If unity didnt exist...

Without unity I’d go back to learning OpenGL, pain in the ass

 

In 2007 the game design school where I worked used Torque. They happened to have hired a bunch of people who worked in the business -- one ran a small studio -- and it was the obvious choice. Students did level design in UnReal, where it was easy and fast to test; but Torque to make something from the ground up.

There were complaints about Torque documentation and the forums from students. I think the license changed. One of our instructors had switched to Unity. A funny thing, we were already teaching C# for intro programming ("Forms", which could make 2D games easily enough) but we didn't care Unity could C#. UnityScript was a more normal game language. XNA was also being heavily promoted, but it was considered a hacker/hobbyist thing.

I think Unity Answers was a big help getting it popular. The Q&A format and moderation was much better than comparable support for other games.

But the coding format was a step backwards. Plenty of students could use Torque's scripting language. Then. rarely, a few talented ones hacked the engine (Torque's character movement had sidestepping. You provided only a step-right animation which was flipped to step left. But that didn't work for robots riding a single swiveling wheel). A big problem with Unity was regular guys had more trouble coding simple stuff. We had a great instructor who taught Torque scripting, among other things, but didn't have the coding background to handle UnityScript.

Unity is sort is midway between a "real" game engine and Ogre/OpenGL/XNA. A feel like it being successful was 3/4th historical fluke.

 

If you ask me this just about sums up the majority of the computer industry. Unity's success is largely due to the mobile market. If Android and iOS had not shown up when they did it likely wouldn't have made it.

Having a free tier available helped them down the road but I think the game engine that was successful because it had an inexpensive tier was Torque. I don't remember the original license cost but at the time I considered it to be very affordable compared to the competition. I want to say it was around $300 while everything else was way beyond that.

What do you classify as a "real" game engine?

 

Full Sail, Digipen, or other? The school I attended for game dev suggested Torque, Renderware, and Ogre. Unity wasn't even mentioned, probably because we were all on Windows machines.

Yeah, same complaints when I was in school, after school, when I joined Torque, and for a couple years after that. Took me years to get the documentation to a state I was happy with, but even then it had issues. Was to little, too late to change anyone's perspective on Torque documentation. By that point, Unity had pulled far ahead and a lot of people were leaving Torque for that sweet, greener grass on the other side.

Kinda goes back to my original thought. Without Unity, the game engine competition would not have heated up as early as it did. Someone earlier mentioned a "Unity sized hole" and they are right. The hole would have been obvious and eventually filled to compete with Torque, Shiva, XNA, etc.

On a similar note, C# as a game development language would not have been as widely accepted if it weren't for Unity.

 

This was a 1-off place in Minnesota. The staff used to make fun of Full Sail. A lot. That place sure advertised. And EA can only hire so many people to make the same football game over and over.

But around 2010 Unity ran fine on Windows. It's what the school used. Back them games were either PS3 or some other console, or PC. My recollection was Unity was ate coming to Mac. No one made Mac games. I think Unity just wasn't as well known then. Ogre and Torque are older. As Ryaih mentioned, it may have really took off when it provided an iOS auto-port so quickly. That's roughy when UnityAnswers started to collapse under the weight of duplicate Qs.

 

When Unity got ported to Windows, it started really picking up some solid momentum. When they released the indie license for it free-of-charge, that was when it truly exploded, and started to dominate the indie gaming scene. This is something that pretty much every other middleware engine started integrating.

The important aspect wasn't that there was a free version of the engine. The important aspect was that people could try the engine out without having to pay. Learning game engines takes time and experience, no matter what engine we are talking about. They are very technically demanding pieces of software, and there is always a learning curve. Putting the whole engine behind a paywall, especially a sizable paywall, is daunting, and seriously impairs the learning process. Opening up a version of your engine to be free-to-use, or perhaps more importantly free-to-learn, is one of the best ways to draw users in. And once they're familiar with the engine, they are a lot more likely to end up paying down the line when they use the engine to produce commercial software. Unity was one of the first big names to start pushing this trend, and now it is almost universal.

 

When a software is this huge, it does it no favors not to have a huge army of users lurking the engine day and night trying and testing things, going online asking/answering questions from the most obvious to high level stuff, over time covering every posible angle... to the point you can google almost any doubt, and someone already did it for you, and also someone else already answered, even with followups that are also helpful.

In a way, Unity users are an automated random question answering system that never sleeps.

Other engines? Pshhh you run into a problem and you're on your own... you may or may not find the problem within a couple of hours, maybe you'll find the answer 3 years later and facepalm yourself, such is the fate of engines without humongous user base u_u

 

This is also true of the Unity engine once you get into its poorly documented areas :V

 

Hmm, well, if you get too deep into the rabbit hole you may find some dodgy areas with features that aren't even in the docs... like, heads up, stay away from Gradient variable type, but.. it is to be expected if Unity is constantly growing the way it is. That helplessness of having no answers is only what other engine users experience on a daily basis, all we can do is sympathize :,(

 

Actually one good thing about Unity over XNA is that Unity doesn't require you to download DirectX. It avoids that whole minefield.
If Unity didnt exist we might still be in DLL hell.
The fact that I know if i make something in unity it is almost garunteed to work the same on any reasonable computer is a big factor.

 

Well, if you really wanted to dapple in XNA in this day and age, you would dig into Monogame, which provides cross-platform support and doesn't necessarily require DirectX.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If Unity hadn't made the decisions it had, someone else would have stepped up to fill the void. The landscape would be different, certainly, but not as much as you might perhaps imagine. All the same, it is very true that Unity has had a considerable influence over the progression of game and entertainment-related middleware. From the accessibility of an affordable indie-friendly engine, to the changes brought about by the introduction of the Asset Store. All of these have ushered in sweeping changes to game development in general.

 

Mark said that he'd dabbled with the idea of going with a 3D Rad style thing instead of blitzmax. An evolution of 3D Rad was kind of what Unity was all about. If he'd have done so things could've been a bit different. There's also Shiva which might still be alive, or not.

 

My uni was still teaching Virtools in 2012. Too outdated for my needs (I think the docs / forums were from 2009 at the latest), so I messed with XNA, didn't have the time to properly learn it & then stumbled upon Unity.

So probably XNA. Or RPG Maker.

 

I don't think you understand markets or evolution. Without iPhones there would be a gap in the market for 'easy to use consumer level smart phones'. Some product would fill that gap. Without kangaroos there would be a gap in the Australian eco system for 'large grazing herbivore'. Something would fill that gap. Without Unity there would be a gap in the market for a 'multiplatform game engine'. Something would arise to fill that gap.

You can actually see this process in action if you care to look around. Pick any market that is isolated from the main market supplier for some reason. Consider Google in China or EBay in NZ. You will find local solutions have arisen to fill the gap in the market.

 

I like your faith in the enevitability of history. I just dont agree with it. There are plenty of gaps on the market that remain unfilled.
We only know there was a gap in the market for an ipad because of the ipad.

There was a gap in the market for something thst eats dodos. It was never filled.

 

well if unity would not exist...

there would be engines like:

Irrlicht V2.5 (now is 1.8 and obsolete renderer)
Ogre3D V1.50.5
Urho3D (with different api, because actually is very unity3d like).

So engines like irrlicht now has no one to create them, because many people now use unity3d, and they dont care about oldie engines.

I probably would make simple 2d engine in ansi-c + opengl2, and create 2d games on it, or pixi-js.

 

Care to provide examples?

Ideally ones that are not ridiculous nonsense.

 

I can't give examples of things people only know they wanted after they've been invented!

As another example the Dyson vacuum cleaner. We could have happily gone another hundred years using the same technology. Only with hindsight can we say there was a gap in the market for a new kind of vacuum cleaner. That proves there was a gap in the market that nobody knew about. There's no doubt millions of others. Are you telling me that without Dyson another company would have developed the same technology? Quite unlikely IMO.

 

There's actually a well-documented phenomenon where multiple people come up with the same idea and/or invention at the same time, in completely different parts of the world, without having ever communicated with each other. It's happened for all sorts of various modern conveniences. If that can happen as often as it has, I don't think it difficult to imagine someone else stepping in to service a clear need.

What's really telling is how much demand there is for that particular need, and how many people could potentially address it. In the case of middle-ware game engines, I think it safe to say that someone else would have stepped up if Unity hadn't been there. Even back then, there were numerous competitors in that space, all of them trying different features and approaches. Sooner or later, someone else would have hit on a similar combination of features and accessibility. Unity certainly wasn't the only company trying to address this particular demand. They're just one of the more successful. This very thread is littered with nostalgic memories of past competitors who fell by the wayside. If Unity hadn't made the decisions they did, it's entirely possible that one or more of those competitors might still be around.

 

Examples? Evolutionary or market related.

The planet has plenty of examples of isolated free markets and isolated evolutionary niches. In every isolated evolutionary niche, there arises the same types of organisms. In every free market, the same types of needs get filled by market forces.

Bad example. Dodo's existed on a small island. Small islands don't normally have an ecological niche big enough to fit a large predator.

There was a market for vacuum cleaners. There is always a market for better vacuum cleaners. There are literally hundreds (thousands?) of people in the world who's full time job is to figure out how to make a better vacuum cleaner.

Cyclone technology has been around for centuries. James Dyson actually got the idea for his cyclone vacuum cleaner by watching a cyclone in a sawmill. You can't tell me that Dyson was the only inventor with a wife frustrated by poor vacuum cleaner performance who happened to frequent saw mills. Dyson may have brought the tech forward by ten years or so by focusing his attention on it. But without him someone else would have done it.

Check out 'steam engine time'. History is littered with people inventing the same new technology at the same time in different parts of the world. When the conditions are right to support a new technology, it will be invented.

 

If we assume Unity is the pre-cursor to the current market (I.e Unreal free, Godot, Polycode etc) and none would exist without it(I think that would be impossible) then I think I would still be making games with a custom engine that used Ogre3D\AngelScript\BulletPhysics or Urho3D probably.

Not sure what would have replaced it when I first went into game dev, it was the best as a starting studio when developing for mobile.

 

I often think back to my troubled childhood and refuge in computers. How they cut me off from a world of social contact. Where I would toil the good and sweet toil illuminated in the dark by bright glyphs that shone upon me. That understood me. That listened to the feverish drum of my fingers upon keys, a drumming that wasn't unlike running, as do we all from demons to lovers.

How the hell I ended up with a tart like Unity I'll never know.

 

Making my own. As I did before.

 

I haven't heard that bit of nonsense in years. So cool. The idea is there's a single mystical human consciousness, racial memory or some such, which everyone draws on. Simultaneous inventions are supposed to prove it. Or course, even minor research shows for every example either the inventors were communicating, or didn't invent the same thing at all, or the dates are off by a hundred years ... . It's as scientific as UFO sightings.

But it's also the basis of those idle games where you restart with bonuses, and those are pretty fun.

 

That might be one idea. I've heard at least two other explanations for that apparent phenomena:

• The first is that the people were all solving a newly arising problem, or solving an old problem with a newly available method. In other words, they all reached similar conclusions as a result of receiving similar stimuli.
• The second is Frequency Illusion. Basically, this is where something happens which causes observers to suddenly become aware of a thing that was already happening, potentially for a long time.

 

I think it's more likely that everyone hears a catchy worldwide pop hit, or there's this film coming out, or a new discovery or a humanitarian crisis.

What all the above have in common is that they are shared inputs that happen roughly at the same time all over the world. Inevitably, brains will process this and similar ideas are very much bound to occur.

If we didn't have some predisposition for similar logic we would not be able to fulfil basic survival tasks so it is not unreasonable given the same worldwide inputs, that we generate similar outputs.

That's my conclusion.

 

Lol. That went off the rails quickly.

Duplicate inventions aren't evidence of anything mystical. They are simply evidence that given the same basis to work with, and the same problem to solve, people will come up with similar solutions.

 

Sure, but I don't doubt for a second that people have tried to use it as evidence to argue that point.

 

Indeed, conditions and time in place make it ripe for those things to happen. Telephones, human flight, steam/industrial power, etc were on the verge of happening and created in different times and places and built on emerging and converging tech and conditions. Gaming is no different (or as critical). It was in full motion before unity. I think unity really was responsible for the explosion of hobbyists and turning those into a market.

 

I probably would have been stuck in Construct 2. Well, not stuck, I probably would have published some games but instead took a plunge into Unity and never took off as it is quite a bit harder to grasp so I ended up with more prototypes and unfinished projects than actual published games. Just a personal difficulty I guess which I am slowly defeating. Nevertheless, Unity's capabilities stole me over from the simplicity of Construct 2.

 

Lots of articles about that are under the term "Indiepocalyse". The idea that indie game became so easy to get out, for just anyone.

The iOS App store, and Steam, and GooglePlay ... and digital downloads in general, happened after Unity was gaining traction. I think they're credited with letting Indies get things out without needed publishers. I don't check, but it seems like most of the stuff you hear about, Boyfriend Dungeon this week, doesn't seem to be made with Unity.

But, IMHO, Unity was a part of that with how quickly they added iOS and Android. I remember when Linux folks were demanding a version, and Unity was all "we'll let someone else capture the huge Linux gaming market".

 

I meant the hobbyists were the market, not that they were on the supply side. Many hobbyists and hopeful indies were spending money on assets, courses, etc. Others were/are making money off them.

 

The Indiepocalypse is just hobbiests realising how hard it is to make money in games.

 

The hard part about saying what we would do right now if Unity didn't exist. It is possible indeed that something else would have filled the void...although how that would work we don't really know. The other thing is that other things that would have filled it in may vary as well. Ogre3d or Irrlicht may be what ended up filling that void. Ogre3d was more advanced, but the Irrlicht developer ended up making CopperCube. I'd wonder if Unity didn't exist, would something like CopperCube have been taken much further? I'd also wonder, if Unity didn't exist, would Epic have made UE4 the way they did? The same could be said for even Gamemaker: Studio, which evolved into a good competitor for Unity(on the 2d side of course).

What I would personally be doing....if Gamemaker evolved the same or close to it, I might would have dedicated myself to do something with it taking it closer to what Unity does. Or I might have stayed satisfied with something like Irrlicht or Ogre3d, or even Panda(remember that one?).

I actually messed with Torque 3d for a while too. I didn't like it though, the lack of documentation didn't help, nor did the proprietary scripting language. The engine itself was actually quite capable, and I found the architecture quite interesting, especially the way it was designed ground up for network support, but the bad part was that you had no choice but to have a server/client setup, even if you wanted to make a single player local PC game.

Another consideration that may apply to some people as well....if Unity had not made 3d stuff so easy(relatively speaking), it's possible that some of us would have stuck to 2d options, things like Gamemaker and RPGMaker, since there may not have been anything making 3d as accessible as Unity does now. That would depend on speculation though, as we have no idea how advanced other 3d tools would be...and of course some people who really want 3d are going to use something that supports 3d regardless of how accessible it is(I too worked with vanilla OpenGL for a time, making a nice little code base along with DirectSound and DirectInput back with 8.0). It's possible I would have advanced that further as well, I really have no idea.

 

Basically you've constructed the argument in a way which is tautological and so is imposible to argue against.

If there is a gap in the market unfulfilled and it takes ten thousand years for someone to come up with an idea to fill the gap in the market your argument is "see the markets work!" And if the market is not filled your argument is, "give it time the market will work." How can I disprove this? Impossible.

Also, you're saying that any new invention must be classified in a group of already existing inventions, X, and thus any new invention is a "new type of X". And then your argument is "see markets always lead to new types of X". No matter how revolutionary the product is.

Hence, since it is impossible to argue against a statement that is by definition impossible to disprove, I must concede. Much like I can't disprove the existence of the invisble spaghetti monster in the sky. Although personally I think that belief in either of those things is equally wrong and equally mystical.

 

I think the Indiepocalypse will happen when VR becomes mainstream. Then it will either be so easy for people to construct virtual worlds in VR that anyone can do it, or it will become so hard that only big companies can do it. I realise that is opposite!

When VR becomes a thing, I think games as such in terms of programming will become irrelevant and we will have more social experiences in VR that are less to do with programmed rules and more to do with virtual human interaction. And of course the rise of the VRlogger(TM) whatever form that might take.

 

I think you might be exaggerating a tad. For the particular example we're looking at, we're talking about a market that was already flush with various competitors before Unity moved out of the Mac-development club it had been in. It's not like there weren't any middleware game engines available at the time. There were plenty, and even more on coming on the horizon. Unity was simply one of the first to hit on this particular combination of elements. They pushed forward multiple initiatives when the time was right.

I'm not attempting to claim that someone else would have replicated Unity's success story if Unity had never expanded past Mac. That is unlikely. But I do think that someone else would have attempted making their engine free-to-use. And I think someone else would have eventually come up with a built-in Asset Store. In a no-Unity scenario, it's possible that these two initiatives would come from separate companies. There's no way to tell exactly how things would have shaken out. But there is a very real need for those types of initiatives in the industry. And sooner or later someone would have realized this, and struck at the opportunity. People are very good at pursuing opportunities. It's just a matter of time before they perceive them. In the case of the video game industry, there was plenty of perception, and plenty of exploration where these concepts were concerned. That is why I feel it was inevitable.

 

VR will never be a major consumer product.

 

My argument is simple to refute, the free market example or the evolutionary example. Find me a free market that lacks a service provided in other free markets. Then I will concede. Or find me a evolutionary niche that has been filled in one ecosystem, but not in another ecosystem. Then I will concede.

I can provide plenty of counter examples. Everything from agriculture to steam engines were invented in multiple places and times to solve the same problems. In evolution, there is a term called 'convergent evolution', which describes how common it is for the same feature set to emerge in multiple different lineages that occupy similar ecological niches. This thing happens so often that there is a name for it.

Thou shalt not mock the flying spaghetti monster!

 

I don't know about anyone's particular views. But "Evolution == pure capitalism == tide of history" is basic Libertarianism/Objectivism (Ayn Rand fans). You're pretty much telling someone their politics are wrong, which is going about as well as you'd expect.

 

I don't really know how applicable evolution is to things outside of biology. What I do know is that it is a scientific theory as complex as any other, and probably something that hypothesizing about be left to someone formally educated on the matter.

 

They are only mildly analogous. I'm just bringing it up because it was an example expressed by someone else earlier in the thread. Markets and evolution are similar superficially. But they work by very different mechanisms underneath. This means they can end up with wildly different results.

At your service.

 

#BoredPastafarian

 

I completely forgot about that! Before maybe 2012 the Blender game engine considered a not-so-good afterthought. Blender was open-source and this was clearly an offshoot that most blender devs were ignoring. Besides, why would a 3D modeling program need a game engine anyway? It's not like we can't export. All it does is save you setting up materials, well, and scenes, and animations with bone modifiers, so not a terrible idea. I remember they ditched it and started over again.

A Design student/worker in the library got into 3D models and got into that new Blender game engine and started asking me about it. I can't remember specifics except that it seemed pretty good. This was when my game design students were all using Torque (older ones) or Unity (freshmen), and I can barely use Blender anyway.

I remember thinking that Unity's big advantage over it was since they were closed source, they could negotiate for all the little licenses for music formats and so on.

 

There's actually been news on that subject. Armory 3D is a new game engine that uses Blender as it's editing front-end. It uses Haxe as it's programming back-end, and uses some of the various Haxe libraries and builders in order to insure cross-platform support and performance. Game logic can be created using native Blender nodes or Haxe scripts.

It's an interesting project. One of the biggest advantages that it provides is being able to create game art/content in the same program that you're developing your game in. It is an approach that shortens the art pipeline as much as possible. Obviously it is not for everyone. If you haven't been able to wrap your brain around Blender, the chances of you using Armory effectively are close to zero. For existing Blender enthusiasts, it is a nice option to have.

One of the biggest limitations that held back the original Blender Game Engine was a limited number of build platforms, and especially its lack of support for mobile platforms. (it had begun its development before the mobile market exploded) Performance was also a bit of an issue. BGE usually used high-level python scripting for some of its more advanced logic, which would limit performance and limit how much the end user could compensate for performance. It was often used for less graphically intensive games, but not for anything that required more rendering muscle. The Armory project seeks to get around a lot of those limitations and shortcomings.

 

I personally never find evolution that complex, it's simple really, it's random neighbor sampling of the possibility space, once you get to a valid neighbor, you can sample from that place again, recursively. Eventually given infinite time, it can solve any problem, it does suffer from over sampling and getting stuck in local maxima, but random oversampling mean it will eventually get out given infinite time. Trial and error is a valid search algorithm, and most multidimensional search are some sort of varient of just that. Also that's how gaz behave and why gaz can solve mazes by simply filling the maze void with random jitter.

 

Ha! Good example. Since genetic algorithms were inspired by the idea of real evolution, you get programmers who are sure that not only are they the same, but that coders know more about actual evolution than biologists. That bleeds into economics and free enterprise as well.

Maybe some people know lots of details and history of the game engine market. But you don't need to know things if you have a unified theory of evolution/capitalism. Pretty soon you're comparing Unity to a kangaroo with a straight face (your face, not the kangaroo's).

 

We used Torque and Torque 3d later. If Unity did not exist, we probably would have continued with Torque 3d but switched to a game that was much less ambitious.

 

If Unity didn't exist I would probably continue to play around in Game Maker 3D, and then after all the swear words has been visited and overused I would develop Unity on the basis of Ogre3D + OpenAL + Bullet.

 

If Unity didn't exist we'd probably have Half Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Portal 3 etc... but nOooOOoo Unity just had to make it easier for developers to make semi decent games to feed Valve's cash machine store...


terrible really no shame....I would have probably have taken c++ more seriously aswel but instead found c# to be the way forward...at least for now.