Hey. I don’t remember when I stopped using Unity. I tried using unreal but I didn’t like their APIs compared to unity - lots of boilerplate and complexity. Then I tried using Godot. The APIs are simple, but I frequently ran into issues where a feature I was used to from unity wasn’t available (like vertex snapping… how do godot devs do level design!?). It was a long journey filled mostly with procrastination and hello world projects that focused on translating things I knew how to do with unity. I believe trying to go with nothing but html5 canvas + pure vanilla javascript with no libraries whatsoever occupied a good chunk of that time. I was kind of sad that the top 3 engines hasn’t changed in the last 5 years, wasn’t much of a journey.
So… last night I downloaded the 2020 build. Read about the new input system in the docs - seems nice. Got vscode working somehow, autocomplete / intellisense is working! I started a new project, unity booted up, and… my eyes melted out of my skull. Whelp, at least my whole world is in dark mode now.
It’s good to be back. I read over some drama about dark theme being free via some theme editing package for a few months and then it was patched out after some apparent disagreement between staff. So, a frequently requested feature goes unaddressed for at least 7 years but a workaround for it was fixed in a matter of days/weeks? Whack. I don’t intend to reignite that discussion, just missed my chance to comment on it when it came up in February
Well, at least the editor is light grey instead of eggshell white. It’s just 1 more thing to sacrifice for your indie dreams along with blood, sweat, and tears.
Welcome back! If you left in 2016, genuinely nothing of much importance has really changed.
All the features that most people use and are not broken as hell are the ones that were available in unity 5. With the 2017 cycle and above, things started to go downhill and we have basically been in a transition period since then where all tech is now considered “old” and all the new tech is not ready to replace the “old” stuff.
So as good as time as any to come back as you wont miss the goldrush once all the tech comes out (you know, around 2050ish)!
On a less sarcastic note, all the things that made unity great when you left are still here, and most of the commercially successful unity games out there dont really make use of the new features much anyway.
I recommend not bothering with DOTS for now as itll just give headaches, avoid the package manager unless you are 100% sure you need something from it, and use the new SRPs UNLESS you want to do custom shaders and custom post fx, in which case it might be easier to use in-built as its difficult to find documentation (or even what the old macros have turned into) in the new shader pipelines - and shader graph so far has been unable to make majority of shaders I needed it to.
Nice to see other people’s journeys. Gamedevs are always at different stages in their “careers”, and sometimes you’re at that stage where you have to discover for yourself what tools work for you, to realize that you had already stumbled upon it years before.
Thanks. Might leave again when godot is ripe and probably won’t be as active here, but I can’t procrastinate on these projects any longer!
I loved it, there’s something really magical about drawing individual pixels. I am proud of this, this, and this. Then I lost steam while working on this, trying to explore 3D with nothing beyond threejs. I wanted to build a procedural modeler where you could specify a series of line segments and it would create discs along those points and render skin between the outsides. I go pretty far before I realized the system as is was only good for rendering noodles and since I successfully did it procedurally I had no way to uv map the textures You can see some of the progress in my new profile image.
Well my current project involves water so I’ll probably want to make a really simple shader at some point to make some wavy translucent material. Do I need to interact with the new pipeline for that or can I just write HLSL like before?
I wish I could tell myself that to excuse these past years of procrastination
I must admit I had assumed the worst when you left. I figured you had taken up a routine corporate job and been assimilated into the collective. I’m still not convinced I was wrong, your recent posting seems to indicate only a single personality, and a serious one at that.
Can we be sure this is you, and not some government spy that has taken over your account?
Ah, that brings back memories. A jester and a hive organism - how could I ever have left all this behind? Being here does sooth my nerves. Although I am concerned that this thread is going to go so far off topic that I might get to see @hippocoder again, too.
Well, yea. I took a job at AT&T killing jobs with automation (processing almost a million records of employee data and doing system integration from all over business operations… with perl!) and then 3 years later a thing called Service Now took my job… and the jobs of hundreds of others. Maybe even thousands. Although it was for a short time, I wielded a large amount of power. I had the ability to access anything from DOJ equipment to blizzard entertainment servers. I didn’t because it would have cost me my job to look, but I could have!
I guess it would be fitting for me to say that in the event a government spy joins the group, it should be obvious who will assimilate who.
Scriptable rendering pipline, huh? Saw a quick video on it and I don’t think I leveraged the previous system. I talked a big game on this forum but, my projects are mostly just some bouncing cubes and some poorly written shaders to make other cubes jiggle. I might never even reach a level where I know anything about or am concerned my projects’ rendering pipelines
Forum addiction. I could probably get it diagnosed if I went and saw a doctor about it.
Its a technical limit of the forum, the forum software only shows ten pages of posts for everyone. However if you go to page 10 and scroll to the bottom, you’ll see a button that says find older messages. This will load another ten pages. Follow this process approximately 83 times and you will find my first post.
Fair warning though, both Unity and I change over the last seven years. A lot of my early content probably isn’t super relevant or useful. And many of my personal opinions have changed too. I don’t stand by any posts of mine past the time of writing.
Honestly if you just want to make water shaders etc you will probably be fine using the new SRP with shader graph, its more doing things like decent edge detection etc that is tricky with it.
That said, if you remember how to do things from before I would just stick to in-built pipeline, it works great and writing shaders by code is much easier for them (and all the macros etc actually documented)
Ah, sounds like a good introductory / hello world sort of task to check that out for me, thanks.
Could be worth doing both and seeing what feels better. Although at this point I’d be happy with just a translucent blue plane for my water lol. I went through a bunch of godot tutorials and their shader language is based on HLSL. Finally got my water looking acceptable and then the last straw… no vertex snapping! I was ready to start assembling my scene but I couldn’t drag things into other things.
I may return there in the future because I’ve discovered I like really simplicity when it comes to engine apis.
