problem solving etc - not for whatever "this" is.

So yeah...take your aggression somewhere else nobody has time for it here

 

Fun, low stakes form of procrastination.

 

See, rotation matrices degenerate and need to be renormalized, slerping them is harder and takes more calculations than quaternions. And Euler angles are subject gimbal lock, while quaternions take fewer operations to combine. That's why quaternions are industry standard for animation. However euler angles are still available to you through transform component. What's more position+scale+quaternion has advantages over matrix based approach, because even though you can't skew, you can stretch and scale parent without affecting children, depending on how you set this up.

In general, it is a bad idea to insult people you're asking for help. You have open questions. Now people have less reason to assist you.

The problem lies with you. You lack skill. Because while working on a 2d project you're already frustrated to the degree where you lash out at random people and try to blame the engine for your issues, it is probably a good idea to give up on programming and learn a different profession. As with this sort of mindset you'll be hindered and it will take far longer to learn anything. The normal idea is to gain more skills, and not blame your tool. In general to get anywhere with gamedev and programming, you need a different mindset. Problems have to be fun for you to solve. If they're not fun, you'll learn less.

Unity is bloody powerful at prototyping. I'm saying that because I successfully participated in Ludum Dare with it before, making a 3d title. The same amount of work that can be done in 2 days would take 6 to 7 months while making your own engine, that's after you've spent several years learning how to program. That's quite a lot of time saved.

Truly skilled people can prototype portal in 2 days with this engine. Here's an example:

Spoiler

If you cannot do that, that's entirely your problem. As some gamers like to say, "git good". At the time you're definitely not a "professional" you're trying to pose as, you're newbie, that started unity very recently.

 

A lot of people misunderstand how the stock market works, and thinks that a stock reducing in value = a decline in people's favor of the quality of a company/product. It does not always work that way. In fact, it OFTEN does not present a correlation like that.

Unity's stock was at a whopping 210 dollars in May 8 of 2022. It had skyrocketed. Absolutely NOTHING changed in Unity that caused a precipitous decline. Unity, when it was down to 90 dollars, was the same Unity in approximately the same situation it was when it was 210 dollars a share. What did change was that the ENTIRE tech stock market began to slow-motion crash. The majority of tech companies saw a rapid and enormous decline in stock value, by no fault of their own (necessarily speaking).

Sure, some things made it worse, like the clear realization of Facebook's metaverse failures, which Unity was "invested" in (not meaning monetarily). But the overwhelming majority of the decline of Unity's stock is the same as the decline of all the other tech stocks - a looming recession and the delayed effects of a massive pandemic causing a bubble to burst.

People read too much into stock valuations as a sign of public opinion. It certainly can be, but when this was clearly (in large part) a market trend, it suggests that you may not be reading into the stock situation correctly.

(Bonus note: It is not great to compare shareholders directly to customers/users of the products a company makes. They are often very different people, who have a very different expectation of a product. For example, close to zero gamers/customers like predatory microtransactions in games, whether they pay for them or not. But shareholders often LOVE them because it gives them a huge ROI. In summary, Shareholders and Customers are a different animal, and for that reason too, it is misleading to assume that shareholders selling is a correlation to customer satisfaction of a company and its products.)

 

Closed. Largely nonsense. Off topic.