Official What is next for us at Unity with Scriptable Render Pipelines

If Unity made a game, they would develop whole new and super specific technologies and plugins just for this specific game that wouldn't serve us for anything.
Just like what they do with their demos: develop super specific cool things that never get really integrated nor really supported in the long run.
I don't think that Unity making games would benefit us.

 

Yeah have seen enough games made with the SRP's which scale well on multiple platforms including weaker ones aswell.... IDK about u guys but i haven't yet faced any major performance regressions with the SRP or slowing down of anything when upgrading the unity version (currently using 2022.1.1b)(maybe because my project isn't that big enough yet....maybe things might change later)

I haven't tested on PS4 because i don't have it but on 1650ti 4gb VRAM and 8gbRam (6gb useable) laptop which i consider must be equal to a ps4 or maybe weaker i get 80 - 90 FPS on the medium settings with HDRP in editor.... i also refer to the multiple optimization guides e books provided by unity (maybe u guys must check that out if u want) and i also try to minimize the use of a lot of shaders and materials...... the latest version of HDRP has some additional shadow related optimzation options like static shadow caster and render list API and other performance improvements and also going to get some kind of GPU driven renderer https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/6461 at some point in the future which might be similar to nanite....
And about URP,i don't use it much but I had tested some third party benchmarks a while ago on mobile which included a phone 2 years old and the latest phones all around price range of 150$ to 200$ and those ran on 60 fps which maybe because URP might be performing better on newer hardware than compared to the older version
i don't mean that whatever regressions u guys are finding is false because your games can be more complete than mine...... i really wish that unity responds to the thread and get our things cleared out if they are not facing the issue what most developers are facing and mobile and AR templates while creating projects using built-in looks sus

 

Even when they get feedback they tend to ignore it. Just ask jboot.

 

Since the thread is going on a tangent anyway, here is another perspective on Unity making their own games, to counter argue the popular point that they should. This is not a strong opinion or a hill I wish to die on, just some points to add to the discussion, so take it easy

So here are some issues I see:

• Unity would have to decide what kind of game to make. Unity serves a pretty wide variety of use-cases, including non-game applications now. Let's say that, for example, they pick an AAA game to showcase flashy graphics. But huge amount of people, including big companies, use Unity for mobile development, so I'm sure they will be here on the forums talking about how Unity gave up on them and only cares about AAA now. The only other way is to make many games at the same time, which does not seem feasible.
• Mixed incentives. Should they care more about the success of the engine, or their games? Those are correlated, but only to a degree.
  
• Following from the previous point, possible PR disasters. Like when the engine gets feature A that is used in their own game, while highly requested feature B gets delayed, people will be grabbing their torches and pitchforks, saying that Unity only cares about their own games.
• People often talk about Unity spreading itself too thin with trying to make too much stuff at once. Well, adding game production to the mix is not gonna help.
• For Unity as a company as it is now, I don't think it makes much business sense. Making games is hard and expensive. They do not have the capacity for it now, so they would have to either buy a fairly high-profile company, or try to build their own team. And after that, since making games is hard, there is a decent chance that the game they produce will be a failure. And that not only entails losing a lot of money on this whole enterprise, but also doing a huge PR blow to themselves: imagine public opinion when Unity themselves could not make a good game with their own engine. This will be a stain on their reputation for years.
• atomicjoe made a great point about most tech made for their own games being very specialized and not benefiting to the engine.

And sure, Epic has dealt with issues like this, but they are pretty different companies, so I am not sure all their experiences are applicable.

 

This touches on exactly the problem, Unity has lost focus entirely and is trying to do everything, but half assing it. They want to claim its an engine capable of cutting edge graphics? Then they need to put their money where their mouth is and show it can be done, easily, and that we can do the same without needing source access or special tools.

Quiet frankly, they shouldn't have made the promise of quality graphics if they can't deliver.

With the head count they have, it should be very feasible. Epic has achieved far more with far less staff. Unity doesn't seem to understand that less is more and bigger teams just means bigger problems to overcome.

Epic is very easy to show as an example of this one, it feels like they manage to balance that success so its hand in hand. By adding new features to Fortnite, they also get added into the engine. The fact things like this are in question shows just how bad things are at Unity because no one has faith they can do any of these things, whilst others are achieving them just fine.

Same as above. This is a bit of a non related issue because really all you are asking for here is a sensible balance of work effort which if things are well organised should be a given. Not delivering this at any point, regardless of if they are working on games or not, is an overal failure of their management.

I fully agree that they are spreading themselves too thin. They are trying to break into films them they have yet to properly crack games :/

However, making games should already have been in their mix. Heck if anything it might save them work since instead of throwing out mess after mess that they need to patch and then support all the previous messes if they got some of the foundations right from the start they wouldn't have that messy headache on top of it.

I believe game production should be a part of their core to help drive their decisions, without that is why we have the floundering mess we are in today. Basically what I am saying is that game production should be a part of their every day development. It would be about changing day to working practises rather than adding something alongside whatever working practises they already have.

So basically what you are saying is you have no confidence that Unity, who claims to be a world class games engine creator, is capable of making a world class game.

Sadly, I agree.

Indeed but all it really shows is how badly Unity is dropping the ball. It proves my point exactly that by just making demo projects Unity learned enough about their engine to know it needed entirely new systems like DOTS. Then instead of doing the sane thing of properly giving us what they identified was important they dropped it and didn't bother finishing it.

Its only not benefiting everyone because they didn't bother to finish

Indeed and I think this is again the problem. Epic has achieved something genuinely impressive. Unity has not. Their extreme differences are quite likely a reason for that fact and perhaps its time Unity started taking a page out of their book because quite frankly what they are doing now is not exactly working well.

I can quite easily imagine a future were after years we are still in this SRP mess and people have slowly got sick of it and moved on, leaving Unity to fold under the weight of its massive headcount. Epic on the other hand is sitting so comfortable they are literally shooting themselves in the foot to take on one of the biggest companies in the world and are still ticking along just fine whilst also delivering next generation tech. The difference between the companies are indeed vast, and not in a good way.

 

There also seems to be a major problem with Graphics Jobs in 2020 and 2021 (more in 2021). I see a huge amount of hickups when is enabled in 2020 and 2021.
So yeah, imma stay in 2019.4 for a while.

 

Guys, I think it's not really fair to compare the know-how of Epic Games and Unity when we talk about making games: the people at Epic have been making blockbuster AAA games since the 90s...
I don't expect ANYONE to be at their level and, more importantly, WE DON'T NEED THEM TO.

Unity was a wonderful engine to work with before all this SRP debacle.
Yes, it had bugs. Yes it had regressions on every major release. And YES, it didn't perform like the best 3D engines in the planet.
But it was easy to expand, easy to support multiple platforms with a single code base and very VERY user friendly.

Engines like Frostbite are infamous for how convoluted they are to use.
That's the price to pay for maximum optimization!
At one point, you have to choose: you want maximum graphics or maximum user friendliness?

Unity hit a sweet spot no other engine had with surface shaders, Mecanim and ILCP for C# scripting.

The super powers of Unity were:
- expandability
- user friendliness
- compatibility and scalability

Being able to make a game with a single source code that scales from mobile to PC high end is pretty amazing, let's not forget that!

But Unity has been losing on all this fronts lately when they force you to choose a scriptable render pipeline that can't scale to other platforms and that can't be expanded without forcing you to make a whole fork of the scriptable pipeline itself and become completely incompatible with everything else in the ecosystem.

Seriously, we don't need Unity to have cutting edge technology and the best AAA graphics in the business. We just need it to be the cozy, user-friendly, easily expandable engine it was.

 

Unity must rather put an end to this infinite transition because willing to become everything and nothing will serve no body, including themselves. Is better to have a product that is simple and works, than one that is very complex but contains many half baked features that no one can't use.
Lastly, I still think they should focus on performance and only performance but not at the expense of user friendliness. How? I don't know and is not my problem, they are the ones working on the engine, im just a regular user making games with Unity and paying them a license for it.
Again, Unity have to deliver sooner or later or they won't be able to hold their users migrating to other techs.

 

When will be HDRP 2023 roadmap?

 

I just recently stumbled on this thread. It’s so easy to miss out on important communication like this! I appreciate pretty much everything that was stated in the OP. And Like many I also express some degree of scepticism about these new promises and am wary of the suggested timeframes. Hopefully some of this makes it in the 2020 stream. As for the issue of tying the SRP to the the editor... it makes sense but only because every new version of the SRP seems to demand the latest version of the editor anyway, due to stuff often not being backported.

Otherwise... it would make more sense, in an ideal world, if SRPs were independent enough to automatically work across editor versions. In other words; the opposite of what we have now. So ideally I should be able to use URP 10, 11, 13 with Unity 2020.1. For this to work Unity would need to have the opposite approach: taking stuff out of the core editor and moving it to the SRP (to reduce dependencies).

As a bonus the editor would get slimmer. Slimmer still if the Package Manager were moved out of the editor and into the Hub.

But this is all wishful thinking and possibly too tricky to pull off. So as it stands, the current solution to tie the SRP to the editor might be the easier option to relieve some pressure on devs and the graphics team. It doesn’t really look like that dramatic a move, and some tooling can probably be designed to speed up the workflow for some of the developers who are adversely affected by the change.

 

Which I feel begs the question, if Unity have been unable to design SRP's in 6 years to provide simple enough core components within the editor which SRP's can utilise, what hope is there for anyone wanting to develop a custom SRP - which was the whole point for SRP's when they were first explored.

I get that you can't necessarily design a system off-the-bat and some changes will be required down the line, but from an outside view it feels like the SRP's are still changing dramatically between versions. Overall I think I still stand by my original opinion, SRP's as proposed would have been a great way to unlock the potential of the renderer, but as they've developed that has been lost and they are rapidly becoming monolithic beasts like the built-in legacy renderer they are meant to replace, yet at the same time appear to have less functionality and even less hooks for meaningful customisation.

The really sad thing is in two years it feels like little to none of the stuff originally discussed as the problems with URP/HDRP have actually been addressed.

 

Custom SRPs are not completely dead, they are actually useful, but URP is not always being designed in a way that adds generic components to SRP and then uses it, to me it seems SRP changes in the most generic way possible to help URP and HDRP, but not always as generic as possible.
I think the problem isn't that big, lack of documentation and some SRP details here and there could make it a lot better.
Afaik even if URP or HDRP gets bundled with Unity, they said you can provide a custom URP to replace it (one from another version or yours) so, while combersome, one should be able to provide an empty URP to debloat Unity when using a custom SRP (which I would need to do as I don't want that extra code and stuff if not needed).

 

After years, the situation for developing a game for multiple plattforms is still bad. If you want to offer both worlds, a mobile version and desktop version capable of Raytracing, you're out of luck. Because you need to "switch" between URP and HDRP. It's really a shame that have to decide between high end graphics and scalable down to mobile. I wish Unity would actually unify the graphics pipeline so devs do not have to choose and make bad compromises ...

 

For the mobile, I think we're a 2-3years to fully support raytracing and GPU compute. HDRP will have potential there too.

 

Does not help devs who want to start now and have to decide between URP and HDRP. :/