https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/learn/lyra?sessionInvalidated=true
Man, this is such a no brainer! Why wouldn’t Unity do something like this? What’s the chance that Gigaya revives, or something of that sort?
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/learn/lyra?sessionInvalidated=true
Man, this is such a no brainer! Why wouldn’t Unity do something like this? What’s the chance that Gigaya revives, or something of that sort?
They have done that, multiple times. They are just terrible at maintaining them, in the sense that they don’t touch them at all after they release them.
It’s the same Unity ethos they also apply to their features.
lol
lmao even
Unity has had decent samples. It’s just that they don’t maintain them at all.
https://unity.com/fps-sample
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/FPSSample
https://forum.unity.com/forums/fps-sample-game.184/
Its usually the case that the dev-team has plans & intentions to keep updating and maintaining projects after release; but get re-orged or pivoted by management to work on something else with no resources or time for maintaining the just-released project.
My guess is the team that owns Lyra has dedicated people/time/directive to make sure it is improved and upgraded for each version.
The real living UE project is Fortnite. Most of the stuff they develop for the engine is developed for Fortnite. And obviously that game gives them all the opportunity in the world to eat their own dogfood.
Unity start a lot of initiatives, but it doesn’t last long because there’s no clear goal or financial return. And when you start eating dogfood, if you don’t have a clear goal and very strong motivation, it’s going to be hard to stay with it long enough to turn it into hamburgers. So sooner or later you just go back to selling dogfood and focusing on marketing.
I have to say the original Unity tutorials I used back around 2014 or so when I started were great. But I never found a satisfactory ‘big project’ which really showed me how Unity could or should work beyond the prototype stage.
I just was looking at the Open Project which, although interesting and worth looking at for it’s extensive use of scriptable objects, predictably never got beyond the stage of an extremely basic prototype with very little in the way of content or features.
It’s almost like Unity themselves are defeated by the same affliction that game devs suffer where they never get past the prototype stage and therefore never find out what they don’t know about the ‘other’ 80% of game development.
I like Unity’s open-ended nature! If Unity could easily provide more complete sample games, that would be fantastic, but as mentioned, it’s resource-intensive to fully develop a game. Unreal Engine often releases polished demos because it’s closely tied to AAA game development cycles. Unity is more of a general-purpose game engine. This has advantages, as Unity doesn’t lock you into a specific genre or style.
What I really love about Unity is the elegance of its “GameObject + Component” workflow. It’s so simple I just described it in one sentence. It’s incredibly versatile, allowing you to build almost any kind of logic without resorting to excessive workarounds. It’s like the difference between carving wood to create exactly what you envision… versus being limited to assembling a pre-made kit, like one of those miniature model boat kits or something, which look fantastic, but it’s meant for just one specific result.
I mean, they could have one demo project that they keep maintaining and use it as an example of best practices?
They had the FPS sample:
It looked pretty good (I mean, wtf is that music, but the visuals are pretty solid). They could have it updated with current Unity stuff. Maybe a URP version and an HDRP version? I think it would need one employee dedicated to this (and maybe temporary help from others if big refactors need to happen), who could also give feedback about what pains they face when moving from Unity version to Unity version.
I doubt it would be more effort to maintain that one than to produce how many other sample scenes they produced (or attempted to produce) in the last 5 years, although I guess maintaining a sample scene, while really good for the community and the users, doesn’t really generate the same amount of marketing as starting a bunch of other sample scenes.
And we know what Unity chooses when the choice is about appearing to produce cool stuff vs actually producing cool stuff.
I think there was also angry bots demo.
And bunch of “microgame” projects…
Yeah it’s hard to see how to make it work though. Like you said they want to keep generating new marketing stuff rather than doing behind-the-scenes updating of projects everyone’s seen already.
UE content used to be Unreal Tournament stuff, now it’s Fortnite related stuff. In both cases it comes from a game they make money from. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Lyra eventually goes the way of all Unity’s promising projects as well, not being updated between versions, half forgotten.
Maybe what Unity should do is contract another studio to build an open project, a studio with the culture and experience in building actual games all the way through the dev cycle. Unity as an organization seems to be simply incapable of managing this - they have people who are more than capable and willing, but the corporate structure seems to work against it.
And it shouldn’t cost more than a tiny fraction of any single one of the acquisitions they’ve been making that didn’t go anywhere.
Lyra has been maintained for ~2 years since its release so far. That is already way more than anything Unity has done in regards to their demo projects.
I understand the point about needing to make money from something in order to spend effort to it, but there is nothing stopping either company from having a simple demo project maintained at all times. Unreal seems to think it is worth the effort, Unity doesn’t.
Now, Unity has given us all the evidence we need to conclude that they are shortsighted enough, that vague, elusive concepts like “a working demo is good thing, long term, for the engine” don’t fly. They need a direct YES to either “DOES THIS GENERATE MARKETING” or “DOES THIS MAKE MONEYZ NOW” in order to consider things.
So what you are suggesting is that it’s somehow easier for Unity to… create a profitable “fortnite” or an “Unreal tournament” than for their management to have to foresight to do things that aren’t immediately profitable for them. IMO they are incompetent enough for both suggestions, so the lower effort one seems more plausible to me.
But anyway, let’s all relax and play some sweet sweet Unity games, to remind ourselves what Unity thinks when they think “games”. Numbers don’t lie.
If anything the only time I would expect them to discontinue it is if they were releasing a new demo project. Epic has shown that they’ll keep a project updated if it’s still useful. For example the Content Examples pack released with UE 4.0 is still being updated and is available for 5.4. It’s one of their oldest example packs.
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/content-examples
You know I always used to think that it was silly for Unity to make their own games, that it was completely unnecessary and a waste of resources. But now I’m not so sure. When a company spends decades sitting there focusing on marketing and acquisitions and IPO and has very little to do with actual game development, I guess there’s a sort of irresistible transformation in the corporate structure. People move by osmosis away from where they don’t fit and toward where they do fit, and if the fit is ‘someone who is into marketing, acquisitions and IPO’ guess what sort of people are going to be coming in? And guess what sort of people, over time, are going to feel like there are better places for them to be?
It’s pretty clear by now that two distinct layers developed inside of Unity over the course of at least the last decade - the people managing the company, and the people working on the engine - with divergent motives and modus operandis. That’s a clear sign to me that there wasn’t a sufficiently strong goal that united them, and perhaps developing games for profit would have been a good candidate for that.
It’s very hard to say what should or shouldn’t have been done, what would or wouldn’t work, but I think that when you have this schism between the upper and lower levels of a company - which didn’t happen from one day to the next - it’s only a matter of time before all sorts of very intractable problems rear their ugly heads.
Fortnite was not making money for many years before it finally became the children exploiting successful behemoth it is today.
Do you see the current Unity:
Yes, exactly, and I understand you want them to make a game to force a cultural shift in management, but I think they can not make a successful game without a shift in management first.
there are other examples and they also have packages that are updated like the 3rd person starter project
They are updated to compile and nothing more.
No, you keep mistaking my comments for prescriptions. I’m simply discussing what happened and how it might have been avoided a long time ago.
Right now, Unity is very much set in its ways, the cultural shift has been going for years. From where I’m standing I don’t see any way for it to return to the sort of company it was in 2014 or earlier.
I simply think it’s possible that if Unity had never stopped making games after GooBall we might not be at this point where the engine development is struggling. We can clearly see the difference when we compare it to Epic, a company still neck deep in actual game development, who are stuffing big new features into their engine like it’s nobody’s business.
Your previous posts still don’t read, to me, like this is true even on hindsight after you stated it clearly here, but okay. Maybe it’s my dislike for ‘what if’ hypotheticals.
the Viking Village has some bugs fixed and GI improved and BoD has also some bugs fixes… that’s something, those demos are pretty old but you can still using them on newer versions of unity which imo is good
Book of the Dead and Viking Village have almost no value to them. Lyra is a game framework whereas these two are just graphical demos. I’ve not bothered to look at 3D Game Kit but I suspect it’s not that useful either.