Just a little topic to talk about my personnal actual problems using Unity. I’m using Unity since several years now and I saw all improvements made on the engine which are really appreciable, specially HDRP and ECS.
Because I’m comfortable with coding in Unity and in general, and getting some knowledges on 3D, I can make a game on my own. I choosed this engine some years ago because i felt it was fitting my personnal needs as an indie game developer. But with all theses evolutions I feel I always have to stay on touch with new features rather than coding. Recently, I intented to earn money selling my 3D games. I took personnal projects that I wanted to improve. Thoughts : ECS is amazing ! I will integrate it on my project, and learned new approach for coding, for gettting performances improvements, even some features are not supported ( for example skinning and rigging animations ). Maybe ECS is not ready to be integrated for games in production. More recently, I bought near 200 $ in the Asset store to spare some dev / 3D designing time : enviro and nature studio pro. I was starting to getting my game looking good, switching from an empty world to an emerging universe, using assets to stay focused on development and sparring time on Level design with bought assets. At this point, i saw some tutorials on shader graphs and wanted to getting them, using HDRP features to get my worlds looking prettier with PBR stuff,
but all assets bought were at this point not compatible with HDRP. So my thought was, are all theses new features really enough integrated ? Because I felt loosing time integrating theses solutions . All I want is to get a simple experience and be able to focus my work on developing the game rather than have to every month integrate a new solution. And today I bought one month subscription for Speed Tree and I reallized Speed Tree is neither supporting HDRP… So at this point I’m starting to really think to move to Unreal Engine which for my personnal experience is more stable. That’s all for me, it was my personnal complain as a lonely indie game developer trying to keep the fire burning with the Unity Engine but at this point if things are not more stable ( HDRP is released since years now ) I will be forced to switch game engine for my 3D adventure game project.
I cannot blame Unity to provide improvements but at this point I got the feeling than HDRP is not enough popular / used / supported. I would prefer to not moved my game projecton to HDRP in order to break it up
Welcome to the headaches that come with supporting the latest and greatest features. I’m currently contracted to a small company that is developing a game using the HDRP but we started the project with the built-in renderer because at the time the new render pipeline was in a very early preview status.
Switching to the HDRP looked daunting but the truth was it ended up being a trivial task to complete. You run the automatic conversion utility, and then you convert anything that wasn’t automatically upgraded by hand. For the majority of assets that means you choose the closest matching HDRP material type and you hook up its textures and properties.
Speed Tree is an entirely different problem. When it first came out we were all excited to have access to it but the truth is it’s been a complete waste of time since the very beginning back when we didn’t have these SRPs. If you want good quality and good performance you don’t choose Speed Tree because you can’t have both of those at the same time if you use it.
I have only used speed tree with Vegetation studio, performance pretty decent with that combo. Built in renderer though.
Will move to SRP when it leaves preview. Glad to hear it’s a trivial task 
if you working on vr game will optimizing is key. There is something called ‘baking’ and is it often recommend for vr tech.
But it is true speed tree and a lot of tech for hdrp is a minefield - even water systems.
You don’t bake trees they have moving parts.
Well my friend is working on ‘vr game’ and had lots of problem with something called ‘baking’ and map size.
So it was important she optimized map.
Yeah but trees are not good candidate for baking. Also I wish we could UV2 map terrain so we could have parts of it with higher resulution. Right now it’s uniform so you can’t have higher res were the player can be. Only way to solve that is with multiple terrains but it can be complex stitching those depending on your scenario.
Yes it is difficult task, right now as we new we started with hdrp, so it is sadly all we know (see signature for example games.)
I wish there was simple solution but it is trial and error.
At moment I am in process of making my own ‘invector’ third person controller as if you ever use it you realise it is very restrictive.
unit_dev, please understand that the person you are trying to explain VR to currently has a VR game released on Steam.
I feel the same way. I even started a thread to list my reasons why I am using unreal for next project, but then I thought, ah what’s the point.
But yeah, for a small timer who is largely dependent on others for technical matters, Unity is too unstable and there is no benefit for me to stick with it. I can see the benefit for coders and mobile developers but if I am hiring people to write code anyway and developing PC only, I can’t see a good reason to stick with Unity. Too much in flux.
Unreal is for artists. Is not for prototyping. You will have problem when coming to gameplay phase or so i am reading. That being said, brushify.io does look like a good fit for your game - especially it citygen features.
There is nothing about this statement that is correct. You are an extreme newcomer when it comes to development and you have very little experience with Unity and UE4. On top of that, you are assuming that prototyping tools and artist tools have no significant overlap while also making broad assumptions about implementing gameplay systems.
Stop making posts where you claim things like this with such confidence. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Sorry I didn’t mean to upset you sir. It was just my friend said when she tried unreal it was very difficult and she could not see realistic way to move from blueprint to scalable game. They use something called ‘Actors/pawns’ and use other cprogramming subset language.
She is very arty which i do not care for. I enjoy making the movement. But thank you for your opinion.
That’s really cool, I hope it is doing well
If your friend has things to say, they should make an account and speak for themselves.
By “confidently” stating things based on somebody else’s not necessarily informed opinion, you might end up spreading information, which is not a good thing.
Build an actual skill through practice, then share knowledge that’s based on actual experience and not on assumptions and hearsay.
She tried it last week and is in 2nd semester in 3d course which is since been post-phoned since outbreak. She doesn’t like talking out internet forums and to be honest prefers wasting time on painterly style graphics which frustrates me a lot as i like to work on mechanics.
At present i am working on my own 3rd person mechanic and we are always looking for ppl to collaborate with if you are intersted.
Wow she tried it a whole week ago? What an expert.
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wasting time on painterly style graphics
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You don’t know enough about gamedev to determine what is a waste of time.
I had to laugh when I saw the OP as I almost had a rant myself at exactly the same time but stopped myself.
Anyway as we’re letting off steam i figured what the hell…
I saw yet another unity acquisition the other day that from a personal point of view (ie indie game dev) is utterly useless. A couple of years ago the CEO mentioned a direction the company would be looking at which disappointed and worried me. I don’t recall the exact words but it was to explore more non-game related revenue and in recent times we’ve seen a number of acquisition that which show this, meanwhile another engine sucks up Quixel and they now have free access to megascans.
I’ve felt the strategy of Epic has been on the nose compared to Unity of late. They eat their own dog food and have done so for years and as a result they find themselves in a position to create a Steam rival which they can afford to sink money in to because of their success using their own engine.
In the meantime Unity acquire Multiplay, an excellent move which is powering some awesome games, but then depreciate the Network solution and fail to have another one ready. There is a DOTS solution coming sometime.
They remove Enlightened which lets be honest, was a cluster truck from the start but at least we had the option of GI, but its removed without an alternative GI solution. There is a GI solution coming perhaps next year.
Bolt has been acquired but unless I missed an something there has been no Unity announcement yet and its still available to BUY on the asset store. Thousands of $ of free Megascans and Bolt is still a paid product?
Unity create stunning demo’s yet they still feel like a missed opportunity - why not release these to the public and then create videos explaining the process?
URP & HDRP look good but having spent the last 8-12 month using LWRP/URP I would now leave it until 2020.LTS. Its fine for Forward rendering but if you find forward rendering isnt cutting the mustard youre stuffed. Deferred is expected some time later this year 
And then you have DOTS & Dots VS. I’m really excited about this but its going to take time.
On the flip side I am really please that this years Roadmap looks bland. ie they are concentrating on stability and hopefully finishing the features they have started. Getting DOTS, URP, HDRP to verified would be awesome hopefully with the later two having full functionality (URP I’m looking at you and your lack of deferred rendering).
Kinematica looks interesting and I’m pleased to see its DOTS based with a wrapper.
So yeah, the future of Unity looks good but the present?
So, like, I’ve been wondering.
I see a lot of users using “since” instead of “for” when talking about time. In particular, I see this all the time:
“I have been trying since two weeks to do this thing”
“I’m using Unity since several years now”
I kinda suspect that it’s a mistake that’s telling of where the writer is from, but I haven’t ever heard anyone say it, so I can’t place them. Anybody got some hobby linguist knowledge? I’ve got a hunch it’s eastern European, but I don’t really know why I think that, so it could be wrong.
The United Kingdom, origin of the English language, actually (I checked). But please - if everyone could focus on OP, stay on topic if possible, that’d be great.
Regarding Unreal Engine - I think it’s a wonderful engine, and anyone thinking of trying it doesn’t really need to make a post. They can head to https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ and download it and get started right away. I fully endorse and encourage it actually.
Why would a huge fanboy of Unity encourage using a different engine? Well because it’ll make you appreciate Unity much more when you return. It IS a great engine but it’s not necessarily great for you - tool for the job really so it depends more like how you prefer to dev, or your project requirements.
Have a go at GODOT too, and other options. I mean if people are afraid of engines, then they’re the problem.
Have at it