Official: How Can We Serve You Better?

Actually, on the subject of Mecanim, there is one part of Mecanim that really irks me at the moment...

So what I would really like is to have "overlay" poses that have absolute rotation rather than relative rotation.
That is, I've got a 9-way blended movement animation set. That's not hard, actually it's downright easy.
Then I want an overlay pose for weapons (like holding a pistol). So I have another layer in my controller with an upper body mask.
Unfortunately this only works if the 9-way blend animation has absolutely no torso twisting and essentially matches the rotation of the overlay pose.
However, the moment I rotate the hips in the 9-way animation (for the strafe animations), the upper body rotates with it. And I can't see any way to prevent it, except for I suppose having unique movement animations for every weapon (which is definitely not ideal).
It severely limits the usefulness of mecanim IMHO

 

The thread is mostly negative which just looks like growing pains to me. As far as I remember, Unity never targeted AAA studios or ex-AAA who are now indie. Now because of their own success they've attracted such sophisticated veteran users. I myself appreciate the restrictions of what is partially exposed in a higher level, perhaps limited API. So thanks Unity team for choosing to KISS for us non-veteran developers! We would not have been able to make games if Unity were too complicated to learn.

Also regarding pricing, one thing not discussed much is the significantly less expensive preorder costs for license upgrades. $1500 is always tossed around per license, but $600 for the upgrade is so much less. So in my case I'm not comparing $19/5% to $1500, but rather $456/5% vs $600 for probably the next 24 months or so. But yeah, mobile license does triple that to $1800, still looks very cheap for any gamemaker that expects to make a decent profit... Looks like break even in my case would be about $19000 gross for a mobile game. Not to mention you get a Windows mobile license for free, and Blackberry which I don't think UE4 has either. Please stay royalty free forever Unity!

 

Of course, you must have Unity 4 to get the upgrade price. I think the $1500 isn't such a burden to those who already have Pro since they do get a discounted upgrade. It is a burden to those who want to buy it for the first time. Those first timers will be paying the upgrade price in a couple of years, but only if they can afford to buy Pro in the first place.

 

Just to be totally clear, I agree with you! Let's ignore the AAA thing for a second. Unity is in the position of trying to do two things...

• Provide complete solutions for individuals/teams without the experience, time, or need to build their own
• Provide a framework for individuals/teams with more complicated requirements to build their own solutions, and ideally monetize and share those solutions through the asset store

Unity is doing a pretty good job on #1, at least at the basic levels. They're doing a fairly poor, or at least highly inconsistent, job on #2. All developers, regardless of experience level, would benefit from having better low-level access to core engine features. They'll either benefit from it by using it directly themselves, or by purchasing new, more feature-rich assets from the asset store.

 

E.g.: don't let collaboration posts activation wait for 5 days!

 

Unity as a base engine is an attractive proposition for AAA it's simple to use therefore cutting staff cost which is generally where all the money goes, issue is we look towards what AAA will be in 2016 / 2018 not 2010. I'm sure Unity deal with AAA in some sectors, you do have the option to get the source code if required. The matter at hand is not the cost of the engine again the problem is the cost of developing tools / frameworks / rendering upgrades / fixing bugs and finishing off features.

But as for point 1, I highly doubt within the vast team of Unity's engineers they don't have some AAA experienced engineers.

 

Well, and besides which I truly believe they are making an effort to hire more of them.
Case in point, Unity just recently hired a new network team made of people who had previously worked on NFS:World, WoW, Ultima Online, LOTRO, Marvel Heroes, and D&D Online to re-do Unity Networking. So I think they're definitely making an effort to hire more AAA experienced devs.

 

I actually know for a fact that they do.

I'm not sure what your background is, so apologies if I've misread your post.

Unity actually gets a lot of use in AAA companies, but it's generally used as either a mobile SKU development platform, or as a prototyping tool - not as a primary development platform for what I'd call AAA games.

Getting and modifying the source code of Unity itself is not a solution. The benefit of adopting any middleware package is that there is another team, somewhere else, largely off your books who is responsible for the maintenance of that code. If I make substantial modifications to their source, suddenly I am now responsible for the maintenance of that code, and the value of Unity's part starts to shift from positive to negative. Unity already has a mechanism (script/native plugins) for maintainable, user-side extension of the engine. The proper solution is to better define the APIs which Unity exposes, allowing for more flexible/effective extension of the engine while retaining the ability for the core to stay maintained by Unity.

Unreal has exposed the source, but the difference is that for critical changes to the engine, you can contribute those back to the Unreal developers for consideration. If they accept that change, then it is once again their responsibility to maintain. When using large middleware packages, I would only consider making substantial changes to their code if I felt I was likely to get that change adopted into their dev line.

 

Why has it taken so long for Unity to fix the lag and time delays when using Unity editor on Mavericks? It's been months and months yet still no solution.

 

Pass the buck. A sure fire way to win developer support!

 

This isn't really helpful, is it? On one hand the community wants to hear more from Unity, on the other hand whenever we hear something we don't like there's always someone ready to moan about it. I know this is The Internet and The Internet will always be that way, but that's no reason for us to contribute negatively ourselves is it?

In this case, what is it that you expect them to do? They know it sucks just as much as we do, and they probably want it fixed as much as or more than we do. Instead of dwelling on stuff that we/Unity can't control, how 'bout we focus on things that we/Unity can actively work to improve right now?

 

I agree it's not helpful to just complain but as many people have said on this thread, we need more open dialogue with UT engineers and managers.

Another case in point: for most Mac users, the Profiler has been broken for > 2 years when reporting the GPU stats (as in, they’re completely empty). Unity says it’s an OS X timing error and a bug report was opened with Apple in 2012. That’s fair enough, but we haven’t had any update from UT re the status: the Unity bug reporter still states the case as being open. We need to know how Apple responded to the bug report that was filed - even if it’s just “case is still open with Apple”.

 

I could imagine issues like that would pile up pretty quickly though resulting in a lot of unnecessary communication - Which issues should they keep us updated about, and which ones can they ignore until fixed?

This thread has already reached almost 800 posts - that's a lot of pages that UT must sort through which no doubt takes a lot of time. Perhaps UT should look at hosting a monthly Q&A session? The most urgent/popular questions could be presented to UT and they respond with answers (or non-answers) to each.

 

This issue has been around for over 2 years without an update. We need a brief comment re the status so we know it's still being tracked - at the moment, it appears to have just been forgotten and will never be resolved. They don't have to respond individually to us - they just need to either update the status or close the issue.

 

I think that complaining is actually a really important part of that open dialog, so I've nothing against that. I just think it's of benefit to everyone to focus on where a) the ball is in our or Unity's court or b) where we can get the ball into our or Unity's court.

With the long standing issues (there are a few), can anyone suggest alternate solutions that Unity might be able to take? If the 3rd parties aren't playing then can we find some way to improve things that doesn't involve them? Or is there some other way to make things better?

With regards to keeping people updated, I'd suggest a quarterly review-and-comment cycle on long term bugs. That is, every 3 months the situation should be checked and a comment added, just so that users know it hasn't been forgotten. Also, I find that this kind of thing often spurs action - for instance, "I wonder what would happen if I called the vendor and discussed this?" leading to it being dug up out of the pile and finally addressed. Are less people using Apple stuff because the lag and GPU profiling issues in Unity lead them to dev on Windows instead? If so, maybe bringing that to their attention would lead to fixes? Maybe it's just been sitting in their log for so long they've stopped even noticing it, and attaching a face to it would be enough to drag it up out of the depths for long enough to get a solution?

Worth a try.

 

wouldn't this require Unity to ditch the "free" version to this sub level?

and if they do this... what happens when UE4 drops the price to $9.99/mo. +5% or $2/mo.+3% or free/mo.+1%, or just plain free.... then what? cause I predict this too happen.

Epic has a large bank roll behind it, UT does not.

So, then what happens... UT goes all open-source and becomes a service based company.... then Epic does too. Everyone get the engine and source all for free, free royalties, just "try" to go make a game with it and oh, buy some extra tools and addons from our store... pay fees for our Cloud ads services or pay fees for <add whatever you want here>.

^that^ is the future here... I think the Red-Hot Chily Peppers say it best "give it away now"

not immediately, UT should perhaps drop the price to match UE4 and see what happens. I guarantee they'll counter it... then UT should hopefully be in a position to become service oriented company and just "give it away".

that's probably the last I'm going to say on this topic.

 

Oh dear God, please do not let this devolve into a race to the bottom!

 

I know, but it's the only outcome I see for now until someone comes out a winner... there will be small bursts of new comers here or there as before, but how hard could it be to stomp a competitor out with a huge bank roll behind you?

 

Well, hopefully instead of "stomping each other out" they can compete from their niches of strength. I wouldn't want to make the kind of stuff I make in Unity in Unreal. By the same token, I probably wouldn't want to make the kind of stuff I'd make in Unreal in Unity.

If you were doing Gears of War 5, what would you prefer to work in? How 'bout an Angry Birds game? I'd pick different tools for each of those, and there wouldn't even be any competition.

Though I guess there could be competition on that in the future.

 

I'd pick Unity for both

 

Haha, to be honest I might depending on the context. If I were starting from scratch I'd probably go for Unreal on GoW-style games, but if I had an established Unity studio and we had already invested into in-house tools and extensions then I wouldn't be in a rush to throw those away.

"The right tool for the job" is pretty context sensitive. Nonetheless, what I'm getting at is that broadly speaking, while there is indeed some overlap, they're generally each "the best tool" for different types of jobs, so I really don't see why either has to destroy the other.

 

Unity may want to be the best tool for all jobs

 

Yes, that would be perfect - we just need a process which will keep these bugs on the radar, and either resolve 'em or dump 'em.

 

My particular reasons for going with Unity stem from a fairly deep knowledge of the toolset, and super efficient development workflow. I'm not terribly familiar with the Unreal way of doing things, and don't really care for the programming workflow (close editor, make changes, recompile, open editor, close editor, make changes, recompile, and so on)
Not to mention I pretty much own enough assets at this point to replicate most of the graphics features of Unreal in Unity except for Enlighten.

 

For a GoW type of game, I'd say that at the very least I would look into if it's possible to do it in Unity first.

What do you guys think is lacking in Unity anyway to make that kind of game (from a programmer's standpoint)? Megatextures? The ability to load/stream vast amounts of terrain seamlessly? I'm not particularly interested in those so I haven't checked up on them, but weren't there Unity plugins for just those things?

Wouldn't all the graphical niceness (e.g. models, textures, shaders) come from the artist anyway, and not from the engine? This is an honest question, I'm really curious what's stopping Unity.


My problem is, as much as I admit Unreal/C++ is powerful, I'm not willing to go back to that environment. Long compile time waits like PhobicGunner mentioned, the ease of me getting intermittent faults (i.e. pointers, memory corruption) when I'm not careful (I remember the days when I was using Torque...)

 

I'm curious on the above question as well, to tell you the truth.

I hear things such as: "with the same amount of effort put in to both engines, it tends to look a lot better with Unreal". Though I suppose that doesn't mean it's not possible in Unity, but you might have to work harder (or get something from the asset store).

I think I'll be sticking with the a. do it myself, b. look in the asset store, or c. wait for UT to add those features to Unity mindset. (Given that I'm making a voxel engine game at the moment, graphics aren't my highest priority). For voxel engines, Unity is a wonderful engine for the most part, though could use a little improvement in the multithreading area.

 

From a programmers standpoint? Nothing. Everything that might be "lacking" is something we can add, no problems*.

From a business standpoint, though?

1. Why work on adding features, purchasing from a 3rd party, etc. etc when there's a toolset available for a competitive price that was built around highly successful games that do exactly what we want already? (That's partly why I picked Gears of War as the example.) Under what circumstances is re-inventing the wheel a wise investment or a lower risk?

2. Available talent. The established industry people doing this kind of thing are more likely to have been doing it in Unreal. So if I need to hire 20 extra people to get my release done by holiday season or to beat a competitor to market there's likely to be less overhead if we're using Unreal than training people to use our partly or wholly custom Unity pipeline.

3. Getting investment. It's going to be far easier to convince investors that Unreal is the right tool for the job than Unity, especially when taking point 1 into account, except where there's some mitigating circumstance (such as an existing team already having years of experience and tools investment into Unity).

None of those are technical reasons. There's nothing technical about Unity that I think would stop it from making the game. But making any kind of large budget game is about more than just the bit where you build a game.


Anyway, keep in mind that I did already agree with Phobic that, given my own circumstances, I would indeed consider it anyway. My original statement was more in the context of if I were starting anew or building a new studio.

* Aside perhaps from team scalability, as I have no experience scaling past around 4 in-Editor developers with Unity.

 

It depends on which way you want to look at it from. Maybe it's really a race to the top. For example, Facebook, Twitter and Google are free, and they're not exactly at the bottom.

There can often be more to be made in the long run by a company going free and establishing itself as a de facto standard rather than peddling licenses one by one.

 

Not so sure Epic can lower their royalties that low. If they did that, some of the big boys using UE might go for that license model instead of paying the full license price.

This may be an advantage for UT : a low monthly fee, royalties and/or watermark scheme that allow hobbyist and small studios to use a full version of Unity. And the possibilty to get rid of the royalties/watermark/monthly fee by paying the standard perpetual license price.
I could be totaly wrong but I don't think Epic wants to compete there : there's no way to get rid of the UE4 5% for just $1500, not even for $4500.

 

I agree.

You're not going to find me wanting to make a Gears of War clone though, so I'll probably stick to Unity for the foreseeable future.

I'll also add that I'm in South-east Asia, and the game industry doesn't have that much of a presence here, much less any Unreal Engine users, so even though we want that advantage of a readily available talent, we don't.

It could be that UE4 will only gain significant traction in the west, from that point of view. I'm talking about in terms of successfully shipped games. I don't doubt there'll be people here who'll pick up the $20 license, if only just to try it out.

 

Sure, but they're also some of very few businesses in existence who have successfully targeted the demographic of "everyone". Also, the business models are completely and utterly incompatible with Unity's. Unity makes its money by selling a tool to users. The businesses you mention make money by selling access to users to 3rd parties rather than by directly charging their users, so it makes perfect sense for them to acquire users by handing out low-cost services for free.

If Unity followed the same model and gave me all their stuff for free then how would they make money? The Asset Store isn't it (David Helgason explained that it's a fairly low margin for them in a recent interview).

 

Something has to be done about these bugs... that's the other thing really getting in my way with Unity.

For example, just now, Unity froze on me. What was I doing in it? Nothing. In fact, I went to get myself some food and when I came back it was frozen with the spinning beach ball (Mac OS X Mavericks).

I had to force quit it. Upon starting it, my entire game scene was gone completely. Everything I had set up in it was gone. Fortunately I had a backup of my project from last night and restored it, but I still had to re-do everything I did to it today.

That kind of bug is rather annoying.

Edit: did it again. This time it was after I pressed CMD+S to save the scene, after applying a prefab.

In both cases, I load it up and it has the default window layout and my game scene gone.

Very annoying. I guess I'll send a bug report for this one...

 

I wasn't saying that Unity should blindly mimic the business models of those companies. I was just pointing out that something being free does not automatically constitute racing to the bottom, and that in fact the opposite has often been true in the digital age.

 

Hey,
Just a thought about Unity3D Free and Pro.

Why not make the Performance tools (Occlusion culling, Profiler, etc.) as part of free?
as well a handful of Graphical things that should have been out a while back for free users - Render textures, Deferred rendering, etc.

Just a thought

 

Unity fast prototyping ?? Not anymore, UE4 is ultra fast prototyping, even more, you can do a full playable level in Blueprints with out touch a single C++ line.

Yes, some peoples will say "there are assets store who do what Blueprints do". False. I own Playmaker, and I've seen some other addons, All of them are no where near Blueprints from UE4.

 

Took about 2 months for Unity to start this thread and come and talk with us, after a lots of thread started about that. I am sure this thread will run for a looong time from now.

And yet, no official survey email.

But you know what's interesting, in the second day after UE4 released officially, I've got a mail from Unity to tell me to preorder Unity5.

I only can see this as "buying time". Nothing from all we said here matter. Unity will make no move until they will start to lose customers, what will be a confirmation for them that they need to change something.

 

Just a small Note @C++ in UE4 = Memory Leaks

That might be true for old UE3 Builds, but now with C++11(Smart Pointers) and Unreal Engines own GC there is barely any way to get Leaks.
For now i love C++ and its very similiar to C# Syntax, and the Performance is superior same Code that i ported from C# to C++ (like A* Pathfinding) runs 50%-1200% faster in C++ and it uses like no memory and cpu compared to C#.

 

I got called "a troll that spews out stuff without any basis" for saying this on another thread. People that haven't tried UE4 yet, or haven't tried it enough, seems so quick to dismiss this.

Ultimately, as a prototyping tool, $1500 per seat minimum price is a lot more expensive than paying $19 per seat once per developer, per upgrade. Remember, if you don't release it, you won't have to pay royalties for it.

 

Would you really use pro for prototyping?

 

Depends on the type of game that you want to prototype. Stuff like asset pipeline access and render to textures can be extremely useful. Plus, if you are a medium to big sized company, you have to license PRO, as $100k turnover is easy to cross at that point.

 

I think Epic were really smart. They want the 5%. TenCent netted more than US$1 billion in Q1 alone. The consumer facing side of the business is an order of magnitude higher than the game development tools business. The $19 is a "soft" gate that keeps the signal to noise ratio better. I know you can pay one month, and stop, but I'll bet some people would feel slightly "guilty" about that and would be less likely to post and create noise. And if you don't like royalties, then yeah, you can have a one-on-one licensing discussion.

Anyway, my two cents...

 

@bibbinator are we anywhere near the opened-roadmap ? or even 4.5 ? are we still talking days/weeks for next release?

 

Tell us who you are
I'm a solo indie developer. I developed Sin or Win for iOS. It was a success, but not financially. Before I could improve and update the app, life had other plans. Now game development is an enjoyable past time. I've really enjoyed my time with Unity, and hope it can continue far unto the future.

How could we serve you better here and stay in business? What business model works best for you?
The current business model is analogous to a television cable subscription or buying a car. The base package is very reasonably priced. You want/need the roof rack and tow bar? Sure, no problem, those are in our premium model. Which also features a chrome steering wheel, satin seats and a v12 engine. You don't need these? Sorry, the premium package is all or nothing.

I own 3.5 Pro, but I have never used nav mesh, LOD, occlusion culling, etc... The Pro features I did use (build stripping, profiler, custom splash screen) are seemingly much smaller features. Unity should embrace the Asset Store fully. Let me download the free version of Unity. Then sell on the Asset Store an Optimiser package which contains build stripping profiling. If I want IK, sell on the Asset Store the full Mecanim package. Sell a Deployment package so I can use a custom splash screen. Without the deployment package, have a splash screen that uses the Unity logo, but overlay that ontop a custom image. So I can have my own logo/splash, and in the lower left/right is a "made with Unity".

Adopting such a method would allow developers to build up Unity to suit their needs. I haven't yet upgraded to 4.x as I can't at the moment justify $1500. But if I could have purchased the components I'd actually use, I'd have bought 2D, Deployment and Optimisation. And soon I'd be buying additional components as I experiment with VR. Perhaps you could even have these features with a trial period so one can really evaluate them properly. You could then also run periodic sales on various Pro components, which would likely help push additional sales (think Humble Bundle or Steam sales!)

Definitely keep free. I know of an incredible number of users who picked up the free version after I evangelized Unity. I know they would have been less inclined had this option not existed.

Caveats to this method:

1. You'd have to be careful about falling victim to Survivorship Bias. The best selling add-ons may not be the best. The ones that sell less may be awesome ideas but have critical design or implementation flaws. So don't abandon these but figure out why they don't sell and improve them
2. No one wants to be nickle and dimed. Keep the fair allocation of features between Pro and Free. And ensure that the total cost of ownership doesn't exceed the current total cost. I'm not suggesting Candy Unity Saga.

Also, it never sat well with me that despite never making a game for OSX or Windows I had to purchase that Pro version to buy the iOS Pro version.

Since Unreal's announcement I have been seriously considering it as it is seemingly more affordable. I'm wary of its Blueprint only development (unless I learn to code in C), and it's binary asset files. My inertia is with Unity, and so I'm hoping your business model will become more financially competitive. I understand Unity and Epic have different abilities to monetize their engines. I hope UT can come up with a solution where we all win.

Do you like subscriptions? How important is it for you to own software license?
I'm not a fan of subscriptions. I've been able to continue using my 3.5 Pro version, and I really appreciate that!

How is your development structured (source or no source)?
Source access isn't important to me. You continue to focus on making an awesome engine and I'll keep focusing on games. If source access is important to others and increases the rate at which bugs are found and squashed, then I'll be happy.

I do love that Boo is a supported language. I code in Python during the day and it's easy to bounce from that to Boo. I also love that the documentation now has (mostly) code samples for Boo. I like the sounds of merging the docs as I've never understood the dichotomy between Reference Manual.

Others have mentioned better integration with Sublime. This would be superb!

At the moment modules in Unity are all static. I'd love an easier ability to extend Transform or Input, etc...

I also appreciate that you're moving to patched releases. I used a renderer that developed like this and it was absolutely awesome when stuck by a bug in the midst of production to have a fix come out the next day. It really felt like they listened and helped sort out MY problems. ("They" being 3Delight)

 

Rightyo! I use Unity on two fronts, so I'll write a little about each separately.

Professional
The first is my day job, where I work for a small company doing primarily business-to-business work in simulation, training and visualisation. I've worked in the firld for ~7 years, and used Unity for... ~4.5 of those years? We started with 1.6, in any case.

We work in Unity Pro and have iOS and Android Pro as well. Here, while we're well aware that it isn't perfect, Unity is considered to be a pretty strong toolset. This is in regards to both the base tools that come out of the box and out own tools built on top of it to specifiecally support the work we do most commonly.

With regards to recent events, while there is competition to Unity it isn't really coming from Epic as far as we're concerned. Also, we haven't spent any significant time looking at alternatives in ages, and would only do so if a specific project didn't seem to fit well with Unity for some reason.

Pricing isn't an issue, and we'll happily purchase more seats if we need more people.

One of Unity's biggest strengths is its cross-platform deployment. This is core to our business, and Unity makes it easy to provide.

I'm very much a workflow oriented guy, so as a result we've invested a fair bit into custom tools and workflows for Unity.

Hobbyist
The second front is my hobby game development. Here I actually still use a free license, because I haven't needed more than that. (I did finally unlock my Pro trial a few days ago to try something out, though.) I make stuff for desktop and mobile, though lately I'm tending more towards the desktop end of things.

Unreal isn't really a consideration to me in this area for two reasons. First of all, I don't feel that it's focused on the kind of game I want to make. Secondly, my hobby and my professional work are exceptionally mutually beneficial right now - experience I gain in one is almost always useful in the other later on down the track. Switching engines for my hobby stuff would lose that synergy.

Regarding pricing, there have been several occasions where I've considered purchasing a Pro license, though I've never gone ahead and done it. The thought process always starts with "Maybe it'd be worth investing the $1500 into this project" before rapidly turning to "but it's actually $4500, per Unity developer on the project". I don't think that's an unreasonable price at all (it's in line with or cheaper than plenty of other industry related software), it's just a steep investment as far as a hobby project is concerned.

To get money out of me as a hobbyist, the initial $1500 is probably quite doable. The roadblocks for me are that a) it gets me no benefit on mobile platforms without at least doubling it, and b) it stops me from directly collaborating with other Unity users who haven't already made the investment.


In other areas, relevant to both fronts but in no particular order:
1. Some areas of documentation could really use some work.

2. The API needs to be more open. Both Mecanim and Shuriken require dodgy hacks to address some use cases purely because data or functionality readily present in the Editor isn't exposed to the runtime API.

3. While I'm always fast to point out that it can be worked around (I learned C# by working in early XNA) I do agree with others that the Mono GC issue needs attention, starting with at least optional allocation-free versions of all API calls.

4. I don't care about source access, and I don't want it if it comes with downsides like making cross platform support more difficult. Having said that, I want to reinforce points 1 and 2 - we don't have the source, so giving us access and information is important.

5. I have no problems with the subscription as it is. Having said that, I wouldn't use it as a hobbyist because the price is too steep (I'd save up for and get perpetual licenses) and we're unlikely to use it at work because of the 12 month minimum. If it weren't for that we might use it at work, as it would present an opportunity to scale up and down at short notice.

6. Official Facebook integration for all platforms (not just mobile and web) would rock.

7. Your bundled IDE of choice needs attention. I made my thoughts on MonoDevelop clear earlier in this thread - what's packaged with Unity may "get the job done", but it's a clear weak point. The concept of being a plugin to normal versions of MonoDevelop is a great one.

8. Unity's Input system is a tad on the lacking side, lacking things like button remapping. I hear great things about cInput from the Asset Store... honestly, though, I don't think we should have to turn to 3rd party assets for stuff like that.

9. This one has irked me since day one. Why is UnityScript called "JavaScript"? The Java/JavaScript thing is confusing enough for newcomers as it is.

10. Generally speaking, I think that purchase and upgrade pricing is pretty good. As mentioned above I can't really justify jumping to Pro for hobby stuff but, also as I said above, that doesn't mean I think it's unreasonable.

I think upgrade pricing is pretty good in the context of purchase pricing.

11. Communication! Better communication would be great. Note that "better" is not necessarily the same as "more", though "more" would also be good. Even if you can't give concrete answers, just having people hanging around on the forum every so often letting us know that you're workin on the things that concern us (GUI system, Google stirring trouble with the web player, and so on) sooner rather than later would be great.

12. I don't like the idea of owing royalties. As long as the option is there I'd rather to pay more up front to not have them, assuming of course it's affordable. It's not just because of the cut, I also don't want to have the pain of accounting for it potentially years into the future.

13. More documentation, tutorials and general information on extending and customizing the Editor would rock. It's key to getting the most out of Unity.

14. A standardised event system! Unity doesn't really have one. Everyone and their dog on the Asset Store seems to have their own idea of what a good event system is... so, something standard would be great. Once you've got one it'd be great if MonoBehaviour and such could use that rather than the magic function calls that are currently there.

15. The Asset Store is great, but some kind of improved or more rigorous QA would be great, especially for code assets. It could be optional, and even a paid certification? I want to know stuff like how easy it's likely to be to integrate into a workflow, how well is it documented and commented, is it full of hacks and/or hard to follow, is the API stable, does it allocate? Doing what the label says should be the starting point for a COTS solution, not the final goal.

16. Foibles aside, I do genuinely like the way Unity has been advancing over the years. I was against it when the guys at work first wanted to start using Unity, but you've won me over and my work has been better for it.

17. I can't say this enough: The free license rocks, and I want to thank you for the opportunities and successes that access to your software as a hobbyist has afforded me. I think I'd have done alright without it, but there's absolutely no doubt that you've helped me and many others along. Thanks.


I might come back later with more, but this is already a veritable wall of text as it is!

 

This is a bit off the beaten trail but still just as valid - if this should be it's own thread, let me know in a reply and I'll happily put it up.
===

Now I'm gonna tread some sacred ground here and I apologize for however offensive this may seem, but it's certainly nothing short of the reality of things. Everyone wants to adapt to the problem - business doesn't work that way folks.

Managing a growing company isn't an easy task because everything that once worked will eventually become inefficient due to scale or technology advancements. Knowing what to pull and when can make or break a company.. unfortunately It's not only my speculation that Unity has been somewhat reluctant to advance. To compound the issue, these advancements should have been made long ago, Unity's behind schedule by the long shot.


The marketplace was a brilliant, community centered way to help others out and make a bit of cash on the way, but look.. if you can't maintain your product to be self reliant without community 'fixes' or extended features to compete with competition, you're failing as a company. Yes, it's wonderful that the community can adapt to certain shortcomings but YOU as a company shouldn't have to lean on it.

Yes, it's respectful (and convenient) to be thoughtful of extension developers and not immediately render their work obsolete, but as a growing business, you need to LET GO. This thing has become much more than mom pop's, you can't hold hands anymore without them slowing you down. If you don't wake up to this reality, you can forget even being a business. Growth in this market is an absolute necessity. You're a company because you offer a continuously improving game engine - you're the only one here that makes that happen. No one is going to buy the tomato with holes in it when there's better alternatives. Some tomatoes are great for certain soups, granted but it's only a matter of time before someone else sees room to fill that market gap. Moral of the story: Move with a purpose, because the world is out to get ya when you're not looking.

Fill the gaps the community struggles to puzzle together. It's literally a shoe up your nose: It's ridiculous.

--

Unity has 400 employees, all of them great and amazing people I'm sure, but looking at the demographics, 400 people nonetheless; Look, Epic has 1/4th the employee base and they're achieving what seems 10 fold more. Now, I understand development takes time, bugs happen, life ain't perfect and they may have more experience, but there is always at least something we can do to help ourselves out.

I'm sure you've done this from time to time, but seriously.. if it takes this long with 400 people (not everyone is a developer, I get that) to work out bugs/improvements, you have got some serious issues internally that need questioning for improvement. Whether it's the code base itself or workflow, you guys need to compromise. For as much as I hate to say it, you've got the manpower - use or drop it, because something's gotta happen here.

You need to stay in business: simple. To do that, you have to be competitive - at this productivity rate, Unity's not going to sustain that advantage while filling everyone's paycheck, you realize this.


Lap up what information you need and get moving.

 

Unity needs to make a game with their engine and sell it, a full blown multi level game thats awesome, that will get the engine noticed, further to the point it may give the engine developers ideas on how to improve unity, while getting this feedback might be useful, there is no comparison hands on experience that would give you. As everyone is comparing unity to UE4 this would then give unity a more equal balance when comparing them. (just shove unity in the game title )

 

This is a very interesting thread to talk about pros and cons of Unity.
However I think that it was created just because Epic release new engine at better price
Without new UDK, nobody have criticized a lot of Unity stuffs
However ...

Pros:
- Easy to use
- Free License to start
- Good Asset Store

Cons:
- Free License is good just to start but you cannot create any serious app with it. It does not inluce culling system, render to texture for postFx, lightmapping, ecc ... How can you create a good 3D game without this features?
- Missing a lot of features: I spent about 1000$ to get a default quality: ShaderForge, Skyshop, NGUI, and so ... Unity 5 now add some interesting features but I is not enough compared to main competitor. For example do you think ShaderForge can be compared to Material Editor of UDK?
- Closed Engine: For this reason maybe I need to switch to UDK. At this moment I need to build my app on Linux ARM platform and with Unity is impossible until engine was closed based and support cannot help us.
I contact on IRC channel Epic team, and they help me quickly (5 minutes and I start with them to develop my app) with toolchain support. Why Unity cannot apply this policy?
- Pro License pricing: Now pricing is ridiculous compared to UDK and the previous Unity pricing.
Last release Unity (from 3 to 4) ask us just 450$ for singular license (in pre order) to update, now it want 600$ ...
I contact Brighton sales support and I need to wait about 2 week to receive a reply. I ask for some discount to buy 3 update packs (pro + ios pro + android pro) and they reply that cannot help me with any discount. What business policy do you apply in Unity? I want to give you my money and you cannot help me? Bha!
I remember you that UDK offer 240$ / year a complete multi platform editor with very actived support ...
You ask for subscription 75 * x (x equal to each publishing platform you need) / years. You think to be competitive?
- Support: Twitter at this moment seems to be the best channel to find info about engine. Why you cannot increase support team for example on IRC channel or forum?

I spent 4500$ + 1000$ on asset store until now, and for Cons maybe I will switch to UDK if Unity cannot change some policy.

Waiting obviously for reply by Unity team because I like Unity engine,
Thanks

 

Angry Birds? The PixelJunk games? Super Meat Boy? I could go on and on and on. None of those things are requirements for making a good game. Plenty of great games are released every year that don't rely on those things.

Also, it does include lightmapping.