Do you think 2018.3 will be a game changer?

I feel like with 2018.3 with nested prefabs, timeline, material editor, high dpi resolution, and so on, that Unity is now an (almost) fully featured game maker.

In previous years I felt that Unity was a bare bones engine (pretty much just Mono with an API to access the PhysX library in a fancy interface. Although I'm sure Unity Fanboys/girls will say it's always been amazing.) That was the least worst option for making games. It saved you time creating your own game engine, but at the expense of not being very well optimized and not very feature rich.

But with 2018.3 I'm looking forward to using it again.

I mean, there's still some things lacking, if you compare it with another popular game maker (Flash), such as an inbuilt way to draw 2D curves such as ellipses. (i.e. if you want to draw a pie chart in Unity, it's not easy to do out of the box...still!) Or indeed make a Bezier curve path for an object to follow.

I'm thinking of Unity 2019 as Unity Game Maker 1.0 since I think it's now deserves the title of Game Maker.

I wonder when Unity started being good? I think around 2017(?) when they started focusing on optimization and pushing new updates sooner. Was there new management perhaps? I wonder...

Or perhaps it was when Unreal Engine became free in 2015. The competition no doubt put the wind in Unity's sails so-to-speak.

 

Probuilder, gui stuff and script inspector mean you can never leave the soft to make any game prototype.

 

Unity is already a market leader. There is no need for any "game change".

 

Unity is only going through incremental changes. If you don't like it now, waiting for another update won't change your mind.

 

I think nested prefabs(and the new prefab workflow) is going to be the biggest thing in this release, and possibly of the whole 2018 cycle. It's something that has been wanted for quite a long time, similar to both the GUI and the input system. That being said, I don't think there is going to be a "game changer" anytime soon with Unity. Even after UE4 went with the new pricing model, which then forced Unity to change things, they didn't really lose their place atop the totem pole of game engines. Unity isn't necessarily the best at any particular thing, but being 2nd or 3rd best at all of the things results in being 1st place overall.

 

I don't think it'll be a game changer, though I think the new prefab system (thankfully against what my predictions were) will help a lot of new devs. As far as game changers are concerned though, I think the 2019 cycle will be more important. I figure by the end of that we should have ECS be mature enough to see its use in actual production, which should be a nice draw to people expecting a lot more performance while not having to sink a lot of time into implementing all new systems.

 

I don't like new prefabs.

 

Agreed. ECS and LWRP/HDRP will be the real game changers.

 

There is always need for game changing. It's why we don't live in the oceans anymore.

 

"Game changer" means major change which creates a completely new set of rules to play. This is not what Unity needs. Its needs a steady stream of incremental updates which fix all the little problems and annoyances. Instead of adding new systems and features I would rather see them spend more time polishing what they already have. Higher level systems can be custom built by game developers.

 

Or both. Open your thinking. And nobody wants to DL the whole utility all the time for incremental updates, that's why so many asset developer/customer problems exist. I applaud your tunnel vision, but there's no bullet trains here. You are correct on the latter part, but there should be both because what you want is pain. And higher level functions shouldn't be left to the customer community, original and quirky things should. What sorts of different business have you run?

Edit/TLDR: Thanks for mansplaining to me what "game changer" means, I really don't know what I would have done without your help on that one.

 

C# 7.2 Roslyn complier, Nested prefabs, different Terrain System improvements, ECS improvements, bug fixes.

Won't be a game changer, but decent QoL improvements.

 

It is a "game changer" if the new feature(s) are especially helpful to your project, and what you want to build now is reasonably possible where in the past it was extremely difficult to impossible. I think a lot of the changes are going to be helpful, but I don't think they rise to game changer status. Everything could have already been implemented using 3rd party systems or with a little more work that these new changes offer. Nice they are built in though.

The new prefab workflow would have been very helpful to my game had I waited to start it until now, but I'm actually concerned it is going to get in the way of my current project seeing that I built so many similar prefabs the old fashioned way already (create 1st prefab, place in scene, change models and various script settings, rename object in scene, drag to Assets folder to create new prefab, rinse/repeat dozens of times for a good number of different yet similar prefabs).

 

It will be a game changer when they add effing options to preferences to control the hardcoded camera speed settings so I don't have to crawl across terrains at a snail pace waiting for the stupid built in camera speed to move faster.

.. ofc that was just a minor minor thing requested every Fn' year, it will be a real game changer when.. <insert feedback list https://feedback.unity3d.com>

 

You've probably spent more time waiting then it would have taken you to write an editor script to solve the problem.

 

Or use the mouse.

 

what part of hardcoded did you not get? you can't fix anything to do with the unity editor camera settings.. nothing, not the clipping adjustments that are locked in mousewheel, not the shift key and what sort of speed multiplier it applies to normal wasd camera speeds, not the time it takes to build momentum... nothing and [f] framing is a whole nuther area of bullshit that doesn't work as well as we'd like.

 

Yes, Unity has always been top of the pack in terms of 3D game engines with c# API and IDE. But thats mainly because its pretty much the only one.

But if you look at Flash which had timelines based on movieclips, ability to draw in the editor. Unity is only now implementing such things.

Thats why i think when Unity becomes as good for 3d as Flash was for 2D it will be a game changer in the sense that the time and ease of use to make games will be dramatically reduced. And it will for better or worse be more accessible to newbies.

 

You can write a custom editor that takes total control over the scene camera.

If a feature doesn't exist, just make it yourself - you're a developer.

 

Sure you can. The scene camera is just another camera. You can grab it in an editor script and put it where ever you like.

 

There are at least three other game engines on the market that use C# and have powerful IDEs. Unity is definitely not at the top because it's the only one available. It's at the top because it was far ahead of the others and was able to establish a very active community.

https://www.cryengine.com/
https://godotengine.org/
https://xenko.com/

Yes, but the exact same thing can be said in reverse when you compare these two. Where Flash started as a vector-based animation package, Unity started as a game engine. Where Flash gained sufficient features to be a game engine, now Unity is gaining sufficient features for vector-based animation.

 

that sounds like such an elegant a solution why didn't I think of just plonking the editor camera at places in my scene.. like screw anysort of elegant improvement to actually fixing the actual problem....of wait for it.. control of camera speed while using .. the mouse in the editor viewport.. what else do you use zombiegorrila other than the mouse... really no idea what that reply was about.

Anyway it's been a few years and tons of people up voting the feedback.. not to mention countless threads and posts on it... if I was into using reflection and enjoyed digging the innards of obscure and probably undocumented areas of unity to try fix these things, or what everyone does just try get on with what works.

Luckily someone actually made an pretty decent fix THIS MONTH...

well done Unity.. well done NOT.

Thanks to Mikilo for doing it.. hopefully it remains working into future versions without Unity breaking it with some-par alternative.

yeah not much to figure out with doing that right.... just y'know " You can grab it in an editor script and put it where ever you like"
ez

 

So to summarize: Instead of doing it yourself, complain until someone else does it for you.

 

Imagine if you actually did the thing suggested to you instead of complaining for three years.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/editor-camera-speed-settings.367189/

 

That is also a good definition of Communism.

Unity devs are our benevolent leaders.

 

It really isn't but go off I guess.

 

Ok then.

 

We really don't need to get another thread locked for going politics.

That's a pretty poor definition of communism. And its not how it works in theory or in practice.

If you are going to be critical of an idea, at least understand the idea first.

 

Can I participate too?

 

Hi. You must be new to General Discussion.

 

Wait, we can control control scene camera using mouse? Then what am I doing all this time double clicking at objects in hierarchy list? :\

 

Try holding right click and using your WASD keys.