Unity's lost the plot

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-wants-to-learn-more-about-devops-for-rt3d-projects.1316844/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...-about-the-devops-purchasing-process.1316841/

I mean I don't mind that they do polls but to cross-post them and just paste monetisation polls on Burst forum is just too much for me. I've done my best but honestly, Unity is just out of control.

Too big to care, I guess. Anyway, ciao.

 

awhile back i was curious about the epic megagrant - had some questions that i couldn't find easily online. I got in touch with the region evangelist and setup a video meeting.

over course of an hour the evangelist (who has been game dev for 20+ years) patiently answered all of my questions + gave me tons of advice and resources just for general use.

Some months later I stumbled upon a presentation on youtube where the same guy was answering basically the same questions on a podcast type thing. He easily could have just referred me to that and saved himself some time.

That was nice.

 

Hourences? Super nice guy; enjoyed chatting with him at events in pre-covid era. Has been an Unreal power user since the start. Few know UE better than him!

 

Well so far I'm loving Unreal Engine 5. It's my go-to for the high end. I'm sure Unity is good for monetisation though, probably the best. Investors love Unity don't they.

I should get a mega grant. I mean Unity didn't do anything for me all the time I was here. But instead of sour grapes, I bet I can just keep being positive and moving forward.

 

@hippocoder so for how much longer are you a moderator?

 

it was Christian Allen, and this is the presentation he did that covered a lot of similar info he shared with me:
Epic Megagrants For Indie Developers - YouTube

but anyway, my point is just to shed light on an experience that makes one feel a sense of loyalty because I was given time and actionable, valuable info despite being a "nobody", versus these sorts of low-effort polls where you really wonder if it it worth the time to fill out.

 

Well for as long as needed. I still do clear the spam and help the community. And people can use more than one engine. I don't recall any rules saying I wasn't allowed to use any tool I wanted.

 

i also had similar experience with some unity users here. I had some questions and some old-timers who were making my favorite games i played when i was a kid took some time to answer my questions and point me in directions.

But they just did that on their own, they weren't employees of unity (just self-employed indie devs)

Again, that is a big time positive experience, but unfornuately I can only pin that award on the unity community, not the company.

 

Yeah my contribution to community is my favourite part and I'm proud of it.

 

Oh I know. Just thought I'd stir the sh*t a bit but naturally you remained unmoved. ;p

 

It is known by unity survey post, these polls are terrible either outsourced, or just made by placement students.

I never fill them, as it is waste of our time. I rather comment upon survey, which hwnestly is made by a student, to suport his/her education.

At least past polls were in right section of the forum, or in general.

But honestly, that two polls in burst forum, should be either moved or locked. These are irrelevant to the sub forum, and feels no less than being spammy.

Unity staff should be treated no less, as any new member, with low effort post. It will seems getting only worse. Give a finger, they will get your full hand.

 

Yeah but what incentive do I have to actually keep telling Unity how to do their jobs? None, hehe. And it's a lost cause.

 

If you lock such bad threads, with warning, at least some poster my reach higher, with complains, why their thread been locked, or deleted. Just do what you do normally as mod. You don't need lecture specifically Unity. It is waste of effort. If the thread is low effort, or harmful for the community and the content, it is not the place to be here.

 

I watched this video with Jim Keller a chip architecture designer worked for all the biggies. He said orgs usually grow along a line of productivity along the X axis and order on Y axis. at the start productivity and order is minimal and rises to a peak with much creativity and some disorder being the peak. Then the orderly type take over the organization and the creativity goes down...productivity goes down. He also said it was better to over fire a team as if you are getting rid of the lower tier contributors at least half of the new tier hires will be above average just by the statistical odds.

I don't like polls. I am not a statistic. I am not data to be mined. Keep the bean counters and marketeers away from developers. They do not have the requisite creative engineering mindset to understand them. Software engineering is not a string of buzzwords. Software marketing is not stringing together a bunch of buzzwords like it is some coherent signal. The people who make the ultimate day to day decisions want to know the mechanics of the latest rube goldberg digital machine being hoisted into their rube goldberg machine they are making to put bread and butter on the table.

Dev Ops in Unity -Don't kill the workflow

When Unity works it is almost akin to magic. It is currently bi-polar. Plastic SCM thinks it own my workflow. I am setting up an AI driven tour of the artworks of Netherlands painter Bruegel The Elder. I download the largest copies of about 20 paintings. I import them to Unity. Plastic logs them immediately. I can't get Krita to save the 30K across pixels one when downsized to 10%..it freezes. The ones it did handle I saved as png's. I went to upload. Nope. Plastic says a file was changed and the only way out is reverse undo dismiss the box. Yeah a file changed it's format and the original was tossed. OK.. 45 minutes spent debugging why it won't give me an option to override this. It also keep reading the render texture right away, marking it changed and then not allowing me to upload changes because it does the same on the other machines and ergo I have some kind of illegal checkout when neither of us touched that file for months. Just started happening this week on a six months old project..

This and similar scenarios kill dev op workflow. OTOH hand I am looking forward to playing with the python integration package released recently. It opens up hundreds of AI repos to be integrated into Unity applications.

 

I've done that, and helped way more than you think like that. Thing is... it does not work. It really doesn't.

What actually happens is someone wherever blames the messenger and not the problem, ignores it, etc etc. Happens again.

 

Oh, yeah. That's actually one amazing thing about Epic Games - how they're using their money.

Unreal Engine architecture has its problems, however..

 

All things do. Unity has more problems than I have time to write. So do other engines. But UE at least has the benefit of available source and publishers do offer much larger budgets for UE-authored games (they don't for Unity games) because they have their own teams specialising only in UE. So while that doesn't make it any easier for you, it does make things much, much more solvable than in Unity.

Depends on your scope and needs.

 

I kinda wrote about it before.

It doesn't help. Solving things through source requires significantly higher level of expertise than dealing with unity.

I do think that unity should start providing source, royalty based licenses, and should add C++ bindings thohugh. I also think that Unreal would be better if it got rid of inheritanc-based model and blueprints. On other hand Epic Games use their money in a better way than unity does, and despite destroying a certain studio once upon a time, give much more pleasant experience as a company than indifferent Unity Technologies.

 

my philosophy for getting things done as a zero-budget indie who learned game dev starting in the last five years is to go for software and tools that above all, gives me consistency and predictability, then ease of use and finally features.

This is why I still think its worthwhile to pay for Maya indie license rather than learn blender. I'd love to learn blender, but then time and again i see people struggling with basic stuff like compatibility with other softwares. I have too much work to do already, I dont mind paying a few bucks per month to avoid problems like that which sap time and energy that could go towards moving game project forward.

at some point i think it will be worth it to use blender for me but not yet.

Likewise, at some point I think unity might be the best fit for my needs, but not given my current skillset and my current projects. Whole reason to use a game engine to me is so that i can make less technical decisions, spend less time learning technical things, and spend more time creating player experiences.

I would love if unity offered a single unified render pipeline and simple, extensible tools to solve the most common game dev problems virtually all of us face. But it seems like unity is more focused on becoming better engine for phone game makers, which isn't something I'm interested. Who knows though, things change.

I dont think its good that unreal has little competition in the pc/console game market, even if i like using the engine in general. And probably in another ten years, maybe leadership at epic changes or something and it croaks and dies or splinters or who knows. I dont really care, I try to just focus on big picture so i can get my games made. To accomplish that i try not to get into too small of details, but rather just go for the most consistent, mature, simplest software that lets me piggy back off the work of specialist as much as possible.

 

@hippocoder
I'm incredibly tired and been dealing with personal issues as of late.

However, watching reaction on unity forums recently, and one phrase keeps coming to mind from the time when I was DMing online games. It was said by one of my own NPCs.
"All Journeys End".
Now, said NPC was an undead and there was more to it, but....

The point is at some point you encountered unity and started to walk along while your goals aligned. Therefore there will be time when your goals align no more, or time when Unity will exist no longer. That will be the time to pick another tool, and walk along with it, once again, until, once again, you part ways and cycle repeats.

That's fine. Such is life and "This too, shall pass".

However, switching tools may trap you in a honeymoon period where you think that everything is new and shiny and perfect. Or so it seems. Then you invest a lot of time into it, encounter a brand new problem and that problem might kill your project. One issue that seems to be frequent with unreal games is that people start chasing high fidelity and then it turns out they were aiming too high. Right now, unity isn't dead, isn't gone, so instead of being distracted by the news or information that may or may not have an effect in 5 to 10 years timeframe, it is probably a good thing to keep it in your toolbox in case you need it later.

Or something.

 

There are problems that can be only solved via source access. All the big Unity games likely have source access and modify the engine directly because it's much faster than doing the QA dance with Unity and then wait weeks if not months for a fix. But not everyone has a sweet mil for source access if the recent 7 figure rumor is true. Or tens of thousands for their accelerate scheme. Inside folks had source access, they did many engine level modifications to achieve 60fps on all platforms and later switched to Unreal anyway, lol.

Not to mention people in the Unreal community regularly commit improvements and bug fixes to the engine. Imagine if Unity's source would be semi-publically available (perhaps to subscribers or otherwise trusted users) for people to fix their S***. The benefit of public source extends past your project because the whole community can contribute to it in a positive way.

 

There are things that you cannot solve with source access if you don't have the skill. There are also things that cannot be solved with source code access regardless of your skill. So if you run into an issue and it can be solved with source code access, that absolutely does not mean that you'll be to do it because skill requirements are quite high.

I've done bunch of code dives into unreal engine, and average unity scripter (newbie?) will not be able to handle that. Same goes for "blueprint-only" unreal developer.

 

I don't doubt that, but blueprints scripters still benefit from regular community PRs that wouldn't happen without an accessible source. There are 0 downsides to source access. Users on all levels and ability benefit either directly or indirectly.

 

Likely an honest mistake, but surely the company's staff respects their role enough to check where to post a thing? I mean this is carelessness Unity doesn't need at this time.

 

There ARE downsides.

The company may decide that "it is your job to fix the bugs", "if this thing bothers you, you fix it", and "you don't need the docs, read the source". All of this degrades quality of the product. Also relying on unpaid volunteers in order to earn money is morally dubious.

Compared to unity, quality of unreal documentation is quite poor, and for the long time they weren't maintaining archive of documentation for it. For example, if you need to fix something from Unreal 4.12, online docs are simply gone.

 

Correlation =/= causation. I don't think most of the problems you outline are the product of source access. And speculation about worst case what ifs also doesn't really apply to reality unless you can show a precedent.

 

Gonna lock this thread as it's pretty much just a moan at Unity to pull socks up, and they did (and no, I'm not immune to thread locks either, even from me)