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Reasons not to use Unity
StevenVI
Member #562
July 2000
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I'd say it's fine if your goal is to just have fun, too.

Currently I've been developing software for the Roku when I have free time. I have absolutely no intention of selling any of my software -- I actually feel that there's not enough open source for the Roku, so that's how I release everything.

The Roku platform is a closed ecosystem like the Apple Store, though it offers a bit more freedom: you don't have to pay to join their developer program, and can publish your channels privately without requiring a review.

Tomorrow they could shut down their developer program and push a firmware update to disallow custom channels to be run. This would be a ridiculously dumb move on their part, but they could do it if they wanted to. I would be royally pissed if this were so, but that doesn't stop me from developing for their platform, which though it has bugs like everything else, is still an excellent interface for pushing media to a television.

Unity could do the same thing. Apple could do the same thing. Amazon could do the same thing. Google could do the same thing. Microsoft could do the same thing. You can't live your life being scared of someone closing the platform that you're developing for. If something you like goes away, you adapt and port to a new platform. That's life.

If Allegro 4 development ceases, you port your game to Allegro 5. ;):P

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Paul whoknows
Member #5,081
September 2004
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Thanks for the comments. I'll give it a try.

____

"The unlimited potential has been replaced by the concrete reality of what I programmed today." - Jordan Mechner.

Trent Gamblin
Member #261
April 2000
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StevenVI said:

If Allegro 4 development ceases, you port your game to Allegro 5. ;):P

Good luck porting a Unity game...

jhuuskon
Member #302
April 2000
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Unity represents the same sort of step back that "the cloud" does with storage.

You mean that I not having to carry around USB drives to school and back because I can just throw my files to OneDrive and have them available whenever and wherever I log in is a step back? Fuck you.

You don't deserve my sig.

Paul whoknows
Member #5,081
September 2004
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Good luck porting a Unity game...

Porting games between engines is one thing (UDK<->Unity) :)
Porting games between low level game libraries is another thing (SDL<->A5) :)
Porting games from a low level library to an engine is other thing (A5->Unity) :):D8-)
Porting games from an engine to a low level game library is suicide (Unity->A5) :-/:-X:(:P:-/

____

"The unlimited potential has been replaced by the concrete reality of what I programmed today." - Jordan Mechner.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Actually, there's a couple damn good reasons not to use Unity anymore. And I was the guy looking to get into Unity the last month or two.

Apparently everyone (in the Unity community) hates it now. Why?

- "Microtransactions." In order to do, basically anything, you either have to script in house, or purchase dozens of 5/10/15/$25 "assets". All the stock stuff is barely enough to prototype the simplest ideas with.
- You still have to code... basically everything. Yeah, you get a renderer. But you still have to extend it and write shaders (or buy them for only $15!) to do anything that a real project will need. If you actually use any "stock assets" you're laughed at for not being a serious developer, and stock assets like the FPS controller actually have plenty of bugs.
- Not only do you still have to write everything, now you have to learn the Unity API and all of it's quirks. Which means when something goes wrong, good luck looking through obscure documentation (if there's any at all) to find out if it's even your fault.
- Their new CEO. This caused a huge commotion. He is John Riccitiello and he's literally the ex-CEO of EA who gave us micro-transactions and always-connected internet DRM. He also was quoted once at saying how great it would be for someone playing Battlefield to run low on ammo and pop up a request "Do you want to buy an ammo clip, for only a dollar?"
- EA.
- EA.
- Anything that isn't "stock" or "standard" you literally have to fight Unity to get your way. And that includes "down-grading" things that Unity does that you don't actually want.
- Kiss $1,500 goodbye for every operating system you support for a Pro License. And going without? Enjoy not having "optimizations" like vertex culling. That's right. They literally make your game slow by not culling in order to force you to upgrade.
- From what I remember, network support isn't actually included. They outsource you to another third-party company you have to pay yearly.

I was going to make a 2.5D Duke Nukem-style game in Unity. But basically the more I looked into it, I was going to have to strip out so much of Unity and code so much of my own... I wasn't really getting anything out of it.

I'm still doing preliminary work on the game, but Unity is now out. Lots of people recommend switching to Unreal Engine now, apparently. Though, I have zero experience with it.

StevenVI said:

If Allegro 4 development ceases, you port your game to Allegro 5.

Allegro 4 development... hasn't ceased?

If my game moves forward into a more serious setting, I'll be making commits as necessary. But things are tight right now, so no commitments.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Trent Gamblin
Member #261
April 2000
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Porting games between engines is one thing (UDK<->Unity) :)

No, you are quite wrong. Porting anything to or especially from Unity, even if it's to/from another high level engine, is suicide.

Mark Oates
Member #1,146
March 2001
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Quote:

Because. >:(

:)

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pkrcel
Member #14,001
February 2012

Choosing a "good" tool (Unreal Engine, Unity, Allegro5, irrlicht, OGre3D, WHATEVER) is part of the deal, but the juice is that not everything will ever be optimal for everyone.

Unity is successfull, widely praised and supported by tons of assets, I can't see a compelling good reason not to grow an expertise on it, make money with it, or just have fun.

Also, it opens up opportunities as a freelanceer, to my limited knowledge there ARE out there freelance Unity consultants that hire for less than the wondrous enterprise priced Unity support, and make a good living out of it not being "full-fledged game developers", but have valuable skills.

Then again, MAYBE John Riccitiello as a fresh CEO could be bad news....:P

It is unlikely that Google shares your distaste for capitalism. - Derezo
If one had the eternity of time, one would do things later. - Johan Halmén

Johan Halmén
Member #1,550
September 2001

C♯ looks better than C#.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Years of thorough research have revealed that the red "x" that closes a window, really isn't red, but white on red background.

Years of thorough research have revealed that what people find beautiful about the Mandelbrot set is not the set itself, but all the rest.

pkrcel
Member #14,001
February 2012

ahahah, wouldn't you have a better sig meat already I'd sig that ;D;D;D

It is unlikely that Google shares your distaste for capitalism. - Derezo
If one had the eternity of time, one would do things later. - Johan Halmén

Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
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How about the musical synonym? bb <- that's supposed to be a B flat...

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

Ben Delacob
Member #6,141
August 2005
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...and that's supposed to be D flat.

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raynebc
Member #11,908
May 2010

It would have been better to name a programming language B♯ or C♭ since there is no interval between B and C in the normal 12 note scale.

Erethar
Member #15,753
October 2014

This thread caught my eye because I'm currently dividing my time between a solo project using Allegro and a group project using Unity.

With allegro, I get to use my choice of OS (Linux), editor (Vim), and language (D). It generally just feels like I'm in more control, and I have a better idea of what's going on.

On the other hand, Unity provides a lot more built-in functionality (physics, 3D, collision, GUI, something resembling an entity-component framework). And while I get annoyed with needing a heavyweight UI to build my game when I'd rather be working for a terminal, its definitely easier on the artists.

Unfortunately, this means alot goes on behind the scenes that I don't really understand. A Unity project contains hordes of "mystery files" and hidden build settings, and that scares me.

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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That's what irks me. That feeling of not knowing on what's going on under-the-hood. Not knowing the feel, the quirks, without slamming into them when everything crashes to the ground in Unity (or any other engine).

I've been stuck working with Microsoft Dynamics the last three months or so for work and it's the most disgusting feeling of "not knowing." You literally have to change registry keys to turn on error messages, and then, you get at best a stack trace, at worst, you get a blank file. And if the problem is on Microsoft's end? You can't even find a phone number to call. And if by chance you do get a dialog box with an error? You get error numbers. No names, no descriptions, nothing. And if you google for that number and nothing comes up? Oh well.

As for artists, technically, you can write plugins for most 3-D modelling plugins to mirror your game engine to show how everything will look in your renderer vs the default modeler's. Sure, that's not "drag-and-drop" like Unity, but the point is, if it's extremely important for your artists to get that level of interactivity, it can be done if you spend the time on your tool chain.

So clearly, engines like Unreal and Unity can take up a lot of a certain kind of work for you (namely, the rendering engine). They're worth investigating, but not without accounting for all the negatives as well. Programming productivity is as important as artist producivity. And "fighting the engine" is as much a time waster as "re-inventing the wheel." Personally, I would shoot for using smaller, succinct, properly encapsulated and vetted libraries/packages. Don't want to re-invent error logs? Fine, get a free, tested error logging library. That doesn't mean you need a full engine. But of course, that's colored by my personal needs for strong customization (as I don't make "common" games), and my complete lack of respect for any engine that gets in my way of "my programming."

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“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

jmasterx
Member #11,410
October 2009

Microsoft Dynamics

I worked with CRM for a few months as an intern. never happening again.

Worst part is the employees there were writing SQL queries directly to the CRM database to have more control, but this just broke everything when the company tried to upgrade to CRM 2011.

Yodhe23
Member #8,726
June 2007

Does Unity have al_init_mindcontrol();

But seriously as a professional(?) games developer there's no competition.

www.justanotherturn.com

jmasterx
Member #11,410
October 2009

No, Unity only executes commands that the user has consented to >:(

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Yodhe23 said:

But seriously as a professional(?) games developer there's no competition. [to Unity]

The Unreal engine seems to disagree.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Paul whoknows
Member #5,081
September 2004
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Yodhe23 said:

But seriously as a professional(?) games developer there's no competition.

I'm a professional game developer 8-)

The Unreal engine [www.youtube.com] seems to disagree.

Not free, not at all :( you even have to pay 5% royalties, it really sucks.

____

"The unlimited potential has been replaced by the concrete reality of what I programmed today." - Jordan Mechner.

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
avatar

Not free, not at all :( you even have to pay 5% royalties, it really sucks.

Well, you have to decide what your profit margin and scope are going to be. Clearly plenty of developers fit the bill. It seems that Unreal is more for a medium-sized company than a small indie company. However, I'm not minimizing your opinion, so please don't take it as that.

Unreal's Webpage said:

If your game makes $1,000,000, then we make $50,000.

That's really not that bad for a complete tool chain. I recall in the 90's when everyone was blowing $20-100K a pop for a single SGI workstation... the only way to make a professional game.

Also, I would imagine older versions of the engine cost less since BioShock for the iOS ran on the Unreal 2 engine. Also, there are other engines like the Cryotek engine which has no royalty payment, but I am definitely not familiar with it.

My point is really that you're not stuck with Unity.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

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