Hey everyone, I’m hoping someone can point me in a direction to start learning Unity again. I used Unity back in the early 3.0-5 version days of the engine and was very familiar with the Gameobject workflow. There used to be a ton of awesome Youtube tutorial series that made it fun to learn. Off the top of my head I remember BergZerg Arcade with his RPG system tuts. Of course then I had a couple of kids and life got away from me for several years. I installed the latest beta and hardly recognized any of the terms from years ago lol. I still lurk the forums every now and again so I’m aware of new things like URP/HDRP/DOTS but I really haven’t dug in to get my hands dirty. Every tutorial series I find and like seems to be incompatible or out of date with all the new systems. Before anyone says it I know every faucet of Unity is being actively developed so it’s hard to teach things that are constantly changing. I’ve made my way through documentation so I at least know where some of the options are. Does anyone follow a specific channel they like for recent and up to date tutorials? A longer series of tutorials that incorporate several systems and are still relevant is really what I am looking for.
I guess I should also note that I’m looking for more programmer oriented tutorials that show best practices since my C# is pretty rusty and I have a feeling a lot of my old code would make people cringe :). I’m also open to any and all current ECS tutorials but to be honest it’s going to be way out of my skill level to use it for a while. Any and all help is appreciated!
If it is to make something, soon, ignore most new stuff, just use gameobjects and the built in renderpipeline. Those haven’t really changed much since Unity 5.
If your goal is learning, and you want to go on an adventure and learn new tech that might be useful to you in the future, but is maybe not quite production ready yet, then just (looks around and leans closer) download Unreal 5 or Godot.
It’s good to know that not all of my old knowledge will go to waste! I’ve considered sticking with the buit-in but I really just have hobby 3d projects so I don’t plan on shipping anything soon. I’ll probably look into URP for the time being since it seems to be closer in scope to the old renderer. From what I’ve read I can use a lot of the high performance C# and burst compiler in mono land so I’ll start there and avoid ECS entirely until it stabilizes a bit (fingers crossed in the next year or two).
Haha, not bad advice honestly. I have been very tempted to try UE5 after seeing some of the reveal trailers but I’m too familiar with Unity and the workflows and have an aversion to using Blueprint. I did try Godot about 3 or 4 years back and loved the simplicity of it but never got too far due to a number of things. If it has improved significantly since then I will take a look!
Overall it sounds like I just need to jump back in and use CTRL+F in the documentation every time I get stuck haha. Thanks for the input, It’s great to be back!
That argument is only valid if you want to stick to gameobjects / builtin renderer, in which case, sure.
Everything is changing for DOTS and SRPs. The familiarity argument does not really work for Unity any more if you are considering the new stuff. Unity are slowly making a completely new engine, which is unproven and unfamiliar to current Unity users with a bunch of ease of use gone.
So if you’re willing to jump to DOTS and SRPs, you are willing to jump to a new engine, so why limit yourself to just Unity?
Godot 4 is supposed to be a giant step forward for the engine (especially for 3d stuff, because I would argue for 2d performance etc, it probably is already ahead of Unity). I would suggest to give it another try when that releases (which should be… soon?).
This is a tough subject for an old time user, coming into what we have now. TBH the 2019 LTS version, is what you should use to re-familiarize yourself with the newer versions of Unity. BuiltIn is always the best choice, as most all assets will work out of box, etc. Now if your looking for 2d/mobile, that would be URP. If your looking for high-def, then HDRP is the way to go. But BuiltIn is the most forgiving, and say…universal, of them all.
I will keep this in mind! As much as I loved the simplicity of design before they started adding all the different pipelines I’m addicted to shiny new toys (which is why I have a hard time finishing a project before jumping to the next lol…). I’m by no means a pro artist so I don’t feel like I could use HDRP to its fullest. I also thought I read somewhere that eventually URP is supposed to have feature parity or near to with HDRP?
This right here made me wake up a little bit. After digging through some of the documentation and seeing people make things for DOTS/SRP I can see what you mean. Whole new ballgame in a lot of regards. I’ll be breaking out of my comfort zone either way, might as well learn some new engines. I guess I’ll take all three for a spin and see which one grabs my fancy.
I am very excited to see if Unity can wrap all this new stuff together in a user friendly way like the old systems were. It’s kind of incredible to see how far the engine has come since I used it last. Thanks for the advice everyone!
