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It's time to stop hating on Unity

Corpekata

Banned
Unitys webGL works very well, but you need to manually enable WebGL 2.0 in chrome - chrome://flags/ - to "enabled" rather than "default"

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So, legit question, why do like 90 percent of Unity games not offer this option? The fact that so many only allow borderless keeps many from being downsampled.

Can count on one hand the amount of Unity games that actually offer that option or have a way to downsample that is not an incredible pain in the ass. The first notable one I can recall was ReCore, which is possibly the best Unity game as far technical prowess among more "big budget' affairs, at least on PC. It has a lot of issues on Xbox, from what I recall.
 

Opa-Pa

Member
The invisible part of this scenario is that had these same developers made this same game in their own unique engine, it's very possible that it would run worse than it does in Unity on top of being a different and probably further cut back game due to the additional effort.

I definitely realize this, but what I'm trying to say is that even if you make an effort to make people aware that Unity isn't the problem, at best the only thing you'll accomplish is make people stop blaming the engine, but they'll still be wary every time they see the logo in their games. Whether Unity or devs are to blame, the problem still exists and the stigma won't go away.

Another issue is that consumers, as they should, expect decent/good performance by default, so I imagine the majority won't see a big deal in a game running great, while badly optimized ones will instantly give the engine a bad reputation.
 

Noaloha

Member
I personally don't hate it, but I am weary about it, same way I'm weary about idTech games running on my AMD gpu.
Cautious/uncertain (wary) or tired/exasperated (weary)?

Worst thing about this thread is how many people are saying "weary of it" when they mean "wary of it".

Hands up, I posted my response immediately upon seeing the quoted comment on p1 without going on to read through the full thread. Apologies if this has been touched on multiple times previously in the intermediate pages. As spelling errors go, it's my biggest pet peeve and has been for around 2 years now. The worst thing about it is that the misused 'weary' usually doesn't create a grammatically incorrect sentence. And it communicates a very different response. It's not a spelling error you'd want to put on a CV or something you're trying to impress anyone with.



On-topic, can Unity's various end-product failings be attributed not so much to the engine itself but to the fact that it appeals to relatively inexperienced / hobbyist / first-time devs who may not have the background to handle optimisation and/or the necessary perspective to keep their project's scope within the bounds of the engine they've chosen?
 

brian!

Member
im one of those ppl who are completely ignorant w/r/t how unity works but are wary nonetheless. in general unity games dont perform well on my laptop
 
I recall Durante making a significantly better version of this thread awhile back that I agreed with. The concept behind your thread is dumb though. Games made in Unity for platforms other than mobile have proven time and time again to run like complete shit despite looking not even remotely demanding. We have every right to be skeptical of games made with that engine.
Could you name some well known games that fit your “run like complete shit despite not even remotely demanding”? If it’s been proven “time and time again”, there should be a ton of examples, right? I can think of one offhand, Super Bomberman R, a game made with a rushed schedule by a developer new to Unity development.

How about examples proving the opposite? Here are some released games made in Unity:

ReCore
Cities: Skylines
Ori and the Blind Forest
Hearthstone
Kerbal Space Program
Wasteland 2
Rust
The Forest
Inside
Firewatch
RollerCoaster Tycoon World

90% of VR games
 

LordRaptor

Member
So, legit question, why do like 90 percent of Unity games not offer this option? The fact that so many only allow borderless keeps many from being downsampled.

Can count on one hand the amount of Unity games that actually offer that option or have a way to downsample that is not an incredible pain in the ass. The first notable one I can recall was ReCore, which is possibly the best Unity game as far technical prowess among more "big budget' affairs.

Things like Alt+Tabbing using exclusive fullscreen will hang running threads, so is not a good solution for things that - say - have multiplayer components, and there is no runtime switching for 'true' fullscreen and borderless windowed fullscreen; its a compile flag option only, so realistically you need to offer two builds, one for exclusive one for not to offer that support (and probably use a custom launcher to handle that).

I didn't say there aren't god and valid reasons why developers wouldn't want to provide exclusive fullscreen builds, but its wrong to say that Unity does not offer that as a feature.

Its also of relevance that MS with W10 seem to be doing their damnedest to deprecate exclusive fullscreen entirely and send everything through their own compositor,
 

Budi

Member
Neve hated Unity and don't plan to start. How could I hate something that has given me some of the greatest games in last few years. Inside, Ori, Firewatch, Pillars/Tyranny, Shadow Tactics.
 

yurinka

Member
The Unity hate is really stupid.

Both in consoles and PC there has been some games with bad performance, like in most other major engines.

But there are similar Unity games on these platforms with great perfomance, which means that in this case the bad performance is caused by lack of optimization in the dev's side, due to most likely lack of time (pretty common) or skills.

Unity may not be the best choice to make the next big GTA or Uncharted, in the same way that Unreal engine may not the best choice for a small game, or when developed by newcomers. But in any case, it's ok if they choose these engines.
 
So, legit question, why do like 90 percent of Unity games not offer this option? The fact that so many only allow borderless keeps many from being downsampled.

Can count on one hand the amount of Unity games that actually offer that option or have a way to downsample that is not an incredible pain in the ass. The first notable one I can recall was ReCore, which is possibly the best Unity game as far technical prowess among more "big budget' affairs, at least on PC. It has a lot of issues on Xbox, from what I recall.
Same reason there's a small batch of games that look and run really well in Unity. It's too easy for indie devs to approach, allowing for inexperienced devs to make and release something.

The Unity hate is really stupid.

Both in consoles and PC there has been some games with bad performance, like in most other major engines.

But there are similar Unity games on these platforms with great perfomance, which means that in this case the bad performance is caused by lack of optimization in the dev's side, due to most likely lack of time (pretty common) or skills.

Unity may not be the best choice to make the next big GTA or Uncharted, in the same way that Unreal engine may not the best choice for a small game, or when developed by newcomers. But in any case, it's ok if they choose these engines.
Err... What's wrong with using Unreal for a small game?
 

Timeaisis

Member
So, legit question, why do like 90 percent of Unity games not offer this option? The fact that so many only allow borderless keeps many from being downsampled.

Can count on one hand the amount of Unity games that actually offer that option or have a way to downsample that is not an incredible pain in the ass. The first notable one I can recall was ReCore, which is possibly the best Unity game as far technical prowess among more "big budget' affairs, at least on PC. It has a lot of issues on Xbox, from what I recall.

Well, you've got the resolution dialog that starts at the beginning of games that gives players the options. But lots of developers don't ship with that because they think it's unprofessional. So to change to fullscreen in-game would be some additional coding (not a lot, but a little). And it also depends on what aspect the game is actually in when considering fullscreen. It's more complicated than it seems.
 

Oppo

Member
I have developed for both, and made/sold assets for both.

UE4 blows unity out of the water. There really is no comparison. Not sure why anyone would use unity other than c# and ue4's blueprint is even easier than it.

- licensing engine terms (!!)
- asset store
- familiarity
 
D

Deleted member 30609

Unconfirmed Member
I just wish they'd fix (ie stop breaking) their fuckjng cache server.
 
Almost every Unity game I've played across both console and PC has had bad performance, bad frame pacing and no ability to downsample. I hate it.
 

CamHostage

Member
my point was we don't blame Panavision or Nagra for bad movies. even though they're popular tools.

Not bad scripts or bad acting, no, but bad movie-going experiences? Sure you do, if they're at fault, just as you'd praise the presentation technology that made good movie experiences like in Jurassic Park and Se7en and Avatar.

It's just that it's rare that bad filmmaking technology is used to make films; that technology doesn't survive in the market, but there are certainly many cinema aficionados who abhor the look of film stock used in the 1980s or luxuriate in 3-strip Technicolor films, and the look of a picture can of course affect its quality, or at least perception of quality.

In games, technology is the medium, and if you work with problematic technology, you will end up with a problematic product.

I'm not one qualified to judge Unity (I like it a lot for what it has enabled designers to do, and yet have been disappointed at the times when, even in skilled hands, the engine has seemed to be the cause of issues, but I only know from hands-on and chatter what the engine is worth,) but judging the engine as part of the quality of a game or series of games is perfectly fair (provided we get the experienced input that we're getting from many on this thread.)
 
I would never not buy a game that looks interesting to me just because of its engine. I actually can't think of a time I've ever even checked what engine a game was running on before buying it. Usually when I'm gonna buy a game I rely a lot on buzz in the community. If a game has negative buzz due to performance I might stay away but that's regardless of engine and could happen with any game.
 
Me being weary when I see a unity logo has zero to do with games journalism and everything to do with pasts experiences with games that use it. I won't skip out on a good game because of it but I will worry a bit until my concerns are eased.
 

wwm0nkey

Member
I didn't know that. Thanks for the explanation. Just coming from a .NET 4.5+ background and doing things in unity makes me miss a lot of new language features. There's something to be said about improving developer efficiency but for me that post was really just a personal gripe lol.

You can use .NET 4.5 and C#6 in Unity 2017.1 now
 

kiguel182

Member
Every time you think "why doesn't the game offer x option" it's usually more complicated than just ticking a box and given the amount of stuff that needs to get done and given limited time some things will just be left aside.
 

Zaru

Member
Avoid foreach during game time. Use a standard for loop instead.

Of course, but... being forced to avoid very convenient standard syntax of an already very outdated C# version just feels annoying and it'd probably not be an issue if they had a modern garbage collector. For my purposes at least.
It's not like I'm trying to use complex LINQ statements in Update() of a thousand objects.
 

Shifty

Member
- licensing engine terms (!!)
5% royalty on gross product revenue after the first $3,000 per game per calendar quarter isn't so terrible. They're not exactly going to be making bank off you unless you're doing pretty well.

- asset store
Unreal has one of those. It runs through the Epic launcher.

- familiarity
Moot point unless you're talking to a super hardcore Unity-and-C#-and-nothing-else developer, plus having graph-based scripting in the form of Blueprint makes it really easy to get a handle on how the engine works without immediately delving into C++.
 

Stiler

Member
To me it's not as simple as "don't blame the engine," engines can have their limitations, their quirks and things that are part of the engine.

Look at Unreal engine 3, how many games used it and how many games had very plastic looking flesh and then how many had texture-load in issues where you'd be up close enough to see a texture "pop" in from low res to high res? It was something that many unreal 3 engine games suffered from.

Are we to believe that these things had nothing to do with the engine and was a mere coincidence and a fault of the developers of each game with those problems?

You should not judge a game based on its engine. I mean look at how much CD Projekt Red changed the Aurora engine (used in Neverwinter Nights by bioware) for The Witcher.

However that's not to say you should not be able to talk about some of the negative things that seem to plague a certain engine type.
 
D

Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
When I see Unity I expect stutter and frame rate drops, with OK visuals. It's the opposite of iD6.
 
Unity gives me a lot of Java vibes: a very easy to use tool allowing for easy cross-platform development, with a performance cost. However and like Java, both technology and the engine itself evolving means that performance cost becomes smaller and smaller over time.

Unity is now probably at a similar turning point to Java over a decade ago, when it started to become adopted in a widespread fashion; as such, it also has a bad reputation, more deserved in the past than descriptive of the present, and certainly not indicative of the future.

That said they need to stop sitting on their hands and implement that goddamn modern garbage collector like yesterday. I don't know how that's not their 100% priority right now.
 

OceanBlue

Member
You can use .NET 4.5 and C#6 in Unity 2017.1 now
Nice! I wonder if that and the foreach fix are related. I remember hearing that foreach was slow in Unity but I thought foreach and for loops were benchmark comparable in more current versions of .NET. Anyway not sure if we'll get to use the new Unity where I'm working but that's good to hear.
 

Gbraga

Member
Here is a list of recent titles built on unity that run great and are generally considered good games.

Night in the wood
her story
Clustertruck

Don't blame the engine, blame the devs - it's up to them to ensure their project runs correctly on any given platform, the engine is simply a base to speed production.

Only played these two. Night in the Woods definitely suffer from the amount and length of loading screens. Her Story is fantastic, but it's a game where you watch videos of real people and type words in a box. Again, I love it, but not exactly a great achievement that it doesn't have performance issues.

Clustertruck takes forever to boot and crashed a few times for me, but overall it was a solid experience, I'll give you that one. Amazing game, too, I've never felt such a sense of speed from any game before. I was actually contorting myself in front of my monitor like an idiot. It's brilliant.

Worst thing about this thread is how many people are saying "weary of it" when they mean "wary of it".

Noted, thank you! I saw someone writing it as weary and just assumed it was the right way. I'll keep that in mind.
 
So, legit question, why do like 90 percent of Unity games not offer this option? The fact that so many only allow borderless keeps many from being downsampled.

Can count on one hand the amount of Unity games that actually offer that option or have a way to downsample that is not an incredible pain in the ass. The first notable one I can recall was ReCore, which is possibly the best Unity game as far technical prowess among more "big budget' affairs, at least on PC. It has a lot of issues on Xbox, from what I recall.

Because it's off by default (yes, really: most people go with the defaults, especially if they don't understand the need for an exclusive fullscreen mode), and not a widely publicised feature. I myself only learned about it several months into development.

It's also not foolproof: my game currently changes the entire desktop resolution, and stays like that when alt-tabbing or exiting the game. That's probably (hopefully!) because I'm doing something wrong, I just have to look into it a bit more.
 
"These games made on unity are shit"
'Yeah but what about these games made on Unity that are good?'
"YEAH BUT LOOK AT THE SHIT ONES"
 

OceanBlue

Member
When are they gonna do something for their outdated Mono fork?
I was just looking at this after people here mentioned that Unity 2017.1 supports .NET 4.5. Apparently they're on Mono 4.8 and are working to get Mono 5.0 working. At least from what I got out of a forum thread lol.
 

Zojirushi

Member
I mean I can kinda relate to the part where it's gotta be super frustrating for devs listening to wack ass game journos tak about tech stuff the know fuck all about.
 
I've been developing on Unity for a good year now and the garbage collection actively pisses me off.
memory management is the single hardest thing about real-time game development

we go to great lengths to hide our garbage collection behind other tasks that don't involve scripting

I'm still not convinced that the cost is worth the benefit
 
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