Great interview with David Helgason - UE4 has had no impact on Unity

I'm not one to think the world will end. It was just how I perceived the interview. I am not going anywhere personally, while I do think the current pricing model is outdated, and the subscription is ridiculous (I get the full Adobe Cloud for $30/month). I think most of it comes from a previous lack of response, but obviously that has changed in this thread.
The fact that your even replying kind of takes my thoughts and kicks them out the window huh?

Thank you for taking the time, and I hope I can upgrade to U5, but can't with the current price.

 

But this isn't the entire situation. Lowering the price point of UE4 was only part of their new business model. They're also releasing the source and leveraging crowdsourcing to accelerate development. This means they are getting a ton of free development hours to fix bugs and add features.

This compounds Unity's problem of already fighting a poor reputation (just look around on some game forums. There isn't a whole lot nice being said about Unity). Granted, this is mostly because of people releasing games with the stock shader and/or less resources than AAA games, but the layman doesn't care about that. The average gamer looks at a Unity game, and something like Mass Effect, and just assumes Unity is a bad engine.

Finally, crowdsourcing UT4 is going to stir the pot and get them lots of attention. It's a giant marketing campaign for UE4.

I'm not saying Unity can't compete, but it has to be more than just changing the license model.

 

I actually don't think the licensing model (aside from subscription) is as important as adding value to a product. For instance http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/12/announcing-unet-new-unity-multiplayer-technology/ UNET. This is a pretty big deal and adds a ton of value we might find hard to deal with going with other engines.

Having an expensive product doesn't make Unity greedy. But it does mean that Unity is empowered to bring more developers and features to the table. If that means I do less work and make better games in less time, well that's time = money.

 

You just paraphrased what I said

And yes, I saw UNET when they posted on the blog. I just hope it won't have the same release schedule as the new GUI.

 

That's actually really cool bit of info. There is definitely a ton of value there.

 

I was initially excited about the UNET announcement, then with a sinking feeling I read "Phase 1 will be part of the 5.x release cycle". Ok, so Phase 1 which is the bare bones will be available "some time" in 5.x. Who knows about Phase 2 and 3. Or I can use the multiplayer framework that Gears Of War uses right now today. These are the things that are killing me, Unity is just too slow to the table with core components.

 

Right so it's established you need Gears of war style networking for your game, today. That doesn't require Phase 2 or 3 from what I see (It's not an MMO, and UE4 lacks any kind of MMO support). So your multiplayer game - it's ready before mid 5.0 right?

 

UNET?!. For Unity Pro only?

 

Plenty of MMO's being made with UE4 . Wouldn't it be a bad idea to develop your game around a third parties time table that you don't have any control over?

 

Well considering I am working on it now, and not starting it a year from now it is relevant I think. Do you wait until your game is almost done to pick a networking library and then try to integrate it? Anyways I expected this reponse, you are now Hippocoder defender of all things Unity and despair ye who voice any concerns.

 

So Unity's existing networking is no good for you then because it wasn't used in Gears of War? am I reading you right? I mean Unity announces an upgrade of a feature they already have, and you're just coming across really unhappy like Unity's this terrible thing because it isn't here yesterday.

I will criticise Unity on a lot of things, but criticising them because they announced some future plan, is exactly why the roadmaps got pulled. Deliver constructive feedback, encourage these people to do better, don't just lay into them because they haven't matched their competition feature for feature, already. Doesn't make sense to me.

... but it does have a core component for networking. Granted it probably isn't as good, but it is there, and it is used by many. I think it's cool its being upgraded.

Maybe you came off a bit harsh eh?

(I'm making a multiplayer game right now, so it's particularly relevant to me)

 

I don't really have anything new to add yet, but I just want to chime in and say that it's great to have had staff join in the conversation.

 

I clicked on the link and nothing came up for unreal 4. Plenty for 1 thru 3 though.
Did I miss something?

 

Just a bit of info. I did ask about MMO support on the UE4 boards. Specifically, whether they were going to make their Atlas MMO framework available at some point. This is the response I got from a somewhat reliable source:

"I'm sorry for the slow reply. We aren't planning to move the Atlas MMO framework to UE4. We are incrementally improving parts of UE4 related to networking, large world support, server performance, etc, to better server MMOs and games with MMO-like elements. For past MMOs built with Unreal Engine 2, 3, and 4, teams have generally used one of two approaches:

1. Implementing a completely custom MMO back-end framework handling all gameplay logic including object movement, and interfacing it with UE through networking: The client purely runs in UE, and the server purely runs outside of UE, and they are coordinated through a custom networking layer using either UDP or TCP. This approach is generally best for MMOs looking to support thousands of players per server, where UE's high-precision approach to player movement and collision are overly-expensive compared to tile maps and other simplified techniques.

2. Using UE's built-in functionality for implementing both the client and server components of an MMO, and extending the networking and level streaming code to support new features such as simultaneous connections to multiple servers responsible for separate streaming levels, and coordination between servers to allow seamless movement of actors between them.

NCSoft took approach 1 with Lineage 2 and various other projects, while Sigil Games took approach 2 with Vanguard. For a small project, I'd recommend approach 2, as it's easy to get up and running in a prototype prior to making engine-level improvements needed for scalability.

Tim Sweeney"

 

@David Helgason: Thanks for responding directly to this thread. I appreciate your responses and I am reassured that you seem to be in touch with the community and Unity issues. This kind of communication is important. For those who may not be paying attention or just not aware, David is not merely a UT staffer, he is the CEO and a co-founder.

 

I agree completely.

 

^this^

 

Do you realize who that "staff" is?

 

Are you suggesting to renovate the current unity3D price model?

Sorry I needed to ask

P.S. I hope that Unity Technologies Comes out on top of all this.

 

It all depends on your team skills, if you got coders then they will feel at home writing C++ code, If you got a lot of designers (with scripting abilities) they will surely love BluePrints. What's works really nice is a combination of both C++ and BPs. Speaking of code, by default any code you write on UE4 (if you inherits your classes from the framework) is managed by the engine (through reflection) but you'll possibly get hit by the engine GC if you are not quite careful. For instance if you instantiate stuff at runtime and somehow you lost references to it, they will later on get collected when the GC kicks in. What's cool is that Epic put out a Memory library (that is also used on the engine itself) to manage your own memory (to avoid natively managing memory which is more dangerous and tedious) in case you want to safely/easily manage your stuff which it's really great. But yeah, you have to be somehow comfortable writing C++ code.
So, back to the initial question, If you have a team of coders and designers the best thing to do is to let your coders write low level behaviors and functionality on C++ and extend them to be accessible through blueprints, so your designers can hook them up visually and so some spaghetti nodes! It's always better than to write everything using BPs (which is ~20 times slower than C++ code).

 

Value is relative to every project. If you don't care about new features and only need a custom splashscreen, US$4500,- is a lot...

 

But company branding is worth a lot to Unity as well, so that probably would still be expensive to the point you'd be saving money overall by getting a bunch of other features.

(would like a choice of logos or have it negotiable how to present it - I might have wanted to mosaic fx it in for example on a retro title).

 

I build code I can re-use. C# is a different language than C++. The Unity API is different than Unreal.

You are reaching very far to make a comparison between playing video games and making them.

If I ditch my code library for Unity and move to another engine, I won't just move willy-nilly to the engine I have already ditched. Most people move forward, not backwards and back and forth.

It's not a decision to be taken lightly. I have done engine switches before, have you? I gain nothing from having to switch engines, so to see the Unity fanboyism so heavily harped on people like me, who have been using and building with Unity for the past two years, is mind-boggling. I don't gain anything from making my life harder, but I will do it if the cost-benefit dictates I should do so.

 

Know what it would do? It would ease the burden on Unity, get more information to more users, and strengthen the community of active voices. Unity has an amazingly strong community that could easily be leveraged. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

Gigi

 

^ This.
Gigi

 

Can't agree more, I announced I was from a commercial engine background and did a small thread on some works. After that I received a flood of messages from various people who made their own engines / renderers / API's etc. etc. not only that, they were generally excellent. I was in utter awe, no offence to beginners but with the influx of people starting their careers these hardcore devs get lost in the SNR, you forget that there is a lot of long standing experienced members in this community.

That is something Unity could leverage, we can commit fixes / rendering upgrades / post effects and shaders / tools without hacky workarounds. It allows better integration with third party middle-ware developers to do clean additions.

Also if it's a quick fix, we don't need to bother Unity with it.

QUESTION! If they did go open source, how are they supposed to get around all the third party SDK's and middleware licensing? Are you expecting a barebones layout with hooks where you can buy third party addons like Enlighten and integrate?

Because this has ended up making things very expensive for some high end integrations with other engines.

 

I don't think everyone's learned their lesson. There will always be people who takes anything as a promise, even if it says SUBJECT TO CHANGE in big letters right next to it. Also, the Forum population isn't a representative sample of Unity users (it's probably a lot better than for something like a game forum though). For each person who complains about something, there are probably 10 people who are perfectly happy with it. People rarely praise anything.

I don't get people who say Unity is sticking their head in the sand because they haven't lowered their pricing, that' silly and would be a knee-jerk reaction. Better to wait and see what happens and make a more informed decision later down the line.

I think the above is something you really should try to take into account. For all those people who complained about the GUI being postponed, there were probably a lot more people who were very happy about other things that was on the roadmap and did get done. They just aren't as loud as people with grievances. Like how currently I'm worried about how UNET Relay and Matchmaking servers might be tied to Unity's Multiplayer Cloud. And also how a Relay server is pretty useless, you could just as well use dedicated servers instead for a relatively minor price increase as all traffic between players need to go through the Relay server anyway.

I'm happy about the work on making MMO networking easier though, but it's unlikely I would have said anything about that.

I don't think that's what he meant Hippo. I think hejust meant that the if you want to get Unity's current networking up to UE4's level you need to do a lot of work and he was disappointed that a Unity equivalent would be a long time coming. He's probably happy that it IS coming though!

Since Phase 1 is unlikely to have Interpolation and Client-Side Prediction, it will still require work to get to UE4's level. Probably less than the current networking though. At least that's what I took away from Lárus Ólafsson comment on the blogpost

Haven't you said you shouldn't plan around upcoming features?

 

Well thats interesting... all the comments at the bottom of the original link were deleted...

 

Which comments?

 

The ones ate the bottom of the article posted by OP

 

Same ones that want Unity Pro licenses to be free.

 

I imagine Unity might group all 'moonlighters' and treat them as if they were Corp Y paying full price for licenses. Why give a discount to those without bargaining power? Business don't do that, they work to maximize profit. e.g. Unity makes far more from the Asset Store from Unity Free users than it ever made from Unity Basic users (if you have been around Unity long enough to remember those licenses).

By the way, the Fonz was in Kentucky last week! Mr. Helgason has some competition in the collar department.

 

I may subscribe to Maya LT for $50 a month but then again to get the time to learn it well enough to make it worth $50 a month when I know Blender good enough for Unity Mobile game purposes anyway...

 

Businesses are run by people, who do sometimes have goals other than "maximize profit".

Are you sure about that?

--Eric

 

What you mean? I make own noodle pots. Taste much better and cost much more.

 

LOL, so you made money with Unity Free but the sequel with Unity Pro is a flop?

By all means, complain about Unity Free. That's what Mantis is for.

 

I hate being off topic, but I need to know more. Can you share a recipe for some awesome fresh noodle pots?

 

I would like to see AllJoyn type features added.

 

@hippocoder: I notice you don't limit yourself to being off topic, guess you don't hate being off topic that much except when it applies to other people.

 

Oh, I go to Aldi's and buy their Swabian Egg Noodles (but any egg noodle will do) and then slice up carrots, celery, water chestnuts, and sliced bell peppers and mix water (not much), cream, butter, salt, black pepper to taste. I know, bland to some but then I also actually like cabbage soup and also things like sauer kraut.

If you have a garden grow your own but realizing that's not practical for most and there is out of season too you can buy the vegetables as fresh produce in the market except the water chestnuts which I've always really liked for some odd reason or if you have to buy them frozen but it's darn hard to find frozen vegetables that's aren't freezer burnt.

As far as this thread, well as much as I'm excited about the future of Unity, UE4, and CryTek, I like that I need only two more 'must' have from the Asset Store.

I'm unhappy that I haven't been able to earn enough mowing lawns to buy Unity Pro especially now since I had the gall to look closely at the vines I had just pulled up only afterwards and realizing they were poison ivy. So I sit here with hands covered in blisters that itch and some on my legs too. Not Unity's fault though. Not that I think Unity Pro gets my intended style anything except extra debugging help and render to texture. I can and certainly have done without a lot of nice things besides Unity Pro! LOL!

Oh, don't cook the veggies or noodles to mush! I sometimes but Birdseye Oriental Stir Fry 64 oz when I'm in a hurry, I don't know if you have, maybe Tesco's or whoever has a brand name. If I use curry power or turmeric or such spices I usually mix sparingly with Miracle Whip to make the curry sauce. You'll have to look up on the labels and cookbooks the 'signature spice signature' of your favorite foods and improvise.

 

re: UE4 has had no impact on Unity

honestly what do you want them to say...

 

I think he's slowly building up to a post that illustrates parallels between choice of noodles and choice of software, that will settle everybody's anxieties once and for all.

Just wait for it, it's coming...

 

Delicious (that's me licking my lips)

 

Please Hippocoder...

 

You have a old fashioned way of thinking about maximizing profits, which in reality does not max profit, because if someone cannot afford paying 1500$, profit from such customer is 0$, but if he can afford 19$/5% or 500$ the profit from him is 500$, which is significantly more than 0$

 

What about the lost profit from all the people that would have bought it at a higher price?

 

I was writing about indie pricing where i proposed lower price for people earning below X$ annually, the trick is to calculate the X so that it would cover all the people that cannot afford current price and at the same time exclude all the people that can afford it.

 

I think the main reasons I'm thinking of seriously leaving unity are because A) hobbyist - no question B) How long some things have been on the roadmap but never become reality (not mentioning that 3 letter acronym) and how long it takes for bug fixes. In regards to things like GUI (oops) never being realised, it's not that I want that GUI so bad, it's the principle. I now can't trust any of Unity's future promises because I just don't know whether they'll deliver. I might spend my time waiting for a feature that's never going to come, when I could have switched engines. Sure, this applies to every engine making promises (a la voxel cone tracing) but they're either dead clear about it being only a potential feature, or only drop the less significant ones. (Voxel cone would be nice I'm sure but we can live with enlighten).
But on top of it all - it's what you get out of the box. If you want a really smooth pipeline in unity, you're going to have to spend a fair amount of money in the asset store. If you're a mainly art oriented person who doesn't want to learn to code (which I think people should try) you're going to want playmaker, and if you're simply an artist you might want some shading/lighting enhancement - eg shader forge, sky shop etc. As I'm not a programmer per se, I don't know what you guys want but I'm sure there's a couple of packages which now you have you couldn't live without.
I'm a bit sick of the store, I see individuals kicking out things Unity have said they've been working on for ages, or better yet - the community members make something, and then Unity see you can get it on the store so they don't bother developing their own. That's what it feels like. I also feel for people who want to make only mobile games but shovel out the money for the base pro package (which is useless to them in terms of exporting to a platform) and then some serious extra cash for iOS/ android etc. Unity should have a pro package dedicated solely to mobile for sure.

I'm not going to complain (as a free user) that I should be getting XYZ, because I shouldn't. Sure, I'd love a lot of features to come through to free, and I think they give us some pretty things that we'd rather trade for something else - but I'm a free user! I'm not entitled to it. I'm just happy I can make a game for free.
Sorry for the rant, many of you will disagree, haha! I realise this went off topic slightly, but hey you're all talking about noodles.

My only hitch with switching engines is the community - I love the unity community, it's so active and (99% of the time) super friendly and uber helpful.

 

I thought it was obvious? Just get noodles and place them in a pot.