Before we came over to Unity we’d been using the A3 and A4 versions of 3D Game Studio from Conitec. Before that we’d used Quest 3D, Flash, Torque, GameMaker, 3DRad, and some other game engines, for various projects. I was sort of an engine hopper back then. Whenever it was time to do a new project I’d look around the the engine that was capable of doing what I wanted to do. They all had their pros and cons.
When I found Unity it was exactly what I was looking for. Pretty much all of the engines available back then cost from several hundred dollars on up to use commercially. Nothing free that was worth the hassle (that I knew of). We (my dev partner/wife and I) bought the “Indie” version for $199 and then upgraded to “Pro” for an additional $880 a few months later once our new project was fully in progress.
So it’s been ten years, and we’re still using Unity, as we speak, on a new game that will hopefully be finished within a month. I keep thinking of changing to something else, not because I don’t like Unity but simply because I’d like a change of scenery. Every time I give it more thought, though, I end up realizing that what I want to do can be done in Unity so I keep using it.
Anyway, What brought you to Unity? What engine(s) were you using before you came over? What are your Unity pros and cons that will either keep you using it or try something else in the future?
Back when I started I was using directX and openGL, and then hopped over to ogre3d.
The reason I hopped over was because it went free and had a level editor. The pros is your going to save alot of time on development you have a full team working on the engine, the con is that if you hit a hard limit (IE you cant free memory in webGL without reloading the scene – you are SOL). Right now we are working on building our own SAAS AR platform “web editor” using unity so its come full circle…
I think you might be better off over the long term to roll your own for everything but who knows.
I fiddled with XNA, GameMaker, and a handful of other “easy button” solutions that turned out to be “not so easy button solutions”… unity was the first game engine that was solid, effective and useful for what I was trying to do, and I’ve looked at unreal since then, as well as some of these newer ones, godot and such… none compare as far as I can tell.
I joined the forums 9 years ago, but had been lurking for a long time before that.
I’d started an indie project along with a programmer after we’d been made redundant. It was the third time I’d been made redundant from a game designer role, so thought going indie couldn’t be less stable. The programmer ended up busy with contract work, so while waiting I tried developing on my own.
GameSalad was what I tried first as my programming skills were almost non-existent. But I soon realised I’d need to use something more powerful, and Unity was the only practical option I could see. I taught myself Unity and Javascript (as most of the tutorials were in JS back then), and a year later I released my first game to disappointing sales, and again a year later for my second game. The joint project was never completed.
I have flirted with other game engines, mostly Cocos, but stuck with Unity when I started a part-time job as a university lecturer on a Games Computing course. Multiple modules involved teaching Unity, so it made sense to continue using it myself.
The lecturing took up more time than I expected, and got involved in a few projects over the years, so haven’t released a game myself in a long time, but I have two I hope to have finished by the end of the summer (one is really a sequel to my first game, and have used it to experiment, and it has changed a lot).
The Steve Jobs “Thoughts on Flash” memo happened. I immediately began looking for an escape hatch that wasn’t an HTML5 library.
That’s when I remembered a very old Flash meetup I’d been to where one of the attendees was raving about a “3D Flash Killer” called Unity3D. I remembered trying it the evening he mentioned it, but back then it shipped with Unitron as its editor and everything was in UnityScript. Nothing made sense. However by the time “Thoughts on Flash” made the rounds the tool was much better supported. We had MonoDevelop, which to my eyes at the time was a blessing.
I’m a youngun, relatively speaking. By the time I started playing with Unity seriously, it was really the only valid option around. Unreal was still super expensive and only really suitable for FPS games. And Unity had massively eclipsed all of the other free/cheap engines in capacity.
By the time Unreal dropped its prices, I was too well trained in Unity to be worth making the switch. I’m basically here for the long run. I can really only see myself switching if Unity really screws up badly.
I think I’m on my fith year, not sure. I was renovating and wanted to visualize my apartment in VR. I went with unity becasue it had good support for Oculus DK1.
Then Vive came out and I decided to create a VR game.
I got into games in the early social game days, using a lot of flash, which eventually lead me to working on more complex stuff and Unity.
The main reason I liked Unity was I agreed with their big picture approach of use higher level languages where possible and drop to C++ only when necessary. But for years the choices and implementations, non focus on performance, was a real issue. Now with performance as a priority and burst, I think we are seeing how well the paradigm can actually work if done right, and I’m fairly happy with Unity right now.
I disliked Unity before I ever ended up using it as a game engine… mainly because I’d grown a certain distaste with PC games using the Unity engine, and all having the same problems of not supporting fullscreen mode properly ie worse performance…an issue that has since been fixed years ago now, among other issues and common things you see with Unity made games.
So it had a reputation that proceeded it, but it was also on my radar as a game engine because of it… Think it was 2015 Unity5 when I tried it out and finally got experience see all the effing problems developers of certain games I liked had problems and bugs with… because now I had them aswel So I did try Unreal out at a similar time actually before Unity even, but soon got into Unity because of its C# support/asset store… Unreal fell by the way side, I lost interest, but still like seeing the new releases and what they support in features compared to Unity.
Of course I made some games with Flash many years before 2015, Map making for Quake3 is roughly when I started getting into game modding.
Flash was awesome! Had spent most of my career working with it right up until just a few ago years maintaining legacy products. It’s a real shame one person killed such a highly productive and flexible tool and consequently destroyed the careers of those involved with it - I know many.
I sought Unity as an alternative too. UE was way too expensive at the time and tho I’ve played with it since I definitely prefer Unity for its similar qualities to Flash.
I’ve been here for a while. Even before creating my forum account. I used to just come here and read to learn about the engine usage. I used opengl, flash, xna, and unreal before taking a leap of faith to Unity.
Back then on Unity 3 I didn’t do much since I was still working on other engine projects, but what made me come back was the interface. I really liked how organized and easy to use it was compared to my previous experiences, so I made the jump with Unity 4. Have been working with it since then both as a hobby and as my job.
I don’t have any plans to move to any other engine. Not now with all the amazing new toys that Unity is giving us while still being the same engine.
My team trialed it on a project in my absence. I didn’t like it at first. However, it did help the team to get contracts finished more quickly, so we kept using it. Eventually both Unity and I changed enough that it’s now my default toolkit for anything that involves a 3D scene.
We had an in-house toolkit using a bunch of Open Source libraries, most notably OGRE. Before that I also had experience with Torque, XNA, and good ol’ C++/SDL/OpenGL.
Pros
The biggest one is support for lots of platforms. I do not want to have to maintain a toolset and runtime across multiple platforms myself. I also don’t want to have to learn different tools for different platforms.
Decent base editor tools, which are extendable. They’re not perfect, but they don’t need to be.
Someone else maintaining my engine! Back when iOS went 64 bit only that could have been a major headache at short notice, but thanks to Unity it was a fairly minor one.
“Free” engine upgrades. Every so often Unity does something cool that will improve my game and just gives it to me. I can focus on my games rather than on keeping the underlying tech up to date.
Cons
Scripts must be attached to GameObjects. This is more a background thing these days as I’m used to just dealing with it, and I have to admit that it does give things a certain elegance in its consistency. However, I’d love for a scene or application to be able to have some scripting hooks which are not dependent on GameObjects. Without this, certain things end up getting hacky solutions.
Garbage collection is worth a mention. Thanks to my experience in XNA I’m used to just dealing with it from the code design stage onwards, but I do have to admit that it’d be nice not to have to. There are also some things in large scale games (eg: arbitrarily streaming game content) that are impractical to do without allocating.
The glacial rate of change for some specific things is just… ugh. Why is the built-in Input system so archaic? Why did a replacement make it all the way to beta before getting canned?
Edit: Additive scene loading limitations should also get a mention.
At this stage my main reason for using other tools is more about keeping my own skills up to date than anything else. That said, I pick the tools for my projects on a case-by-case basis, whatever best fits the job.
The general state of all engines with 3D support. Good lord was 3D engine support awful back then. 3.x, compared to today, wasn’t great, but compared to the alternatives at the time? Especially ones that had Mac support? Everything either cost a fortune, or had massive compatibility issues.
Everything. For 2D stuff I was still using GameMaker, I tooled around with GameBryo for a spell (dreadful engine, I can see why they ended up in the state they were in before vanishing), Ogre3D, Torque… The latter two weren’t bad, but they were both very much engines in the sense of what 3D engines were like at the time: more a collection of tools and APIs than a dedicated creation system.
Honestly, the biggest con to me is the amount of assets on the asset store that don’t grant source access, which is less a Unity thing and more store thing, but whatever.
On the topic:
Came to Unity from the XNA Framework (~2014-ish) after making the prototype first prototype by it because of Learn section, and because XNA sucked (and still does).
Unity has a charm of not so steep learning curve, so thats that.
Decided to stay because Unity engine is probably the best from the cost / quality perspective and the ease of use.
Can someone tell the difference between RuntimeInitializeLoadType and RuntimeInitializeOnLoadMethod by just looking at its name? Nope Unity naming standards (Hint: The latter only triggers for the first scene)
So I did try Unreal out at a similar time actually before Unity even, but soon got into Unity because of its C# support/asset store… Unreal fell by the way side, I lost interest, but still like seeing the new releases and what they support in features compared to Unity.