I always whine and complain about Unity but now’s the time to show some love. We upgraded from 2022.3 to 6.3 here’s how it went:
Zero actual errors while upgrading
%10-15 performance gain just by upgrading editor version, what a pleasant surprise!
New low level physics 2d API is insanely fast compared to old Box2d v2. If your game is physics heavy you MUST make the switch. Implementing it low level also forces you into proper architecture
Build starts up very fast compared to 2022.3
Unity Hub boots up pretty fast and has better UX now
I see people hesitating to upgrade from 2022.3 because before 6.3, version upgrades led to slower editor and build times. This is absolutely not the case this time. Great job Unity team!
Without Unity I wouldn’t have my current job, so yeah, I appreciate it! I haven’t actually used Unity 6 a single time, so I can’t speak for or against either side in that regard.
The appreciation thread has turned into a holy war thread. Lads, come on - could we put this honorable duty aside, at least in this thread?
I also want to say a BIG THANK YOU to the Unity team. I accidentally stumbled upon Unity in 2017, and it literally changed my life. I started working in the game development industry without any previous programming experience, and, more importantly, I started prototyping and building my own games.
Over all these years, the engine has been remarkably stable, and I have almost never experienced any major issues.
I took the liberty to clean up the thread. Several posts here were reported as inappropriate, so I removed all that are essentially off topic. If you want to continue the heated conversation, either create a separate thread or use a PM channel
Not to downplay Unity’s role in the Indie explosion, but for completeness sake there’s a few other factors to consider, too.
Like the explosion wouldn’t have happened without Steam Greenlight in 2012 and the mobile market, which in its first decade was dominated by lightweight 2d engines like cocos2d while Unity was slow to embrace 2D tooling (tilemaps were finally added in 2017). There was also GameMaker (2000-today) sparking a first wave of 2D indie games for less tech savy developers.
What really built the universe was developer interaction. You could and can sell what Unity is lacking, so the Unity Asset Store created a whole new D2D (developer-to-developer) market.
I like posts like this because a lot people underestimate the amount of joy and motivation being told thank you and being told how much small changes help.
Honestly for those that don’t know a lot of the actual devs that make the Unity Engine are very friendly and are always welcoming when giving advice to people. The entire 2D team, specially the 2D Physics/Tilemap devs, the UI Toolkit team, and the URP team have always been real open about talking with devs.
Note obviously don’t just spam their DMs without asking first, but they have been very open to showing off their own side projects within NDA allowances, aka don’t ask them anything that might be NDA, but they got some fun cool projects they are almost always glad to show off.
I mean they will even work with you to solve engine bugs for engine patch releases. Example group of devs that have helped me personally would be and sorry for the ping, but I want to show appreciation for the devs that have helped me out a lot. Below is just a small amount of the official Unity staff that helped me in the last year alone for crashes and bug reports while giving advice on new features. There are a ton more from URP and Input System team as well. Special thanks to all of them honestly.
@MelvMay - 2D Physics who has a lot of really cool GitHub repo demos for people to go through. This man has helped me from Unity 6.3 alpha 3 all the way to 6.7 alpha 2 and thanks him, I have a custom multithreaded and burst compiled Physics 2D toolkit that builds on CoreCLR already for multiple games.
@masayuki-unity3d - Has helped in the very recent past get example and demo scripts shown on Unity’s official YouTube channel to help show off new features. Recently helped fnd 2D animation examples for SpriteBlendShapes.
@martinpa_unity - Unity UI Toolkit dev - Took public feedback on the new Unity 6.6 UI Viewport (not the UI Builder, but something for editing UI Toolkit in sceneview.).
@uDamian - Same as Martinpa - UI Toolkit Dev who listened to feedback for UI Toolkit 6.5 and 6.6 features and even helped me solve a bug I ran into.
@ChuanXin - Helped me for no joke, a six month long crash investigation into Unity Tilemap that started in Unity 6.4 alpha and went into Unity 6.5 beta even.
Indeed up being multiple crashes related to how EntityID for sprites of tiles was being read that ended up leading to SpriteAtlas issues for RefreshTile causing hard crashes on devs computers.
@Venkify - Also helped with Sprite Atlas related issues and corruption amoung sprites in memory during the previous mentioned bug finding spree.
This is vastly improved more even with CoreCLR builds.
Already got three projects on a test branch working with the CoreCLR player builds and the performance in some areas are more than 25% on average across different PC CPUs and GPUs.
Honestly, at this point, I like one thing in Unity. And that’s the people are developing it. I don’t share their optimism, obviously, because they are inevitably subscribed to the corporate BS, but I admire their persistence and that how they are working among these conditions. Damocles and his two handed sword swinging constantly.
So kudos to the developers, even when they aren’t doing what we demand.
Honestly I feel like it is a 50/50 thing for what we think we want or what we actually want, but it is being done behind the scenes without us realizing it is happening. Also somethings we want require a foundation made first before the feature can be made properly with good performance. CoreCLR good example of this.
I see someone enjoys their greek and roman philosophy. Guessing you enjoy reading Cicero’s work and his anedcotal stories. Got to love reading about Dionysius the second and his tyrannical ways. Great example of power and wealth can’t bring happiness.
IDK, I’m in this “Unity business” for more than 10 years now more or less. I’m in the “software business” for 30 and I’m poking around in various levels of software for a little bit over 40 (I learned to read C64 Basic a little bit later than I learned to read). I like to think I know what Iwant. It’s not always the most profitable for Unity, especially because I hate the exploitation of people, I wouldn’t touch the exploitative f2p mobile market with a 60 feet pole and I’m a strong advocate for PC gaming and game preservation and practices. And also, I value humans and it is my strong opinion that generative AI is garbage. No matter how sophisticated it is, simply because art needs human intention and experience. So I understand that their interest most of the time isn’t aligned with mine lately, but still. I demand more desktop-gaming-friendly features, less micro-transactions and AI, because I think that’s important.
Sadly my English is atrociously bad for holding a longer philosophical conversation. I could do that in Hungarian though. I also was raised on the philosophy that you can lose everything in life, except for your good heart, your experiences and the knowledge you gained along the way. I read most of Cicero’s work, but in Hungarian translation.
Anyway, back to the main program of this thread, let’s praise the developers instead and let’s wish they will still work there next week!
At the risk of this thread becoming derailed again, I have to say that you paint a slightly grim picture that simply doesn’t exist. There may be good and bad decisions here and there not unlike every business on the planet but it’s not a “them” vs “us” in any way whatsoever. The conditions are just fine sir!
