Official Introducing Gigaya: Unity's upcoming sample game

UE5!! Woooohooooo! Timmy doesn't call us idiots.

Welcome to 3 years ago.

 

Unity IS great.
Which doesn't mean it couldn't be much better!

Anybody that says that Unreal is "broken" is insane: it's the most advanced 3D engine in the world used by tons of AAA productions, how can it be broken?

Can we stop turning this into a "console wars" thing?
Stop the fanboy nonsense: both Unity AND Unreal ARE great engines. And the amount of successful games made in both shows it.
Your personal preferences are just that, PERSONAL.
I completely understand why artistically oriented users like Unreal much more than Unity, but as a generalist first and technical artist second, I just LOVE the freedom and easy of use of Unity to make my own things without having to fork the whole engine C++ source.

However, as much as I love Unity, the advantages it once had are steadily being phased out in favor of a much more complicated ecosystem of packages that are turning developing with Unity into developing with Microsoft's Visual Studio in general: A PAIN. (that is everything but VISUAL)

If the current trend continues, it will soon be as complicated to program for Unity than it is to program in C++ for Unreal. (maybe even more so, since not being able to manually manage the memory gets in the way of your programming once reached a given point of complexity.)

And if/when this happens, Unreal will be a friendlier option for everyone, not just artists.

So: is Unity a great engine?
Currently, YES, YES IT IS.

Does it have a bright future?
From my point of view, not that much, no.

But hey, there are still plenty of people who LOVE to program blindly with Microsoft's "Visual" suite, so there will always be a market for this, just not for the people like me that fell in love with Unity because it was easy to tune, customize, adapt and make original things with.

 

Genshin Impact, Inside...

 

Thank goodness no-one is going to reel off UE4 games because that would be an extremely long list of high end games.

 

The point is that Unity IS and HAS BEEN a great engine and Unreal of course is too.
It's not the gear, it's the artist who makes art.

 

It's true, I've got thousands of posts where I demonstrate to people the successes of Unity. But I think, really, it's not Unity's focus and so Unity can't measure up if the tooling is not there.

I know it is a poor artist that blames the tools but it's on topic to state (even with Andy Touch above) that a large amount of people wanted workflows and tooling from Gigaya.

The problem here is that one engine is clearly built to make making games easier in a proven way. It really touches on that Gigaya nerve. I'll leave it here, but tooling is very important isn't it?

Engines can't function without mechanics and mechanics can't function without tools.

 

all the title that you named using modifed version of unity nothing that they were using was based what you delivered out of box the guys... could you name a game that was AAA in terms of Graphics and Gameplay( with fast stable framerates and frame pacing ) similiar to the countless of titles that are unsing UE4

 

To belabour the point, many Unity staff will agree that the feature can drop much quicker than tooling can. Tooling takes a long time and is hard to do. Very time consuming. Terrain tools in Unity have barely shifted in a decade, and surely based on asset store, demonstrate just how far behind Unity is there.

Meanwhile there's been plenty of 2D or mobile oriented tooling. It's a good topic as it respects one of the bright hopes people had for Gigaya.

 

i meant the unity games you mentioned all of them had changes that were not made by you guys and yes many UE4 games used what they had out of the box , secondly most of the games you mentioned above they moved their sequels to UE5 isn't that an indication for you guys to realize what's wrong with your engine ... the wiki page you posted alone shows that every year we see less titles using unity ...

 

It is, no doubt.
And Unreal is clearly built around making game development specifically easier.
Meanwhile, as the creator of ghost of a tale said in his tweets:

Which is absolutely true.
But then again, that doesn't make the current Unity engine bad as a tool for creation, as all the high quality indie games that were made with it can attest.

That's why I make a clear difference between what Unity IS right now, and what the FUTURE of Unity seems to me that will be if no one fires the current executives that manage it.

Because that's the issue really: it's not the technology, it's not the lack of talented developers in the company or the lack of funds (as much as everybody likes to remember that "Unity never made a profit"... yeah, because they were reinvesting EVERYTHING they earned in questionable things, not because the income wasn't there.)

The problem is the executive branch of Unity, the managers.
And since their goals aren't aligned with ours, as creatives, and they seem to have bullet-proof contracts to avoid them being fired (again, read The Undercover Economist for more on that) I see the future of Unity very bleak and think this is like beating a dead horse.
It's not that it CAN'T be done, it's that they DON'T WANT to do it.

 

Most UE games actually change source code, way more than unity.
Also worth noting the game Rust, made with unity and no source changes. At least that was the case a year or so ago.
source: lead dev blog
(PC).

 

Rust is using Unity from 2013 were everything was fine after unity 5.2/5.3 things get to the wrong direction lightmaps bugs memory leaks , framerate issue and thing escalated with Unity LTS none of the feels ready at all for production even the gigaya project proved that unity is not useable for production , sadly we are no more in 2013 and this guys have to wake up and do something about it ...

 

I think that what you are trying to say is that you can do a more awesome experience with the included tooling in Unreal Engine out of the box than with Unity. And that much is 100% true: if you aren't a technical artist, there is no chance to achieve the results of UE5 in Unity just with what it's included by default. You will need at the very least to buy some plugins in the asset store to get close.

However, don't fool yourself: the guys that made the actual Unreal games you are picturing in your head had to create their own in-editor tools, shaders and everything else for the game to be different and stunning.
That's just the way it is: as cool as anything included with the engine could be, you will have to create your own custom things to be different, starting with a custom character controller, camera controller, NPC systems, dialogue...
EVERYTHING.

Game development IS HARD. (even 2D retro styled one)
The problem I see is that plenty of people think it would be easier than it really is.

 

Unity 2020LTS is fine.
Unity 2021LTS however is a S***storm.
That's what triggered me to cancel my pro subscription and stay in 2020LTS.

- Edit: Unity 2021 LTS seems fine now. Update here.

 

it doesn't matter what pipline you are using if the editor it self is not stable and has it's fair of issue when your project get bigger and bigger ...

 

No, not really: it's full of bugs. CRASHING bugs.
Mainly in editor, but I haven't tested the player extensively enough either.
I know, you will say it doesn't crash for you, but trust me, IT WILL.
It's simple: my project runs perfectly well on 2020LTS and as soon as I put it on 2021LTS it stutters (something to do with the fixedupdate pace) and has a 40% change of crashing the editor every time I compile my scripts or shaders (something to do with compute shaders blowing up).
No errors in the console, no incompatibilities in the upgrade... it's just bugged.

- Edit: Unity 2021 LTS seems fine now. Update here.

 

Third party studios like Mihoyo have and keep showing that Unity can ship high quality games to phones, what I wonder is if the changes they made to the Unity engine in-house are a requirement or a nice to have to accomplish that. If it's the former, Unity has yet another problem.

 

Nope, not an upgrade issue: Since the upgrade process was being a disaster, I just recreated the project from scratch.
(and by that I mean I made a completely new project, reconfigured everything to match the old one, closed Unity, copy pasted the 3d models and assets, recreated the scenes just in case the new Unity didn't like the old Unity scenes... I'm not new doing S*** like this.)
The project runs without errors, everything is imported correctly.
That's not the issue. The issue are regression bugs, and this is intolerable on an LTS release.

edit: and all of this without gaining anything in the switch except faster "enter play mode" times.
Faster Android builds also. That was great, but if the editor blows up every time you recompile... xD

 

if i recall they said in one of their Dev presentations they used a customized rendering pipelines for different platforms i assume they meant android ... they annouced also a switch version that should ship after 3 months of the main launch (which was 2021) but i think it didn't happen still TBA

 

I joke you not, I find it easier and faster to poke the Unity blackbox until I find what is broken and just work around it, which works most of the times. I can't just wait for Unity to fix a bug, it takes forever, I have to move on and keep working anyway, which results on reporting bugs that you can work around (most of them) a waste of time.

That's why I wish I could just fix Unity bugs myself. Some think this is shameful, Unity should do that job instead, they are the ones making money off of it and blah blah. The fact is that I don't care, I want something fixed and if Unity can't provide it, I can. I may be one of the three people with a certain bug, so it will never have enough priority. I will end up giving them code for free, yes, but I can keep making the game. If I don't like it, I don't do it, but I have the option, and many of us have enough knowledge to be able to fix many bugs that we care about but aren't accessible to us.
It would cost multiple employees full-time handling pull requests, but given how many known bugs Unity has that haven't been fixed for years, I'm sure it would be worth a try.

Hopefully that wouldn't end like Unreal's "fix it yourself, you have access to the source code" but instead as a shortcut for those who can fix it, without removing the employees doing the bug fixes.

 

Cloud-based.
You will own nothing and you will be happy.

 

It would end exactly like that LOL
I don't even discard the idea of Unity executives doing that and firing devs.

 

I was wondering when this topic would turn into a UE vs Unity contest
Since we are comparing the two companies with each other, let me add that I would love to see what UE has had on a weekly basis for a very long time - live streams with amazing guests. This is truly a goldmine of knowledge. I'd like to see more of that from Unity (we've had a few episodes that were super useful). I don't know if Unity's budget will allow for something like this, but there is a small chance for it.

 

They do.
Haven't you noticed the stable but endless stream of bug fixes since the first version of Unity 2021LTS was released?
Haven't you wondered how it is possible for a long time engine to have a list of 50 bug fixes on every single update? (Most of which are not related to new features but old ones)

I've been here since FOREVER. LOL

 

Follow UnityTech on Twitch, they do semi-regular streams with various mid-level game studios, where they often get really deep into technical details.

About UE vs Unity... yeah I was waiting for this thread to devolve into this crap too, I was really hoping it wouldn't but here we are.

 

Thing is they are on record stating they used a source license and do have a billion dollar income stream with which to use their ancient Unity with (as far as I can remember it's Unity 2017 or 18).

It is a huge studio.

In any case it's not a reality the rest of us can have. Unity can do, but without the tooling and the source, it's a can't do for many. As Gigaya proved.

In fact isn't it more common than not that titles like GTFO, Fall Guys, Ori, Inside, Firewatch, Genshin... all either required Accelerate (Unity's engineers) / source license to actually ship things with some kind of ambition?

Isn't that really unfair on users? I mean Unity's going around showing off all this hot stuff. But it's not for you.

They could fix that though. Who knows, priorities.

 

Unity did several youtube videos interviewing devs that Used Unity to make some cool games, and what tricks they used. It was very interesting because it showed workflows the followed, tools they made and gotchas the applied that were useful to me.
There was also a time when Unity made videos showing off games made with Unity, I wonder what happened to those.
Their talks at GDC and their own Unite are also very useful. Only a couple of them talk about modifications to the engine's source code which isn't very useful for most of us, rather makes me feel a bit sad...

 

I'm not here to compare Unity to Unreal. I'm sure there are plenty of issues on Unreal land that one will only know of when it affects you. That's not my point.
My point is that Unity 2021LTS was ultra bugged when they released it and that shouldn't happen in an LTS release, because it has been matured for more than a year as a tech stream version before switching it to LTS. This is intolerable. (I don't know if my issues were fixed with the updates, but I don't even care anymore since I cancelled my subscription and I'm staying on Unity 2020LTS for my current game. And after that, I'll see what I'll do. Maybe another Unity game to amortize my investment in Unity, but after that, I'll check other engines.)

 

What you will get is a massive new world of bugs we can't even imagine right now, a much more rigid and complicated architecture and complete incompatibility with everything that has been programed for Unity up until now.

And I say that as a guy who actually knows how to code multi-threading apps and I implement multi-threading in Unity every time I get the chance to.

It would have been much much MUCH better if they had enhanced the monobehaviour API to be multi-threading friendly.
But yeah... apparently the guys who wrote that aren't even in the company anymore, so let's do a new shiny thing instead! (code from others always stink, let me redo everything instead)

 

I don't know where you got the idea that they will be incompatible. I have been deliberately holding off on spending a lot of time learning DOTS but even what little I have has showed me that it's trivial to communicate between the two sides. If I were an asset developer I would start adding support now.

 

Ok, we'll see. I will be glad if that's the case.
Contrary to many people, I love to be proven wrong, because that usually implies good news LOL

 

Ok ok, DOTS will solve all our problems
I'm kidding, as I said before, if DOTS ends up being marvelous, I will be as glad as you.

edit: it's just that I'm not really confident in Unity's future, given its management, but I don't know the future so I can be wrong, obviously.

 

Wait, why didn't I know about this? I dont like twitch (I dont like sites with NSFW content) but I'll give it a try. Thanks!

 

I genuinely believe making at least an average living is not that difficult but it does take effort and time. Can't just put a game out there and expect people to find it. But a good strategy can lead to repeat and ultimately long term success and growth.

Even the most talented developers fail at strategy if they have no sense of marketing. I know so many people I gave just a little advice to and now their projects are sustainable and they can actually pay people.

As an indie dev you can find out if your game will work for an income long before a full release.

As people have said here earlier it doesn't really take a lot of sales at like $10-$20 to generate a stable income.

 

Per hour ?

 

There's a difference: modifying Unity is a privilege only a few studios can afford to pay for. With Unreal you have to compile from source to even package for consoles or make a dedicated server build: modifying the engine is just an arm throw away.

For devs with C/C++ console game dev background modifying the engine for your game is actually expected, while in Unity it's the exception. Those without source access are at the mercy of Unity's updates if they face a bug or performance issue that doesn't have a reasonable workaround. This is why mobile GaaS like Genshin and CoD will go straight to a source license: something like a full LTS upgrade on a live project just so you can use the latest Xcode carries too much risk.

 

Like it or not, I believe this is the future of Unity, and services related: https://unity.com/products/economy
I don't begrudge them but I think I was pretty slow on the uptake. My interests are much more about accessing high end rendering but with an indie lens and I think that alienates me here going forward. Dots will require extensive tooling and there is no guarantee HDRP will scale.

 

Being able to modify the packages is delicious. Feels great to press F12 in some package function and go straight to source, or to be able to make small dirty changes which would never fly in the official releases but are just what specific projects need.

It's a shame that moving large parts of the engine to C# did have unintended side-effects in iteration time and performance (new input system, the SRPs). Burst and jobs are fantastic for optimizing "dumb" code, but there are things like addressables and the input system which would fare much better if they were written in C++. IL2CPP can only go so far with the way managed DotNet code is expected to work.

 

The code quality of URP and HDRP packages are still not really good especially HDRP. Besides that If I'm not wrong, there are things like just hardcode guid into code directly. Any plan to improve it?

 

Because with all due respect to Godot, Cryengine, Stride and other niche engines....Unity and Unreal are behemoth of general purpose, public available engines AND THEY WILL ALWAYS BE COMPARED untill they are shutdown . Just accept it, as long as the dicussion is civil

 

Well we don't need to discuss other engines. You go to those forums for that. As always, if you want an answer, you try it out.

With Unity, I guess they've been bottlenecked as it's called, for a few years too long now, for my taste. I think it's fantastic all these wealthy clients are able to afford Unity's services and source. I can't.

I guess the outdated tooling is also bottlenecked. That's the new thing isn't it? bottlenecked.

 

I mean You can compare UE to Unity on UE forums and Unity to UE on Unity forums, why not? Ofc You dont ask UE questions on Unity forums and vice versa...I have no clue why civilized discussions about engine comparison my be unwelcome, it would show Unity and vice versa UE is afraid of each other or something.

 

Because its been done to death, and so no, you may not. There are hundreds of prior comparison posts. So our moderated answer now is: try them all out. It is free to do so.

This topic is really about Unity and seeing a better future / path with Unity.

 

Corporate buzzwords...
I prefer the term "resource-starved".

 

I would like to give some feedback to dots. Currently dots missing AI tooling like dots behavior tree, dots utility AI, dots navigation and etc. Any plan to work on it after releasing dots 1.0?