How to react to people "hating" on the Unity engine, who are ignorant?

News & General Discussion
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Hey guys, I don’t usually make threads like this, but what the heck? This particular subject has been beat to death a bit, but I want to approach it from the “do I defend against ignorance” standpoint.

Ya know what really grinds my gears?

I see threads like this:
https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?25326-Is-Unity-5-Engine-ruining-great-Games

And I read some users complain how a game based on X engine (unity in this particular case) is so terrible and needs to switch engines/create an engine from scratch and everything would be just oh so much better.

Places where a user might say the “problem” with some game (which I don’t mean to make 7DTD seem bad or anything, I think its a fun game!) is totally not the developers fault, but in-fact, is a direct result of the engine the developer chose to use. Or maybe the “performance would be 50x better on Z engine” kind of comments…

It awakens some deep sense in me to defend unity from these ignorant attacks by enthusiastic but ill informed gamers… So I do things like register an account to only find that the threads been closed for a while now :stuck_out_tongue: (probably a good strategy to get users, don’t show when a threads been closed to unregistered users haha).

But as I sat there, fingers just burning to write a long wall of text and quote and call out several ignorant comments and demand future readers to consider them incorrect… something occured to me - these people are just not getting it! They obviously have never actually sat down and used any type of development tools I’d imagine in most cases, or if they ever have, somehow they have drawn often very severely “bad” perceptions of unity (or whatever engine is in question) based on certain particular games, or certain developers who used the engine and then they go on to say “X engine was a terrible idea, shoulda gone with Y engine”. I feel like these people are just misinformed and have formed a bias that makes them assume certain failures of a game are exactly the fault of the game engine used and they are so fast to discredit the engine used, and rarely seem to actually question the developer or the ability of the team that made the software…

Is my reaction normal? Do you guys feel this need to speak up for “the voice of the real unity”? haha

Or do you guys maybe just go with the “they have no idea what they are talking about and probably trolling” aspect? Don’t waste your time or effort?

And what makes it worse, is they are talking about a game that has been (and still is) in early access alpha for a long time. The devs have clearly said how things are rough, and to keep expectations in check while development continues (the usual early access mantra) but none of that phases the bias of users towards unity from rearing in the comments/forums/wherever.

Sometimes I wonder if they don’t do it just to get people like me all worked up :stuck_out_tongue:

Thoughts?

EDIT: Let me add - sure, making an engine from scratch or using a more suitable engine makes sense in plenty of cases - but I refer specifically to how people kind of “blanket” an engine as “bad” all around… sorry I use so many “quotes” to describe my abstract thoughts :stuck_out_tongue:

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Make a great game using unity. That’ll show them. :wink:

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Haha, amen to that @zombiegorilla

God forbid I don’t do it good enough and someone make a thread like that towards me :smile:

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I would just leave it alone. Honestly, many people are just closed minded and it isn’t worth the effort to try to change their minds, and even if you could, what do you( or Unity even) gain from it?

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I suppose nothing, other than a few people who might have also picked up the notion that a game engine is “inferior” for whatever reason, which might be based on mis-information, would instead have a reason to reconsider that stance…

Or perhaps they would try and turn it into a flame war :stuck_out_tongue:

I suppose most forums aren’t as well moderated as these here! It would potentially degrade pretty quickly. Especially if I managed to use the word “ignorant” somewhere haha

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Do nothing. It’s only worth getting into a debate about the problems with engines with people who are using them. Who knows, maybe they have a point about one thing or the other not being as good in Unity, but aren’t able to articulate it.

I wouldn’t describe that thread as a hate thread. Just pretty pointless and lacking specifics. And mostly it was about the graphics (“wouldn’t it look better if it was in xyz engine”) which at least to me is a fair point if that’s what’s important to you. But they probably don’t realize how difficult game development is, and all the things that Unity has over other engines that help to make these games possible.

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Ignore, unless “educating ignorant people about unity” is your job.
“Educating” is a waste of time unless the person in question is for some reason very important to you.

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Did you read the thread? Most of the responses are users saying ‘The OP doesn’t know what you are talking about, it’s not an engine issue’.

Either way there is no real need to defend Unity. Developers at large know what it’s capable of, and they are the ones Unity needs to convince. No one really cares what players think of an engine. It doesn’t effect sales in the slightest.

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It’s the internet, which gives voice to those who would normally be ignored entirely.

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A lil bit out of topic, but is it just me or the zombies in the screenshots (in steam page of OP’s game) all have the same bend-your-body-left pose?

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Thanks guys, I appreciate the input!

Yes @bart_the_13th the screenshots on that game (and while you play it) the zombies tend to all kind of have this awkward positioning while idle… I’m not sure why they did that!

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Let us know when you figured out how to silence this instinct. I struggle with this too but I’ve started to make conscious efforts to give in less often to that.

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“You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into” so don’t bother. If they catch a statement from a random person saying Unity = bad games or they have played a couple of Unity games and they were all bad that must mean that the engine made them bad then they are a lost cause.

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Vocal minority and all that. Ignore for as long as you can, because they NEVER speak for the silent majority, only ever for themselves.

There is a vocal minority on the net that have a boner for CryEngine because of the CryTek games that made good use of it to produce awesome graphics (and fry even high end desktops doing that). And lack the technical expertise to make ANY distinction between engine, game code and, frankly, user error (many frame drops and other stuff could be down to old GPU drivers, and bad PC configs).
I would guess the guys who DO have an idea about how things really work keep their mouth shut because they KNOW that you cannot judge the engine by just looking at the games produced with it. And know that 5 games are not a statistically relevant group. And know that IF this is saying anything, its that developers more and more lack the resources to go after the last drop of performance.

But there is more to it in this case:

It’s guys that pay 24 bucks for an EARLY ACCESS or BETA and then complain about PERFORMANCE of the game of all things.
Should you pay money for an unfinished game? NO! But on the other hand, their fault for doing so. A Beta or Early Access game is NOT a finished game! And what does a sane game developer look in last? Right, optimization and performance. Because framedrops are less severe than crashing to the desktop.

Now, this game is in ALPHA if you believe their PC version tag. Uuuurh… yeah. So maybe the developer is shittying people by calling their build what it isn’t (an alpha version is a VERY early playable version in my book, nothing the customer should ever get to see), and is only using the alpha tag as a defense for lazy development, but the guys expecting good performance of an alpha build are really dellusional.
Be happy that you don’t crash to the desktop all the time! Oh, you paid 24 bucks for that alpha? Well, might teach you a lesson NOT to pay 24 bucks for something called alpha, beta or early access. Unless you are REALLY interested in the game, don’t mind helping the devs test their alpha/beta, and have faith in them EVER delivering a release version.
Because that is why you are playing a beta / alpha version… to help the devloper test, not for your own enjoyment.

I see how getting money during development could help fund games that otherwise would never be made, and that not EVERY early access title is going to abuse the system by staying in early access forever and neglecting the development as soon as a certain profit margin is reached.
But apart from that bad dev problems, the real problem is with customer expectations and that players less and less understand what alpha or beta means when the boundaries get blurred more and more because devs cannot wait anymore to finish their games before they try to sell it. Result are BS posts like the one linked in the TO by the vocal minority

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I’m betting that a lot of the Unity games out there would not have even made it to completion/release if the developers had chosen a harder to use game engine.

Unity makes it very easy to make a game.

Is Unity as good as other game engines, maybe that’s the wrong question.

Unity has a lot of technical issues and lacks a lot of tools/features/level of quality that other engines have.

Also Unity allows anyone to make a game, so the level of ability of the developers using it tend to be lower.

The question should be how good is Unity in the hands of AAA developers?

Or how can Unity provide better quality tools that help developers make better Unity games.

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What? No.

This obsession with AAA has to stop. The question is “how good is Unity in the hands of competent developers,” not AAA ones.

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How long is a piece of string? How big is the budget? 100m is enough to pretty much make anything look good. I mean for 100m you can hire people to rewrite half of Unity.

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Which is exactly what they do IF they use an off the shelf engine like UE4 or CryEngine, and then people go all “Oh look how good Unreal games / CryEngine games look” while not noticing that the engine used by these games only shares the core with the engines used as UE4 or CryEngine by the small time Indie on the street…

If you want to know how good the stock engine is, you have to see what the bottom feeders can do with it, those guys who lack the money to upgrade the engine.
I bet you will find it difficult to find a ton of UE4 or CryEngine bottomFeeder games. Most of these are created by small teams with small budgets, which already means they have the resources to hack the engine if needed.

Hell, most of us probably use one or the other bought asset to plug holes in Unity.

So really, don’t look at what the big boys do. They have the resources to polish a turd engine into a diamond (see CryEngine… the tools, at least 2 years ago, where turds. Small wonder I heard most bigger studios using that paid for custom tool development).
Look at what guys without any resources do with the engine. I bet there you see a lot of trash and some rough diamonds being done with Unity… and almost nothing being done with the other big commercial engines.
That does not mean much about Unity lacking features or being crap… if anything, it says more about how hard to use the other engines are for developers.

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Haters gonna hate. There’s always going to be someone who just spits vitriol just for their own satisfaction. Some people can’t feel good about themselves unless they’re tearing something else down.

As usual, the general consensus is “don’t feed the trolls.” Getting up in arms over every instance is counter productive. Ultimately your best bet for this kind of scenario is to walk away and dismiss it. Someone who’s already made up their mind isn’t going to be persuaded. Zombiegorilla offered some of the best advice. Just go out and make an awesome Unity-powered game of your own. That is a creative and constructive solution.

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Can Unity really present high fidelity visuals with the same hardware as CryEngine?

I know Unity has improved by leaps and bounds - and I’m convinced the visuals and lighting itself can be on par - but is the core engine rendering as optimized?

The problem is that we don’t have enough real games at the same production level to compare.

In my personal gaming experience, Unity games do tend to require more hardware pound for pound to produce equal quality visuals. Is this because those game devs were just using poorer techniques? Maybe.

I recently played Ryse Son of Rome - and was just blown away by the smoothness of the game on mediocre hardware. I remember thinking, “if this were unity - there’s no way I could run this smooth on my hardware”.

Was I right to think that?