The Lost History of Unity

Have we lost part of our Unity history?

Whilst looking into deferred rendering techniques, I happened to be browsing the Wikipedia page about it which had a reference and link to the Unity 3 Feature Preview on Deferred Rendering at blogs.Unity. To my dismay the blog was a simple single paragraph summary as the main content, a short video, which used to be hosted on Vimeo is apparently no longer available!

So I tried searching for the video based on the blog title and that it featured Will GoldStone, but was unable to locate any official version. The video itself is no longer on Vimeo if you try the url '

' and as far as I can tell Unity simply removed their Vimeo account altogether at some point.

I was able to finally find one copy of the video, reuploaded by some user, but nothing else, not even on Unity's official youtube channel which goes back 13 years ago, so perhaps that was the change over point from vimeo to youtube, but no one thought to archive the old videos?

Granted the blog is from 2010, so archiving was not as wide spread or as simple back then, but the thought that we might have already lost a large amount of the history of Unity is quite depressing and while this post is focusing on video content, I wonder what other forms of media content we've lost.

So I'm wondering if anyone else has come across this, perhaps you've found a missing video, in which case please do post it here.

The other reason for posting is to propose that Unity really should invest a little in securing and archiving old content for historical reasons. I'd be surprised if they don't have the source videos any more, and archiving this stuff is always useful if only from a historical perspective.


For reference here is the video in question, one that as soon as it started playing I instantly remembered and brought back a little bit of nostalgia.

 

Attached the UnityEngine 1 whitepaper to this post, enjoy!

 

Given that they recently let go a bunch of people, if they have money to spend, let go one less people instead of spend money on non-important things like reserving youtube videos about features no longer relevant, really.

People's lives worth infinitely more than nostalgia.

And if you want to learn about Unity 3's features, you can download it from the archive and actually work with it.

 

Ah the innocence of youth.

Kind of stunned it came with Python scripting, guess that didn't last long.

Amazing features of Undo and copy-paste

 

Unity REALLY needed long to find their language of choice. For a while they supported a nieche language named Boo and later a derivate of JavaScript called UnityScript
It's only since 2017 that C# is the one and only way to go.
Guess that's a similar journey to what they currently do with the rendering pipelines.

 

I don't see it as finding it, as it changing. When Unity started they were in the less crowded Mac space, but were still trying to entice users from other game engines. Those used simple hand-made "scripting" languages. Without Boo, Unity3D might not have gotten enough critical mass. Then UnityScript became more popular. It was before my time, but I think there naturally grew more examples and tutorials in UnityScript and more people here and in UA started writing answers in UnityScript (and saying "your code is in BOO? I don't know it but here's my guess..."). Then I was here as very slowly more users drifted to C#, partly new users who weren't looking for a language like their last engine had, partly more formally trained coders going "hey, this has C#, why aren't we using that?" I think when Unity announced phasing out Boo and UnityScript they had numbers to this effect.

 

You know, very first versions of blender did not have Undo. I have not witnessed it personally, however. Those were 1.x versions. (joke)So, yeah, having undo can be pretty impressive. (/joke)

 

Wow bunch of new features that really help developers but mediocre presentation.
Its just like complete opposite of todays Unity.

 

Back then they had to sell you on a new release since it wasn't a subscription model.

 

Even on subscription model they should try to target us. I think real problem here they are focusing on stock buyers too much, they forget that they need to satisfy customer base.

 

Indie game devs aren't really their customer base any more though, so why would they spend resources on us?

 

Folks from Flash/ActionScript background could easily migrate to UnityScript circa 2008-2011 when Flash was dying and being invaded by "grfx school grads" who couldn't code a button but had degrees stating they were experts.. Took me one night to get going, bucked C# at first but now like coding in C#..

 

I can't remember exactly when I first used Unity, I think it was somewhere around v1.5, but my understanding is that they had 3 scripting languages right out of the gate - UnityScript, which they called "JavaScript" for marketing reasons, Boo, which is a dialect of Python, and C#. As far as I know these were all implemented as input languages to the Mono environment, so while there were awkward dependencies at compile time, they were all equal citizens once they were running in your game.

When Unity started the Web Player was one of its key strengths. This was pre-iPhone, so "cross platform" really just meant "PC + Mac". Doing that via a web browser instead of bespoke builds was pretty neat in and of itself, but it also meant the games could work within web portals such as Newgrounds - a big deal.

Anyhow, as for the languages available, Unity's so-called "JavaScript" was never actually JavaScript, but having a thing called that was probably a big part of enticing both general web developers and Flash developers on board (Flash's ActionScript has common lineage with JavaScript.) even if the similarities were superficial. I would assume that Boo played a similar role for people coming from a DCC-scripting background, but am not really sure.

Since then the ecosystem has completely changed. Mobiles came along, so "cross platform" today has to cover a lot more than it did back then, which Unity did a great job addressing - including, from memory, creating and maintaining ports of the Mono environment for platforms where it didn't previously exist (which probably put them in a good position to develop IL2CPP later on). Flash was killed, so people coming from that background dropped off. Meanwhile, C# was becoming more popular outside of Unity so an increasing number of developers were coming from that background. As C# was steadily moving forward itself developers also wanted the shiny features from newer versions, while Unity was maintaining two other scripting languages being used less and less.

In short, I agree with Owen - it's less that Unity took ages to find C#, which was there from the start, and more that everything around it shifted such that it ultimately wasn't worth maintaining the alternatives.