This one here is locked:
What is next for us at Unity with Scriptable Render Pipelines page-15
, so I’m posting here.
I didn’t read through all of it, yet my feedback for SRPs:
- I have been using Unity since version 4.
- I have learned how to manually write shaders.
- Sporadically, I tried using Texture Combiners and finally, Surface shaders came along, which both just weren’t suitable for me (just too little control over what’s happening exactly).
- Happy coding of fragment shaders.
- I gathered quite a number of shaders that work nicely with the BiRP.
Now you come along saying
- URP is here to finally replace BiRP.
- User written shaders from BiRP will not port to URP.
- New syntax for URP shaders.
and - wait for it -
some speculation about coding shaders being completely deprecated eventually, which even the docs on SRP emphasize, saying “Shader Graph” is considered best practice over manually writing code.
So, what you’re saying, going forward:
- Me learning BiRP’s fragment shaders won’t hold any value.
- All my existing shaders will be broken.
- Possibly even won’t be able to write shader code, even if I invested massively to keep going forward with Unity.
Sounds like a huge PITA on the horizon and, from my perspective, with no feature improvement whatsoever.
I guess you should have
- kept BiRP for a basic approach and
- created one SRP, keeping it adjustable and extendable in quality for when you really need such thing.
Don’t get me wrong. I do understand why you wouldn’t want to keep BiRP if you have URP and HDRP majorly differing from it. Why you introduced such drastically different systems to begin with is what I don’t understand. This is a guarantee for frustration to maintain, not just for you, but also for the users in terms of their workflow and assets they gathered over the years.
I don’t need a scriptable render pipeline. I don’t want two new shader syntaxes. I don’t need tremendous amounts of time wasted. I need stuff working. And be dependable. Not a mutating behemoth that could drop BiRP any day, nuking all my stuff.
Will surely need to have another look at Unreal. I did keep assets as little engine dependant as possible, after all. If I need to invest a substantial amount of time, I may as well reconsider the engine of choice.