The pros and cons of UT developing engine software without in-house games

If they effectively know 'where to take their engine' why do they need to redundantly create games? That doesn't make any economical sense.

 

Okay. You win.

 

@LaneFox

From personal experience, it really is much more efficient to do it yourself most of the time. Someone would suggest a good idea to the team, we'd have management other teams and the end user developers sat around the table. We had a pre-meeting for it , as always just to talk about the upcoming meeting. The conclusion at the end more times than it should of been was the only thing we agree on is that we don't collectively agree how we should do it and what the trade offs were worth.

For Unity I can see the noise factor being exponentially higher, at what point do you know what's right and wrong anymore? In most cases we had to take the lead by scoping out the competition and effectively re-creating what they did and how it'd apply to us, we also improved algorithms and process for our target markets. But you need a complete scenario to test, little offshoots won't serve much of a purpose and luckily we had AAA games to test our tech on.

Even Epic ripped the SVOGI tech out of there engine, because it was a no go. But hell at least they tried..

@Jonny Roy

I get what you're saying, but the reality of it is no where near that amount of staff or effort is needed. Most of the Epic demos are made by few people in a skeleton team, the Unity village is a couple of artists for a couple of weeks. I'm sure they can stretch a little further than that..

There was an MMO and large RPG being made in Unity (not ours), I played them both and they are pretty nice got to admit. But issues / tools / workflow caused them to defect to UE4 even though the game was 99% done in some instances, if a team of three can create a large openworld survival MMO in six months then the masters at Unity should have it done in time for dinner.

 

@ShadowK

To be honest I was trying to get the thread back on track it's about whether Unity should make games...the credits for Crysis 3 are here:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/xbox360/crysis-3/credits

I've not counted them but it looks like way more than 1000 people are involved, so to beat that you'll need a bigger team, I think that's a reasonable assumption and as most of the negative comments on this thread point toward Unity making games of that standard...I think it's realistic to assume they would need to commit that magnitude, but agreed for a great demo they would only need a smaller Team, the Viking Village is supposed to demonstrate how 1-2 people could knock up something that looks great in a couple of weeks, The Race and Butterfly Effect are to demonstrate what some extra effort can do, and I think they achieve that.

 

~200 voice actor/actress 's I would say.

 

That's exactly why they are going bankrupt and keep getting bailed out, CD Projekt Red's Witcher 3 is graphically superior and an order of magnitude larger than Skyrim, never mind Crysis and at last count they had around 150 staff working on the actual game.

On top of that they develop and maintain there own engine, it's far simpler and requires less man power when you don't have to do all the engine work yourself.

 

So basically the team agreed the act on some input, but then didn't act on it? Thats not a problem with the system, its a management failure. Not really a good reason to redirect resources and make a big commitment to developing a game over the existing solution.

 

Not at all, it's about feedback and noise plus experience.! Firstly you need to build upon your own framework, is it possible without affecting other components? What is the end goal? How should it effectively be presented to the customer? If you're continuously getting conflicting information from end users instead of sitting there mulling over it all, generally it's best to find your own way as you're the team / people who know your own solution most effectively.

If you're a leading games developer, you generally find flaws many will never encounter.

 

For the sake of nostalgia, this used to, essentially, be the flagship title:

 

Goo Ball for the win! I wonder if someone still has the asset files somewhere... would be interesting upgrading them to Unity 5.

 

Oh man... that would make me so happy!

Actually, it would be pretty awesome if you gave the public access to it and used it as an example for something like "How to Upgrade Legacy Unity Projects" or something...

 

Mr "I'm the best, no one can stop me", would you please stop nitpicking me every time I make a post? I didn't insult anyone.

 

They don't need a game dev team, they have us; and by moving away from a conflict of interest, UT can better focus on helping us help them.

 

No


Ok.. Sorry ..

 

I seriously like this guy, you are such a tease!

 

I bet unity could start dominating in the mobile-field if they made there own games. Beat down companies like gameloft. Imagine you saw one of top 10 grossing games on mobile - made with unity and that it was actually a game not a cow-clicker.

 

Plus, it could become a huge source of income for Unity.

 

Problem is if the game slightly sucks at all, it will reflect badly on the entire company.

 

How about developing a game similar to how Epic Games is developing their latest Unreal Tournament? Better yet they could heavily document the process they took and use it to create tutorials while serving as a showcase project.

 

Well I can see both sides of the coin here, some do make good points. But I still believe going through the pilgrimage will slingshot development, but hey you never know they might already know what needs to be improved. I'm sure peeps like me whine about it enough ..

 

At this point, I want Unity to do nothing except increase performance for Unity 5 as an ongoing project. The engine should be the fastest on the market.

 

I was watching a video of SGF play the game dream fall -- one of unity's promoted games. At 43:00 he says: "the open areas - the frame-rate really takes a dive, this game was made in unity ugh i dont know maybe unity games just not the most appropriate for ugh this game - i dont know because the framerate certainly does go down pretty kind of alot as we get to the open areas"

http://redthreadgames.com/forum/top...-faq-known-issues-please-read-before-posting/

 

Should? It must be the fastest, for every single game!

 

Yes. Optimising my game for things the engine should be faster at is my number one timesink bar none. Because I work a lot with fixed hardware - I want to push it as hard as I can. Faster execution on Unity's part means less workarounds, less stress and more money.

 

Well, while framerate drops like this one are certainly no fault of Unity's, I think there is a tendency for developers using Unity to worry less about consistent framerates.

This could easily be due to the indie-centric status of Unity, as bigger companies tend to put a bigger emphasis on framerate consistency - knowing from experience that areas with low framerates will get more negative feedback than the abundance of graphical detail is worth. Additionally, framerate consistency tends to go hand-in-hand with content-detail consistency... and more consistent detail levels will usually be more aesthetically pleasing.

In Dreamfall, for example, if "Europolis" had less detail then the framerates likely would have improved; and almost nobody would have complained because they would never have known that a more detailed version existed.

Again, this isn't Unity's fault - but they might be able to help by educating their customers on the concept and benefits of framerate consistency... which they could do via their example content.

 

Well some of it is Unity's fault. Their own API not having allocation-free options in a lot of cases limit things. It means needless garbage is allocated and this isn't fun for framerates. Unity 5 offers a good step forward but still not quite enough emphasis on speed. I hope the staff will find time to be proud of any optimisations and blog it.

There's much not optimised.

Also, more speed = more visuals etc.

 

@deram_scholzara

This sort of thing isn't really an issue in other engines, they cap the limit and employ framerate smoothing to even out the spikes. You can generally get away with 30 FPS with no staggers or jumps etc..

Also what Hippo said..

Personally I'd of sent this project to Unity and said sort it out if it was an issue, I'm pretty sure they would of helped..

 

Would that happen if someone was using the unreal4 engine. It doesnt really seem that complex.

 

Well, the Kim Kardashian game is made with Unity and that has made the devs $43 million dollars in 3 months.

 

And what is the major element? Unity3d or Kim ...
And do not forget the lack of common sense in some people.

 

I guess you missed all the IL2CPP stuff.

 

You want even less detail than that in a modern realistic game?

 

Out of interest, what would you classify as a 'modern realistic game'?

 

Nope didn't miss all the IL2CPP stuff. It's not script execution I'm talking about

 

Beyond: Two Souls?

 

Some of the most horrid use of flares I've ever seen... period. Coupled with a female character that is characterised by her stiff unyielding buttocks that seemingly don't animate, I think I'll pass.

 

What I meant with that is that considering the detail isn't that high already, he should better be demanding more detail not less.

But for a game that is going for the same setting as Dreamfall Chapters, see Remember Me.
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/game-environments-parta-remember-me-rendering/
^This guide goes around every PBR thread in this forum.

 

I would actually say that Dreamfall has more detail, but less compositional quality than Remember Me. I feel like you may be confusing aesthetics with detail.

 

http://redthreadgames.com/forum/top...-same-on-minimum-and-maximum-visual-settings/

And I am willing to give the Dreamfall team the benefit of the doubt because the graphics they were pulling with the first entry were a cut ahead of most games at the time, both in graphics, art direction and asset density.
And if we go by The Forest, it has much less detail than other games of the same type but also much worse performance. And they are a skilled team pushing Unity to the max.

 

For me it's about polish. I don't need a screen full of effects that came right out of the 90s - I need little polished touches and care - that makes me accept and enjoy the title so much more. So Quality > Quantity I guess!

 

Well we've been talking about one of them a lot on this thread, I actually think the in-game stuff looks more impressive than the cinematics @ 1:19+:

I think the real question is, how is a game that large and detailed is going to run? Hopefully much better than ACU!.. If we don't believe that's the in-game graphics, there are lots of 50+ min gameplay previews.

 

While I don't think Unity needs to make a full game, they definitely need to improve the current feature set, and knowing what to improve is so easy to find when you actually work with it.

As mentioned by hippocoder: the new NonAlloc methods found in the 2D physics system are great, but why aren't those extended to other classes? The Mesh class for example is a prime candidate for this where you often have to waste tons of memory to do simple things.

I primarily make assets using Unity and there are tons of issues I come across all the time, but not all of them are bugs so I don't always report them, and it's not like I can wait several months for a fix anyway. The biggest issue that I still don't have a decent solution for is how to make a component that creates/destroys and generally manages its own Components/Textures/etc. Anyone that's tried making such a component will quickly realize there are tons of edge cases that can't easily be accounted for: like how duplicating the GO can easily break everything, how copy/paste component values can break everything, how making a prefab from stuff causes nothing to get called, etc.

I recently decided to make a small 2D game prototype and needed pathfinding, so logically I thought I'd try the built in navmeshes. However, they require baking and can't be created from raw meshes, and they aren't compatible with the new 2D system... so it's useless for my needs, and these are hardly obscure requirements.

I really wish Unity was designed a bit better. In my mind it should be a lightweight and incredibly solid core, but have features like pathfinding, physics, etc, as extensions to it.

 

I think that Unity needs to make their own games for the sake further developing and fine tuning the engine for other peoples needs. Even if they are just small vertical slices of games to prove a point or improve a part of a workflow. This could be put back into the engine as an official template maybe as well as an improvement to the general workflow of Unity3D.

That said they need to encourage their employees to make games with unity that will improve the workflow of Unity3D.

Epic Games has Epic Fridays where they just do a small game jam to have fun and improve unreal 4.

Maybe Unity could do something similar?
I know Unity have or had ninja camp but not sure if they do that anymore. I think ninja camp is just engine improvements. Not sure though.

Proving a workflow is good and polished is better than just throwing stuff out there after you think it has enough polish. Running the workflow by coworkers and clients to make sure that it makes sense should be a priority as well.

That said I do not know Unity's Process for putting new features in engine.


Anyway - That is my 2 cents.

- Headclot