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I hope to see unity a fully featured game engine

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by frodoe7, Jan 2, 2016.

  1. frodoe7

    frodoe7

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    I hope to not use third party and plugins to handle something on my game
    like the backend (users authentications and management , saving data on online cloud , leaderboards and etc)
    , social integration(facebook , google+ , etc) , cloud code , downloadable content , achievements system like in google play services , in-game chat , push notifications and more..
    it will be awesome if the engine have these features built-in , like ads and IAP now
     
  2. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Wishful thinking at best. I'm not aware of any game engines on the market that handle all the aspects that you've listed and even if there are some they aren't affordable like Unity.
     
  3. Yash987654321

    Yash987654321

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    I hope people stop saying this :(
     
  4. Kiwasi

    Kiwasi

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    You have confused the concept of game and game engine. If you want a completed game, go buy one from blizzard or ea or any of the hundreds of indies out there.

    Unity gives you the tools to make a game, not a fully completed game.
     
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  5. frodoe7

    frodoe7

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    they managed to do some stuff built-in like ads and IAP
    "they can"
     
  6. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    By the way these are third party services. Why would you expect Unity to implement support themselves?

    Naturally they would have to implement support for their own services (Unity Ads). Otherwise how would you use them?
     
  7. frodoe7

    frodoe7

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    Facebook,google+,gamecenter,kongregate and twitter is built-in with Construct-2 :)
     
    Last edited: Jan 2, 2016
  8. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    So long as you don't mind waiting between 0 seconds and eternity.
     
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  9. AcidArrow

    AcidArrow

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    The problem with doing support for those is not doing the initial implementation. That would be fairly easy. It's maintaining those implementations. For a lot of those services the implementations and APIs change frequently. It would be to be on top of these on top of other more important and game breaking changes that come with new android versions and new iOS versions.
     
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  10. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Construct is aimed at people who would normally struggle with other toolsets. It does various things like replace actual scripting languages with visual event systems. Apparently its own users are not even aware that the integration for those platforms is through plug-ins too and not actually part of the core. Those plug-ins are simply downloaded with it.

    A similar approach could be taken with Unity by having the web installer grab the various SDKs. Though if someone cannot handle even downloading an SDK by themselves then I question their ability to be a game developer. At least with a toolset that is not designed to completely hold their hand through every step.
     
    Last edited: Jan 3, 2016
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  11. djweinbaum

    djweinbaum

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    I'd rather them work on the game engine: rendering, sound, animation, resource management, etc. Saving to the cloud? That's uploading your save file somewhere. Achievements? That's a bool. How would they even implement these things? You're still going to have to serialize and deserialize the data your game needs (aka writing a save system). You're still going to have to count kills and make UI for the achievements.
     
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  12. JohnnyA

    JohnnyA

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    The OPs title kind of sounds condescending but there seems to be a bit of undeserved vitriol here. UT clearly IS moving in this direction: Unity Ads, Unity EverPlay, Unity Analytics, etc. Its very likely this service portfolio will continue to grow.

    You may not want UT to focus on these things but there's no need to trivialise them. There are plenty of large, successful companies providing games back-ends as a service*, and doing it in a secure, reliable, cost-effective and scalable way is not trivial.

    * PlayFab has so far raised 10m in seed and Series A, PlayScale was acquired by Yahoo, Gamooga, GameSparks, many more.
     
  13. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Right. They're moving in the direction of providing their own services. They don't own Facebook or any of those. Those won't likely ever be handled by Unity unless those companies collaborate directly with Unity like Microsoft has been doing lately.
     
  14. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    This look very similar to "make my mmo" push button dream engine.
     
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  15. JohnnyA

    JohnnyA

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    The OP listed many items of which social is one ... and there's no way Unity would ever try to wrap third party social libraries ... http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Social.html ...

    EDIT: And Facebook used to be in the list of ISocialPlatforms (although it wasn't actually implemented and has since been removed).
     
    Last edited: Jan 4, 2016
  16. JohnnyA

    JohnnyA

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    I totally disagree. Unity's mission of 'democratising game development' is about remove hurdles so you can focus on creating your game.

    Many games these days have server-side requirements, and not just for multiplayer (IAP validation, anti-piracy, anti-cheat, etc). But having to build complex server-side systems is a real blocker. Learning a new language and tech stack as well as a bunch of different cloud and social APIs can seriously impact timeline/budget. And its got nothing to do with creating gameplay.

    If Unity can take these problems away then its doing a better job of realising its mission.
     
  17. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Yet these are not truly hurdles as they're already being solved by third parties. Unity having them integrated into the core wouldn't eliminate the true difficulty which consists of reading the documentation to understand how to use the APIs and eliminating any problems in the code that you write.

    This would only eliminate the difficulty of acquiring and importing the asset which is one of the simplest steps.
     
    Last edited: Jan 4, 2016
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  18. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    Those projects are most of the time "big team" games or with people already familiar with these API and that are able to call them throught a 3D engine.
    Having Unity follow theses Apis would just bring more problems to the table, Enlighten for example is still far from finished and optimal and it is not entirelly graphic bugs free, we stilll have problems or features like "mixed mode" still not totally integrated and debugged.

    I am not sure a 3D engine purpose is to integrate all Apis each individual could need, this would become overwhelming work as there is thousands of optionnal Apis anyone could pick up to integrate within Unity.

    But there is a lot of these features listed that are available in the Asset Store for individual specific needs.
     
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  19. JohnnyA

    JohnnyA

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    I'm not sure Photon would be the go to solution for cloud data storage for something like a Candy Crush type game where you aim to get many users and make a small amount per user its extremely expensive for that sort of game (compared to say some of the back-end services I listed a few posts ago).

    But you are right you don't necessarily have to write a back end you can of course consume a third-party service.

    You do still have to find out about these services, you have to pick which one is right, you have to learn them, you have to pull them all together and hope they work together. You have to hope they stay current with Unity version. The more Unity does towards these the easier and smoother it becomes.

    I've used many ad services with Unity (from writing my own iAd wrappers, to third party plugins like RevMob), yet when Unity released Unity Ads I switched. Its just easy :)

    Anyway we are getting way off my original point which was simply that the OP's point is not so left field that they deserve derision.
     
  20. JohnnyA

    JohnnyA

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    I think thats the crux of it. Is Unity a 3D engine or a game development platform, to me it seems like they are heading more for option number 2 and some people (e.g. OP) seem to want this.
     
  21. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    At the same time though this allows you to pick and choose the service you want based on your needs. If Unity were to offer all of these in their core they would have to largely provide one-size-fits-all solutions for each as they wouldn't have the resources for anything else. At least not for the affordable prices they are charging now.

    Either way though I feel like you're over exaggerating the effort necessary to have third party services work together.

    Only tentatively. Some of them might make sense (namely the third party ones like Steam, Facebook, etc). The others though are too difficult and/or impossible to provide as one-size-fits-all solutions.

    Unity 3D is a game engine. Their other services combined with it make up a game development platform. Just my $0.02.
     
  22. JohnnyA

    JohnnyA

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    Maybe but I think its also easy to under estimate the true cost of adopting a bunch of third party services:
    • Your project need a new feature from Unity 5.3, but one of the plugins doesn't support it.
    • The revenue impact of these services can really explode if your game becomes successful. This can really impact ARPU calculations for marketing spend, and more improtantly the bottom line (maybe it was better to spend the cash to roll your own custom back end that sits on top of AWS).
    • Services have poor uptime or worse go out of business (happened to me with my PhroniX game, the level data service was down, or extremely unresponsive, for a whole week... just so happened to be launch week).
    • Revenue (i.e. ad) services don't pay out (can't remember which service it was but this happened with a fairly big one not that long ago).
    • Selecting services can be quite time consuming. Often details of features are hard to ascertain from marketing/promotional material. Can often need to try multiple services or worse commit to one only to find it has a ket feature missing.
    • Plenty of others I'm sure.
    Services from Unity wont necessarily fix all of these, but they help address a lot of them.

    I'd still prefer Unity fix major bugs, I spend many hours talking customers of Platformer PRO through Mecanim bugs. But a lot of these services would be useful to me. Not because I can't integrate something else but because it becomes a no brainer.

    EDIT: Anyways enough from me, I need to do some work!
     
  23. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    Before all these services, should not Unity adress the basic features that are still missing from long date ?
    vertex color painter, shader visual editor, cinematic tool, new terrain system with today advanced shaders , vegetation shaders, terrain advanced tools ( Gaia plugin for example), visual programming (aka UE4 blueprints ,Crysis flowgraph) 2D skeletal animation and vertex weight rigging etc ...

    There is perhaps more demand from users to adress above needs than external services, the terrain system is very outdated today for example.
     
  24. Moonjump

    Moonjump

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    cocos2d-x has SDKBOX, which is very similar to what the OP wished for, but for a different game engine. So it can be done.
     
  25. Tanel

    Tanel

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    Unity hasn't forced anyone on their services thus far, doubt that'll ever happen. So you can still choose to use a third party one instead.
    The people developing those things usually aren't in the teams working on services. So doing one doesn't exclude the other.

    They wouldn't really put evertything else on hold to provide us with the ultimate Services package, so I agree with JohhnyA, the more convenient and faster those integrations are the better.
     
  26. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    What's the difference at that point to not having Unity integrate it all? You'll be back to square one.
     
  27. Tanel

    Tanel

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    How so? You have the option of using Unity's offering which will most likely be easier to implement and maintain but if that doesn't suit your particular needs you can also go look for a third party solution.
     
  28. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Remember this is primarily about how the OP wants Unity to handle these aspects for him. Thus any reason to have to resort to third party is likely an automatic failure for Unity as far as he's concerned. Those of us who won't mind having to resort to a third party are likely to see this as a waste of time on Unity's part.
     
  29. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    Unity can't expand their teams , they don't have enought teams.
    If they had really big and enought teams we would already have new terrain features, shader editor and lot more :rolleyes:
     
  30. Tanel

    Tanel

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    Ok, I get it now. Guess I'm inbetween the positions. I wouldn't mind resorting to third parties if needed but also don't see Unity implementing those things as a waste of time if they can make the integration better and faster for me.

    Still yeah, this stuff isn't what's holding Unity back from being a fully featured game engine, not by a long shot.
     
  31. Tanel

    Tanel

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    Those are features that are divided by the same people (teams). For services they've usually brought in fresh blood.
     
  32. AndrewGrayGames

    AndrewGrayGames

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    Occasionally they'll also sacrifice a few carrots to Ixion for a 0.3ms improvement in render times of non-culled materials. Ifrit requires authentic buffalo wings, he won't improve cyclomatic complexity of the main engine otherwise, and of course there's always Anima, who drinks the tears of the QA team and Community Managers when having to deal with people who want a "Summon Game" button built directly into Unity.

    *: I thought Tanel said, "bought in fresh blood". Oops. Remember the wisdom of the Trolls of Azeroth - stay away from the voodoo! And, stay away from the summoner.
     
    Last edited: Jan 5, 2016
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