Thanks again another very useful response, I have a final question if I’m not taking too much of your time which I think will also help other less experienced/knowledgeable members of the forum such as myself.
I didn’t realize unity wasn’t making good progress with its engine etc I thought this was one of the areas it was doing well, are there just specific areas for your own use case they’re neglecting or is it overall?
For example are they still developing well in other areas such as mobile games?
Either way I wish you all the best with your future projects and using unigine.
No because their feature set hasn’t really been advancing. It has taken many years and URP still isn’t a superset of built in, at this point the state it is in is “It is probably better than built-in for mobile, I guess, maybe”.
I’m doing a URP project on the side and I often find myself wondering : “what is good about this again?”, and sometimes I do come up with some answers, but they are not answers worth many years of development.
On the mobile specific front, multithreaded renderting still causes crashes, Vulkan still isn’t solid enough (it causes issues on a lot of devices), Unity is always 6+ months late with platform requirements, they dropped support for various things (like achievements) trying to force the platform holders to develop plugins for them, instead of Unity directly supporting various platforms, and the platform holders are dragging their feet.
Smaller things like mouse on iPad would probably be easy to implement, but they won’t do it.
The only thing that is progressing (albeit slowly), is DOTS. But to get DOTS it feels like progress to everything else was sacrificed, and I don’t think DOTS is enough of a boon for everyone to counterbalance the rot that happened everywhere else.
DOTS has been on my radar and is one of the things (promises) that is the most interesting to me. Creatively, if I could implement millions of objects running around in a performant way, that could be a lot of fun. I was happy to read an update in the DOTS Development status that they are inching towards a world where you could combine game objects and bits and pieces that are the ‘performance by default’ that I always hoped DOTS would be.
Currently, DOTS development requires so many new concepts, sub-scenes, entities, etc. that I can’t wrap my head around it. I also know there are some major things are missing like Animation and the likelihood that it still will be changing has kept me in wait and see mode. Based on the development pace though, it seem like at least 2 years before it will reach a point where I can make use of it easily.
I thought mobile was one of unitys main specialities/focus if that isnt even progressing well I guess Ill look for another engine that focuses on mobile, thanks for the info.
I don’t care about DOTS, I think the whole thing was mishandled, trying to force a new paradigm in the old editor was a mistake, instead of going after new markets they could have kept supporting the current feature set while they were developing the next generation dots based Unity.
At this point I’m never going to use it, it will arrive too late and I don’t want to spend effort to learn more Unity stuff, I’m done.
Maybe that was true at some point, but then Unity spent several years being very unfocused.
Agreed, but then I’m not convinced it will ever reach feature parity with GameObjects which is why I think they’re pushing towards unifying GameObjects and Entities. Unity knows that we’ll be relying on the GameObject side for most of our features with Entities providing speed increases where relevant.
I feel like this is a pivot, otherwise they would have done that first, so everyone can benefit, and then maybe slowly add more “pure” dots stuff as time goes by.
Unity is making progress, just not at the rate most people would hope. As others have pointed out, any new features they have implement throughout the years still seem to suffer from issues that ought to have been solved by now. We’re in this really strange place where there is no “right” or “optimal” path to go down - you will always be sacrificing something in order to gain something else. E.g. Built-in RP is stable and proven, but old and certainly not up to par with modern standards. URP is fast and optimal, but is missing a lot of features as compared to Built-in. HDRP is quite capable, but you’ll be sacrificing a lot of performance going with it, and it still isn’t as performant or featured as as a certain other competitor’s renderer.
As for GameObjects vs ECS, I can’t help but feel Unity trying to be in too many places at once, creating a very complex situation that is too confusing for most people. They’re too afraid to ditch old workflows and make the necessary changes, and instead ending up with a solution that doesn’t mesh with most people. Not to mention that at least I feel they’re trying to push a lot of the complexity onto users rather than solving on their own. I think that in part is why ECS hasn’t seen the kind of adoption I think they were hoping for, at least not yet.
You won’t get “unbiased” opinion. I think you should just treat unity as abandoneware when using it on your own projects. This way you won’t be disappointed in anything. I mean the codebase you have now will remain to be available, time will tell if company ever does anything else with it.
I’ve tried this, and so far it only complicates things unnecessarily managing what’s on both sides. Its way easier to just utilize Burst & Jobs if you want to offload heavy processing to the CPU.
If you want to use DOTS, its way easier to just do everything in DOTS all the way. (Excluding Graphics/Animations/UI and all that)
Your message coming from someone with so many posts is very impactful, I was hoping things had changed since I last looked into the situation but I think this thread has confirmed my concerns.
For making mobile non-gaming apps with 3D elements and animation, I need UI elements like listviews/scrollviews with deceleration and elasticity. Unity has this built-in (UGUI and UI Toolkit). As far as I know, Unreal Engine doesn’t have any easy way to accomplish this.
For making 3D mobile non-gaming apps with a lot of UI elements, I think that Unity is a far better fit at the moment than Unreal Engine of even Godot.
I have a tendency to expect negative outcome of things. My current opinion is a result of a mess with runtime fee and unity’s attempts to implement it.
The advice I gave (“treat it as abandoneware”), would allow one to work on a project using unity without getting burned by any sort of expectations or promises that may be broken.
Sadly its a realistic approach. It can be soul destroying to be struggling with something and not having a clue whether unity are working on it or not, or even going to fix the bugs or not. Right now, the only real pushes i see are DOTS but in kinda a very different direction than originally seemed to be the plan, and AI, and while the world is all about AI at $30 a month or whatever it was last time i looked and it chewed through those credits very quickly, much as some of the things are interesting, i cant see a lot of us buying into that unless its a tax right off for people.
I’ve always wondered: what’s the purpose of elasticity in scrollable elements? Is it for accessibility?
Edit: Okay, I’ve played around a bit with UMG in UE 5.4. Everything is named oddly as is typical for Epic. Using the ScrollBox as a test it has the ability to scroll past the point it should and it has deceleration, but it doesn’t appear to have elasticity. I imagine that wouldn’t be too hard to implement manually seeing as the prerequisites are there.
When scrollable element has inertia, that means on mobile device you can flick to give it momentum and then stop when it is near required point. You never do this stuff on PC, because there’s scroll wheel. Elasticity also gives you visual feedback that the app sees your input, is not frozen, but there’s simply nowhere to move past this point.
It will be interesting to see what happens this time next year. At that point all the Plus upgrade to Pro deals would have elapsed and Unity will have expected to see a jump of developers using Unity 6.
For old Plus users I expect them to lose up to 50% of customers to the free level or other engines, but that’s fine for Unity since Pro is 4-5 times the cost of Plus, so they could lose 75% of those customers and retain the same earnings!
Unity 6 uptake will be interesting as that’s where runtime licensing comes into play. I expect uptake to be lower and slower than previous versions. Depending on how much lower or not will likely dictate Unity’s next move.