Looks like Unitys CTO has been replaced

Based on the latest blog post: https://blog.unity.com/news/cto-luc-barthelet-on-key-to-next-phase-of-unity-tech

It looks like Joachim Ante has been replaced as CTO, and another Electronic Arts veteran has joined the core team.

Interested if anyone knows anything more about this and the timeline, as this was the first I heard about this happening and nowhere does it say anything about Joaqium stepping down, just about unitys new CTO - but I doubt there is going to be 2 CTOs

 

wow.. i guess the blog post does give positive image, so it could be good news!
"more features at a quicker pace" (imo: nanite / lumen alternative is needed asap..)

but then again, since there is no more info given, this could be preparation towards selling Unity-company?
*funny enough, searched for Ante news and this came up from 2014,

https://twitter.com/unitygames/status/521728206714724354?lang=en

*other comments here:
https://twitter.com/andytouch/status/1632890407842377728

*** linked in, new cto:

 

I am surprised since the blog post just barely mentions „newly appointed“ and the rest of the article doesn‘t touch on the subject of this change at all and there is no official statement I could find. You know, since Unity is a publicly traded company you would expect a personnel change at that level to be publicized via press release.

On LinkedIn the blog post is highlighted with: „As we enter the next phase with our newly appointed CTO, Luc Barthelet shares his ideas on fueling the future of technology at Unity.“
https://de.linkedin.com/company/unity

So either Unity or Unity in regards to the CTO are entering some sort of „next phase“. I tend to read it as Unity entering a „next phase“ but what is that phase and what other phases are there? Or is it just a dumb phrase where someone simply did not consider that such statement carries implications such as fueling the rumor mill?

I just feel kind of underinformed at this point, no more, no less.

 

OP you butchered his name. It's Joachim!

Anyway, since I put a lot of trust into Joachim at a time were I seriously wanted to change the engine, I'd like to read a statement from him and what the future holds. Unity has a bright future with DOTS, that's for sure. I'd just like to know what the man that has spear-headed such a fantastic tech stack is doing now.

 

I haven't have heard from @Joachim_Ante for many months.
He just to be very active. Until major company changes. I was wondering for long time already, what happens to Joachim. I suspect something else is going on.

 

Wow so the opposite of what the engine needs.

 

I know nothing about any of this, but i swear i saw E.A. mentioned, and well ... lol, they've been on my worst ever list since well ... west wood cnc days.

 

As always, thanks for more context! Definitely paints the transition in a much smoother light! Its a shame that not-directly-related employees have to take to forums and social media to clear up things in a sort-of-unofficial way!

Maybe some of this info should be added and elaborated more in the blogpost to avoid further confusion and worry? I know you are not part of the marketing/copywriting team but have internal connections.

 

Thanks a bunch for adding more clarity I mostly just wanted to know what was going on as none of that was on the blog post. Sounds like a much more "relaxed" transition than might be insinuated from reading the blog post + following the company closely

I therefore agree with @Andy-Touch that it would have been nice for this to be on the blog post, because given Unity is a public company people immediately work these sort of things out and start to run with whatever info they have

 

Depending on the level of the person who phrased this corporate-speak, that could mean technology changes or the layoffs.

 

This flies pretty directly in the face of what we've all seen happening with the engine already.

 

I wouldn't take the contents of the blog post to heart, we're not the audience for a PR post that's most likely intended to bolster confidence in Unity from an outside perspective. Metaverse is dead and they're talking about games again, which is good imo.

 

I'm not really interested in who runs Unity, as long as it's capable // bit community - thinking people . . .

However, there's also another question, what if Mr. Joachim was an amazing boss, however Mr. Luc is even more amazing, and now the engine got better, or it's run perhaps better, or more focused on community, or getting more features, or perhaps quality updates, or also bug - fixes . . .

 

I think for most people this is not about Joachim Ante being a great boss, but more about him being one of the three people who started and released Unity in 2005.

 

To say nothing of how Luc Barthelet is another EA alum, and the current EA alum in charge is a complete disaster.

 

Awesome. Btw when official will start improving various package manager issues? One the biggest issue is every new version release is insanely slow that at least takes over 1 month+ like ecs release and addressables release. Even the simple bug fix to Service Core also takes almost 1 month to release. Another is ecs hotfix release takes about 10 days to release which I think should reduce to takes 1-3 days to release after official implemented the fix. I would like official to introduce something like fast track for unity user who want to quickly get the hotfix release. Currently it's too slow from official implemented the fix until push to production.

 

It might be bit weird, optimizing, or making the consumer - pipeline more effective isn't necessarily a feature looking for, or perhaps it's not a goal itself, think people want the engine to be run well, and also people that understand the community, and perhaps also what made Unity unique, not sure one could say it in even one word . . .

- community - focused
- courteous
- wisely run // features

It's nice to hear about all these new features, and how stuff is happening faster, however it's also a matter of the ' right ' things happening faster, or it's not just about #technically pushing new features, or quality - levels . . .

Anyway, it's easy to find another engine, or that suits one's needs, Unity is a very pro - tool, and if there was anything that might make me leave it was if it went ' too ' pro, or over quality, or what most video - games need, also the features, it's not either - or, however bit reason, and instead of thinking the community want faster // ever-better features, perhaps what most people that use the engine want is more of what made Unity it's own thing, not sure . . . .

 

Poor Mercurial, lost another one.

 

Please make your own thread if you want to ask about specific issues, rather than hijacking my thread. This is specifically about the topic in the title of the thread, which at this point has been answered and has nothing to do with the package manager. Thankyou

 

The broader issue is that this same claim has been made what feels like dozens of times at this point.

 

And it's entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that it's been true and valid every time. Continuous improvement isn't a thing that's completed and stopped, it's continuous. I would hope that there are improvement projects being both kicked off and completed on a regular basis. That's a good thing.

 

I'm talking about how these things are never actually reflected in the engine. All these backend changes don't actually mean anything in the face of things like "Unity adding features that would barely be considered betas anywhere else and calling them production ready" or "Unity's documentation completely slipping in quality for years" or "Unity's base feature set languishing due to not actually getting updated, instead getting replaced outright with the aforementioned barely betas."

These things aren't true and valid to developers.

 

ohhh, so what has happened is that Unity now has faster internal dev, or update - efforts, and perhaps everyone is going to also benefit when we get features that are both better, and faster, and also bug - fixes, alright this may be important news, and an even better reason for learning, or making content also in Unity engine, that's also sort - of cool . . .

for me, as someone bit on the indie - side, the important thing is that the engine stays that way, or it's almost easier to make stuff in Godot, or other grass - roots engines, or there are a few that are mostly open source, not something a corporate engine can do, also over licenses to third - party technology, however that's one of the advantages of the more commercial engines, that one gets the best // industry - leading also ' tech ', or features, overall quite happy with the Unity stuff, except perhaps the recent IronSource - merger, overall wasn't looking to add, or even think over half - blatant monetization, part of the fun of making video - games, or taking-a-break from reality, or the also corporate world is to make video - games, maybe indies need almost ' help ', or to be half - flogged to make money, bit lol, however looking at the stuff now the engine is perhaps more monetizable, however less-fun, and releasing a title, or at all product in Unity now feels a bit ' cheap ', or perhaps bit more ' CEO ' than was ever looking to, it's also a problem for people that have invested years, or a ton of learning in Unity, that they can't just fast - migrate to another engine, however after thinking about it, think it's a bit weird move, however that the leaders, or people that understand the dev - market better, perhaps adding this feature, or extention to the software is actually for the better, or the average Unity - dev almost needs help to make more money, or it's perhaps either upsetting, or ' weird ' that devs working over Unity aren't better at monetization, not sure overall it was for to benefit the fans // different devs that work in Unity, however it's bit like adding ' loot boxes ', and over how much think money the stuff cost, it's almost like sending a message to most devs it's also time-to-get-greedy, or it's almost big-sell-out day, and that goes bit against video - games, media, or art being made for fun, and to specifically ESCAPE that feeling, or ' corporate ' world, at least that goes for me, it's break from the hum - drum, or where people are ' free ' from the various realities, or life - pressures, now it's like the ' un - fun ' part of life is a pedigree at the Unity - engine, and that's perhaps why thinking bit over finding another engine, despite Unity overall being amazing // feature - full, and bunch of other stuff . . .

 

Let's put this to a test. Ever since the Terrain Tools have been introduced there's been the critical bug (my personal classification) in the Unity Editor that once you click the terrain gameobject all heightmaps are being loaded into memory.

Here, this is how it looks like:



Have 25 heightmaps as brushes in your project, click the terrain gameobject and *bang* out of memory crash of the Editor only for selecting a gameobject, you lose all your unsaved changes. The fix should be trivial, show only the thumbnails in the Editor, load/unload the heightmaps per instance when you use them.

Here's a ticket:

https://unity3d.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/2/IN-21309

It's been completely ignored by Unity.

I don't see improvement of core functionality, nor velocity change. The ticket system and classification definitely needs improvement too. I'm pretty sure the devs would fix this, but it seems like the ticket got lost.

 

Eh, I could cherry pick positive examples, e.g. my Editor used to crash multiple times a day, but now I can't remember the last time I had a crash. The engine is huge, and everyone's experience will be different depending on what parts we use, what we do with them, target platforms, etc. etc. Individual examples don't prove anything, and superpig was already clear about the fact that this round of improvements is too recent to have had direct customer impact yet.

 

This happens more than I can count, since Unity 5, I have tickets, that get no reply or ones that are months later.... with finally a replies that are not helpful at all...

 

It is really difficult to read your wall-of-text posts as they mostly are rambling, with extreme use of punctuation in places it shouldnt be. Its just honestly difficult to read, and I think that is why everyone is mostly ignoring your comments here and in most threads.

I really recommend trying to condense what you are saying down to a few sentences, and use standard grammar and punctuation instead of "...." all over the place and other punctuation just used randomly everywhere.

If this is a second language barrier type issue and english isnt your first language, you would be better off using auto translate.

 

#thx, high - func autist, think bit in terms of code, or symbols . . .

 

I can see this is in your signature - it used to be possible to display signatures at the bottom of all your posts. I am not sure if the forum still supports this, but if it does that would be a good option to use to increase positive engagement with your posts Knowing that information absolutely changes the way I would read your post for at least

 

It is visible, providing I understood what you meant.

But it is not visible on the mobiles, at least in my case.

Srr for off-topic

 

Or ChatGPT.

Spoiler

 

wow that is amazing. I feel like i agree wholeheartedly with the post now that I can read it

 

I get people hitting this bug on a daily/weekly basis in my support channels. This is because people who buy MicroVerse often buy stamp packs, which contain hundreds of stamps at 4k each, and install them all into their project. Then clicking on a terrain loads 4gb+ of data or more, often crashing their systems, and they assume it's my code doing it.

Crash bugs which are easily reproduced in common cases should not be ignored like this. It's easy to repro, the cause is clear, and it's very easy to deal with by either virtualizing the control, or virtualizing it and having it generate preview versions instead of loading a 4k texture to render a 64x64 preview.

The work around to this is that stamp packs can no longer include brushes for the unity terrain system, otherwise they will crash users machines. So basically, if you want Unity not to crash, you can't produce large amounts of content for the built in tools, because they are so badly written that they can't handle large projects. Again, trivial to fix, but Unity is basically saying they don't care if their tools work under actual production environment scales.

 

Actually this is a critical bug. I have no idea who categorized this major bug as not critical and "won't fix". The bug makes you literaly run out-of-memory and therefore crashing the editor by selecting the terrain gameobject in an otherwise empty scene. Sorry but classifying this as "won't fix" is madness.

 

Great post! You should be the translator for unity's blog posts. They're always written in some form of ancient demonic wizardry, I believe it's called "HR speak". Often it can incite anger, frustration, and a feeling of estrangement. and these are only some of its more known evil abilities. Extremely frightening.

 

On the terrain, I sometimes truly wonder what the terrain team does day to day. Not to put them down or anything, but unity's terrain has been.. isolated, to say the least. Other than terrain tools, it seems there's been nothing.

Even bug fixes don't seem to take a priority. Maybe they're stuck in a vicious cycle of meeting hell, forever discussing what could be -- but never is. Who knows, a mystery it will remain. (I will fight back the urge of using unity emojis right here... don't do it. This is not 2010 anymore. God damn it.)

 

Is there a "terrain team"?

 

If we're airing grievances about timelines and unusable Unity 1st party systems, Visual Scripting comes to mind. It was acquired nearly 3 years ago, they cancelled Bolt 2 which was in development for two years, then they took a year to integrate the outdated Bolt 1 that had stopped development in 2018 and migrate it from an asset store product to a 1st party package. Then they basically did nothing with it for two years.

A bug fix here or there, and also some breaking changes messing with peoples workflows. For some 9 months Visual Scripting couldn't output functional builds when using reflected nodes from other Unity packages like Cinemachine or asset store editor tools. It was a known issue for all that time and it was simply reversed nine months later after numerous bug reports, a multi page forum thread and making a lot of noise on Discord when UVS team still used to communicate with the community. The change was made to make automated testing easier or some such and didn't take into an account actual real world use cases. If anyone at Unity would actually use visual scripting in any capacity, that change would not have been made.

Now per 2022 November update, current Visual Scripting won't receive any new updates this year and possibly longer since they're developing a new major version based on Graph Tools Foundation and a new runtime for the tool, which is great, but their projected timeline is "2-3 release cycles". That'll be 5-7 years after acquisition to get the first usable incarnation of the tool because the current version of UVS is simply not usable in any sizable production for a plethora of reasons be it performance, UX problems, serious serialization bugs due to it still being based on the defunct 3rd party FullSerializer and many other issues.

The 7+ year development timelines for a minimum viable product seems to be the norm rather than the exception for Unity packages. UI Toolkit is still not production ready, URP is routinely undergoing major changes and still can't match the feature set or the quality of HDRP or even built-in RP, almost feels like URP has been handed off to the B team despite it being the most adapted of the available options. The decision to split the scriptable render pipeline teams off into closed off silos will always be a bad decision in my books.

Whenever I read about these velocity gains internally, I just don't see it. Or perhaps the issue is not really with velocity but rather with poor decision making. Maybe the new CTO can remedy some of that, albeit the role might be too high level to change any of this? I've no idea.

 

This news makes me think the future of ECS is probably in doubt. I could easily see it deprioritized even more. We will need to wait and see what happens over the next 6-12 months.

The new direction seems to be focused on better graphics and ease of use.

 

I do hope that's the case, especially lighting & GI solution.
Current GI is the most painful aspect of Unity.
With the lack of change and fix in the GI solution, I do hope the GI team get re-structured ASAP.

 

It would be interesting to have a much more indepth blogpost from the new CTO diving in to specifics of Unity's technical direction and future. How will SRP evolve? What will happen with DOTS? What major changes would come to the core engine & workflows? And also cover the future of dev ops systems like Cloud Build and acquired/merged company tech like Weta, Ziva, Parsec, IronForge, Plastic, PiXYZ, DDNA, etc. It would be a really insightful & helpful read to know what Unity is going to be technically offering to it's users over the next 6 months, 1 year and 5 years.

 

Unity's own Terrain Sample Asset Pack recently got plenty of heightmaps added itself. So this problem will come to light of day more and more.

Fact is: It's a bug. It crashes user's editors and they'll lose all their work when they don't save in time.

It's fixable, should be even easily fixable. There hasn't been a load test obviously. It's also understandable that this just comes up later when users get their hands on the software. But whoever classified this as "won't fix" clearly didn't understand what it's about and what the effects are. Why should anyone have to waste their time now trying to convince someone that this is actually considered a bug?

Yes, it's sane to use 4K stamps on a 4K terrain. It also works just fine. It's just that the memory management needs to be dealt with with stamps that are not in use.

I don't want to be picky on this case, but it's a good example: To me it looks like the typical case where Unity doesn't use their own software. What good is a feature that can't be used? You may as well remove the stamp functionality altogether. Nobody wants their editor crashing when memory can't be handled properly by Unity and Unity refuses to fix it when you point your finger at it.

On a personal note: Terrain should be given more focus. Currently it seems it's been ignored for years.

 

Clearly everyone should just resubmit this bug. The chance that Unity looks on comments of existing bugs closed as Won't Fix is likely 0. So simply resubmitting this bug over and over until someone gets it is likely the only way it gets looked at.

 

Unity could very well be using their own software and just never use the terrain system. Thinking back on the past demos they made I can't think of any that would have needed it. MegaCity was entirely in the air, Enemies was in a room, etc. Gigaya is the most likely one to have used it and even then it might just be a mesh.

 

Blacksmith had terrain system landscape. You can see it within Viking Village asset.

Well, you COULD see it in viking village asset, because, of course, unity took it down as far as I can tell and right now only URP version is available.