To democratise a technology you need to make it easy for people to use that means you need to provide a UI/UX toolset usable by people with a range of IQs.
Or you need to ensure the majority of people can use your technology e.g. IQ < 100.
The problem can be endemic with a company that recruits and creates technology with super smart people e.g. IQ > 130. Then wonders why the majority of people have problems using their amazing complex technology.
I think some aspects of Unity are moving more towards the higher IQ spectrum and therefore losing Unity’s power to democratise game development.
Are there areas of Unity that you find confusing and hard to get to grips with that could be made a lot easier to use?
Personally DOTS has to be one of the most complex aspects of Unity for me.
The package manager has a whole raft of complexity to it’s interface and working with it that I find baffling at times.
Assets and Resource handling is another area that really seems over complex.
TLDR I could use a version of Unity that is easy to use for people with a lower IQ.
Even if you have a high IQ do you want to waste your time and brain power to use Unity or would you prefer a version of Unity that is easier and simpler to use?
This is only a problem if using the more complicated parts is critical for the users to create what they want to create.
Ideally you would have a “simple” abstraction that hides the complicated API underneath, while at the same time exposing the complicated API for those who want to go beyond what the simple abstraction can provide.
Like, defaults are on easy-mode, but you can opt-in to higher difficulty levels when you are ready / need it.
Possibly even multiple levels of hidden-by-default API’s to access.
I understand what you are saying regarding DOTS feeling more difficult when compared to using game objects. But DOTS is actually a lot easier than building your own custom solution using struct arrays and GPU instancing. I released a game in 2017 that way. It delivered DOTS levels of performance years before DOTS was available, and I had to design and implement low level systems myself. DOTS is actually very easy compared to implementing those things from scratch. So its all relative.
If you don’t need thousands of units flying around in your scene, then you don’t even need to use DOTS. You can continue using the game object style workflow for most types of games.
I released my source code on GitHub for anybody that wants to see how I implemented an extremely scalable laser projectile system before DOTS using struct arrays and GPU instancing. https://github.com/ShilohGames/InstancingPoolDemo
Can you please post any hard evidence you can show (journals, studies, white papers etc) that actually show a link between IQ and usabilty of a UI?
If not - thread is entirely baseless and purely discussion framed around a mostly nonsensical point.
If so - interesting and please do share!
I doubt you can though, sorry not trying to take a jab but I think a few of us would have read these studies by now if they existed given a lot of us either work in or have worked in UX and UI within industry, whether from a design, management or implementation point of view experience.
