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[kiguel182]

My game is a simple 2D game and the loading time on the WebGL player is terrible. I'm struggling to even think what can I do to make it better.

Other devs will probably be better at working with Unity and working around it's quirks. Every engine has them.

If some performance hiccups or 30 fps makes you that mad then what can I say.

 

[Kaleinc]

Every time Unity logo pops up and you're like Not this shit again.

Inside was mentioned several times. Well, it launches at desktop resolution in windowed borderless mode and if you're below 1080p enjoy the blurry mess. There is a workaround which is surprise, surprise pain in the ass. And surprise, surprise it's not the only Unity game that works like this.
Firewatch was stuttery, randomly crashing garbage.

 

[InsaneTiger]

I don't agree with threads saying the we should stop criticizing X. We can respect something and criticize at the same time.

 

[Griss]

Well it's a shame but the fact of the matter is that Unity games are known for being stuttery, having framepacing issues or problems holding 60fps. Or have been in the past anyway.

Ori and Inside are exceptions, based on what I've played.

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.

This. As someone who loves the two Golf Club games the typical Unity frame issues drive me crazy. I can often guess if a game is made using Unit from the stutter - that's pretty damning. There are some great games and it's a good, easy to use tool but it definitely has performance issues in console.

 

[FinKL]

Sorry gamedev GAF, I used to be part of the dislike Unity camp years ago and was all about Unreal.

Then I messed around with Unreal and Unity (as not a Programmer). Honestly, Unity's tools seemed easier for me to use and gets the job done so I understand why smaller groups/individuals use it and I'm perfectly ok playing/purchasing Unity games.

We got a lot of gems from Unity including the 2-person dev team that made Overcooked and Pokemon GO

 

[Son of a Witch]

I have to admit a game using Unity is a turnoff. I don't have anything against it, but there's certainly a correlation between that engine and poorly optimised games.

If it's something I'll play on my PC, I won't care, but I do when it's something I want to play on my MacBook (even if it's on Windows) when I'm traveling,

It's also funny how people use things like PoE as an example, when it's exactly the kind of game that should run infinitely better than it does.

PS: Unreal has its own problems that are very common in all the games using it (mostly the unresponsiveness and shitty input).

 

[kiguel182]

Every time Unity logo pops up and you're like Not this shit again.

Inside was mentioned several times. Well, it launches at desktop resolution in windowed borderless mode and if you're below 1080p enjoy the blurry mess. There is a workaround which is surprise, surprise pain in the ass. And surprise, surprise it's not the only Unity game that works like this.
Firewatch was stuttery, randomly crashing garbage.

That's due to how the Playdead selected the player settings. There are different ways to address that. Nothing to do with the engine.

 

[Mr. Phellps]

Made with Unity, runs great even on mid-range phones and looks beautiful while doing so.

Giving Frostbite to BioWare Montreal didn't automatically make Mass Effect: Andromeda a technical marvel, neither does using Unity mean the game will run like shit.

It's better to accept that it's a great tool for indies and small teams who can't afford more.

 

[SMG]

Unity is trash. Every game I've played using it except Hearthstone ran like a upsidedown donkey.

 

[Phamit]

Konami is not an indie, they're just cheapskates.

I said usually used by indies, not only used. Of course every Dev /pub that cheaps out on dev is going to have problems

 

[gngf123]

I've heard some horror stories regarding the Unity console exporter, but I have had nothing but positive experiences with it on PC. Both as someone who has enjoyed playing games made with it, and developed with it.

The main issue really seems to be that it is a victim of its own success: Make an incredibly easy to use game engine that non-professionals can use, and you'll get games which are clearly made by non-professionals and run as such.

 

[selo]

Why tell people how to feel? Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If someone likes it/hates it, that's alright and allowed.

What you can do though is present facts/stats/arguments on your stance, people can then choose to listen/ignore. Ahh... freedom.

 

[GameAddict411]

Every Unit game I played on consoles and PC run like garbage. Firewatch hitches and freezes on PC. Hollow knight, a 2D platformer drops frames on a GTX 1060 + core i7 and 16 GB ram.

 

[Allnamestakenlol]

My dislike of unity is based solely on hearing pc game developer replies in the past for games (plural) that amount to, "Sorry, because it's unity, we can't do XYZ," or, "That bug is supposed to be fixed in unity version ABC in a few months."

 

[Tain]

Lets take a moment to remember how GAF consensus seems to be that Gamebryo is fucking shit because of Bethesda, even though stuff like Bully, Catherine and Civ IV all ran fine on it.

Huh, never realized Bully used it.

But yeah, most engine reputations built around enthusiast forums are unfortunately similar to "lazy devs" nonsense.

 

[BurritoBushido]

My game is a simple 2D game and the loading time on the WebGL player is terrible. I'm struggling to even think what can I do to make it better.

Other devs will probably be better at working with Unity and working around it's quirks. Every engine has them.

If some performance hiccups or 30 fps makes you that mad then what can I say.

Yeah, unfortunately the WebGL player was not a priority for a long time because of the original webplayer. Since browsers have killed all that stuff off, we're stuck with Unity's way behind WebGL. I think they plan on continuing to update it, but it seems like they were not prepared to make that transition at parity when it happened.

 

[Sheroking]

Lets take a moment to remember how GAF consensus seems to be that Gamebryo is fucking shit because of Bethesda, even though stuff like Bully, Catherine and Civ IV all ran fine on it.

Bully kind of runs like shit on PC, though. It's always had weird performance hick-ups.

Though I guess performance isn't the problem with Gamebryo Bethesda games.

 

[timberger]

It'll be time when console games using the engine don't have severe issues most of the time.

Look on the bright side though... at least it'll never be regarded as the worst engine around so long as Telltale are in the game

 

[kiguel182]

Yeah, unfortunately the WebGL player was not a priority for a long time because of the original webplayer. Since browsers have killed all that stuff off, we're stuck with Unity's way behind WebGL. I think they plan on continuing to update it, but it seems like they were not prepared to make that transition at parity when it happened.

The transition was super abrupt. I'm not on the latest version (I'm too afraid it's going to break something) but hopefully they fix it. It's super important for itch.io devs and game jams.

 

[Human Trashcan]

If you're skipping a game like Inside or Gone Home for the sole reason that it's made on Unity you're not a smart person.

 

[Zombie James]

Unity has (had?) some pretty significant performance issues, especially on console releases. Calling on journalists to ignore it and, in turn, keeping your own potential customers in the dark is beyond stupid.

 

[_machine]

Man has a great point; correlation doesn't mean causation with engines. They're simply a factor in midst of a massive formula, and whilst they all differences and a general-purpose engine is very unlikely to ever match the framerate performance of a purpose-developed engine, it also isn't anywhere close to being a singular factor in performance. I've worked with Unreal and a custom-fit engine, and they both could exhibit similar issues when there were no resources available to prioritze towards high framerate, or it was not an absolute necessity for the vision of the game. Because Unity is much more common in low production budget games is a much more likely causation than it being terrible at performance (which it absolutely does also have issues with, but so does every game engine). All middleware engines have great examples of performance, and poor examples of performance.

Unity has (had?) some pretty significant performance issues, especially on console releases. Calling on journalists to ignore it and, in turn, keeping your own potential customers in the dark is beyond stupid.

Just because those games had issues, doesn't mean it's complete correlation. UE4 and CE3 had poor console performance at early iterations too, but that's not an issue, because you didn't see as many titles using those engines and the ones that did, were likely to have better resources behind them.

 

[Cels]

a lot of unity games don't support exclusive fullscreen..

from what i've read that's partly due to unity itself. any truth to that?

 

[Oppo]

Unity has (had?) some pretty significant performance issues, especially on console releases. Calling on journalists to ignore it and, in turn, keeping your own potential customers in the dark is beyond stupid.

oh look, yet another shitty movie shot with Zeiss lenses. fuck those lenses!

 

[SRG01]

This. They need to make a clean break from the garbage outdated Mono implementation they've been stacking stuff on top of. There are young WebGL-driven Unity-like engines out there that actively outclass it in some fields.
Lack of source code access is a mark against it as well. If something fails engine-side due to some edge case, debugging it is an absolute nightmare.

(Still sore over the time I tried to write multi-threaded code and had half my jobs consistently and silently fail for no apparent reason.)

Wait what? It's mid-2017 and Unity still doesn't have source code available for developers?

How is that in any way acceptable?

 

[LordRaptor]

Yeah, unfortunately the WebGL player was not a priority for a long time because of the original webplayer. Since browsers have killed all that stuff off, we're stuck with Unity's way behind WebGL. I think they plan on continuing to update it, but it seems like they were not prepared to make that transition at parity when it happened.

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

e:

a lot of unity games don't support exclusive fullscreen..

from what i've read that's partly due to unity itself. any truth to that?

no

 

[_machine]

Wait what? It's mid-2017 and Unity still doesn't have source code available for developers?

How is that in any way acceptable?

Because it's not realistic (there is cost associated with distributing/licensing some of the tech behind it), and it's not a change that's going to happen fast. There's been talks of moving away from such 3rd party libraries though, and their Enterprise Support will help a lot when it's crucial and you work with scale. And technically, they do have it as an negotiable option.

 

[TheHellsLord]

I've heard some horror stories regarding the Unity console exporter, but I have had nothing but positive experiences with it on PC. Both as someone who has enjoyed playing games made with it, and developed with it.

The main issue really seems to be that it is a victim of its own success: Make an incredibly easy to use game engine that non-professionals can use, and you'll get games which are clearly made by non-professionals and run as such.

Pretty much this. There's lots of games by less experienced and small teams made with Unity. And this also means more buggy games with less optimization. At some point people notice this.

That's not something that's limited to Games though. We see the tools professionals work with and based on brand, etc. we attribute more or less professionalism. This doesn't mean that it's not possible to achieve great results with simple tools but when someone shows up with tools made for the consumer sector instead of ones for the professional sector many people would give it a second thought.

Even though people can take amazing pictures on their phones (and they do), when I hire a photographer for my wedding I would hope he/she turns up with something more professional than an iPhone.

All that being said: if a game is said to be great or looks really interesting to me I definitely wouldn't care wether or not it's made in Unity. I do understand however why some people actually do care.

 

[OceanBlue]

Unity 2017 has been pretty nice to me performance wise. They are going to be introducing a new job system for multi-threaded code and a new compiler too for performance gains, Hoping those gains are good.

Hopefully at some point (if they haven't already) Unity can use the fact that Microsoft is moving .NET to open source and that the Roslyn compiler is open source. There's some really nice stuff in .NET 4+.

 

[Tain]

oh look, yet another shitty movie shot with Zeiss lenses. fuck those lenses!

there's plenty of film coverage about how they're shot and how effects are done though

 

[GavinUK86]

Funny, while I enjoy the game, I found the visuals to look rather basic and screamed "unity engine game"

I thought the exact opposite. I think they've done an incredible job with the art. Blew my mind the first time you exit the cave and it does the Breath of the Wild camera pan thing.

 

[tamaster92]

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

Night in the wood
Snipperclips
Strafe
Torment
Cuphead
Everything
Clustertruck
I am setsuna
Inside
Pokemon GO
Pony Island
Overcooked
Oxenfree
Superhot
Super mario run
cities skylines
fallout shelter
grow home
her story
kerbals pace program
ori
sunless sea
infinifactory
pillars of eternity

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.

 

[Oppo]

there's plenty of film coverage about how they're shot and how effects are done though

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

IMO as gamers we should all bow down and thank fuck for the miracle that is Unity, despite the technical niggles. it is a gift from the gods.

 

[deadscreensky]

Game journalists don't talk ENOUGH about technical aspects, they certainly aren't to fucking blame for this trend.

Well said.

Just to add to your comment, the games themselves often mention what engine they use, right when you launch them. It's not like Unity is some industry secret that irresponsible gaming journalists are lifting the curtain on.

I personally try not to hate on the engine, but I've had at least minor framerate problems (the best case scenario being small hitches) with every Unity game I can remember playing. That includes some of the "good ones" other people praise as running well. Even freaking Hearthstone has hitching.

 

[Negotiator]

Maybe Unity should do something about it then. They didn't get this reputation for nothing. Single threaded VM and garbage collection hickups have plagued it since its inception basically.

This explains Unity's bad performance on consoles.

And garbage collection in a video game? FFS

Or the system architects who served up consoles with weaker single threaded performance that the PS360 had.

This isn't true.

 

[TheHellsLord]

Hopefully at some point (if they haven't already) Unity can use the fact that Microsoft is moving .NET to open source and that the Roslyn compiler is open source. There's some really nice stuff in .NET 4+.

Roslyn won't be much help. The issues with performance are unlikely to stem from the C# to MSIL compilation but rather from the JIT-compiler and Garbage-Collector used in the Runtime. RyuJIT (the JIT-compiler used for newer x64 versions of the full .Net Framework and all variants of .Net Core) would therefore be the bigger advance.

Roslyn is very helpful in building better development tools though.

 

[Danneee]

Hey game journalism, stop talking about games or at least anything that sounds negative and could affect sales.

 

[Tain]

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

IMO as gamers we should all bow down and thank fuck for the miracle that is Unity, despite the technical niggles. it is a gift from the gods and a miracle.

I agree.

But we should be pushing journalists to be more nuanced in their coverage of performance issues and game tech, not pushing them to avoid these things.

 

[Sini]

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

Night in the wood
Snipperclips
Strafe
Torment
Cuphead
Everything
Clustertruck
I am setsuna
Inside
Pokemon GO
Pony Island
Overcooked
Oxenfree
Superhot
Super mario run
cities skylines
fallout shelter
grow home
her story
kerbals pace program
ori
sunless sea
infinifactory
pillars of eternity

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.

Grow Home (and also Grow Up) don't run smoothly even on i7+GTX970 setup. Kerbal Space Program has plenty of smaller issues as well.
Cuphead isn't even out yet, though I bet it'll run fine.

 

[Conkerkid11]

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.

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

Night in the wood
Snipperclips
Strafe
Torment
Cuphead
Everything
Clustertruck
I am setsuna
Inside
Pokemon GO
Pony Island
Overcooked
Oxenfree
Superhot
Super mario run
cities skylines
fallout shelter
grow home
her story
kerbals pace program
ori
sunless sea
infinifactory
pillars of eternity

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.

Speaking for the games on that list that I've played, Pokemon GO was shit at launch, several months after launch, and also manages to be one of few mobile games made in Unity that was done poorly. It has ridiculously long load times to this day, is a crazy battery drainer, and despite its intent, it still needs the screen to always be on in order to be functional.

Clustertruck has optimization issues despite its textures being comprised of solid colors, and its geometry being really basic.

Cities Skylines has optimization issues. I can't recall exactly what the devs were saying around launch when people were complaining, but it had to do with limitations within Unity or something.

Last time I played Kerbal Space Program it had plenty of issues, despite looking not even remotely demanding.

I'm playing Pillars of Eternity right now, and I can tell it was made in Unity. Framerate hitching everywhere, and some ghetto approaches toward UI which results in blurry text sometimes.

 

[Glass Shark]

Escape from Tarkov, Inside, and Cuphead are all using Unity.

At this point more "exceptions" to Unity being awful have been named in this thread than examples of it.

People don't know what they're talking about and look for an easy scapegoat when the answer is much more complicated and nuanced.

 

[OceanBlue]

Roslyn won't be much help. The issues with performance are unlikely to stem from the C# to MSIL compilation but rather from the JIT-compiler and Garbage-Collector used in the Runtime. RyuJIT (the JIT-compiler used for newer x64 versions of the full .Net Framework and all variants of .Net Core) would therefore be the bigger advance.

Roslyn is very helpful in building better development tools though.

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.

 

[Opa-Pa]

It's complicated because yes, I realize it's technically not Unity's fault when a game runs badly, but it's still a fact that I've only ever played three Unity games on console that haven't had mediocre or downright shit performance (only Assault Android Cactus, Furi, and the recently released Yonder).

So like... What then? Unity itself isn't shit, but when I see an indie game made on Unity I feel like there's a 90% chance it'll run bad and more often than not my fear is justified, so what is there to do? I think that if a studio manages to make a good Unity game with great performance, people will definitely notice too, so there's that. I'm always singing praises to AAC because of how well optimized it is despite it being an Unity game.

 

[Zombie James]

oh look, yet another shitty movie shot with Zeiss lenses. fuck those lenses!

If Zeiss lenses caused movies to drop to half their framerates, then yeah.

 

[mas8705]

Some might not make good use of the engine, but there are plenty of others that can still make it work.

 

[Tain]

It's complicated because yes, I realize it's technically not Unity's fault when a game runs badly, but it's still a fact that I've only ever played three Unity games on console that haven't had mediocre or downright shit performance (only Assault Android Cactus, Furi, and the recently released Yonder).

So like... What then? Unity itself isn't shit, but when I see an indie game made on Unity I feel like there's a 90% chance it'll run bad and more often than not my fear is justified, so what is there to do? I think that if a studio manages to make a good Unity game with great performance, people will definitely notice too, so there's that. I'm always singing praises to AAC because of how well optimized it is despite it being an Unity game.

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.

 

[RandomTiger]

I've been developing on Unity for a good year now and the especially since it's really annoying to avoid creating garbage when even a simple foreach loop creates it.

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

 

[geordiemp]

It is 100% undeniable what Unity's capabilities are when you look at games like Ori and the Blind forest, a 2D platformer that should be 4660 if it was on Pro or Xb1X

Its not journalists fault, I have the same opinion, 1 bad game is 1 bad game, but I am trying to think of 1 impressive one.

A 2D platformer is not impressive in 2017.

I have not played a unity game and went wow, what an engine. Will that Change ?

 

[Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew]

I disagree with this sentiment. Gamers avoiding games made on Unity is fairly okay. The same reason that games made on Unreal Engine 3 used to be avoided: if games have track record of being poorly optimized in a certain engine or the engine has issues that is consistent with some games, then the consumer should rather be more informed than going in blindly and not being happy with the game's performance, not the engine's.

It's fair to wait for reviews or previews for a game and wait and see if it'll run smoothly on your system. Unfortunately, Unity's past record shows inconsistencies with the frame rate and frame pacing, so I will also question it.

There are lots of games with stable 60fps on Unity e.g. Assault Android Cactus, but the ones like Broforce that dip to 10fps or lower are painting a bad rep for the engine.

 

[Croatoan]

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.