Agreed. More than anything, most of us would like to see a shake up of the board. Let’s see some legendary coders on there, let’s see some breakthrough indie developers shown as a consultant. I’d love to see actual representation from people in the trenches on the board who want to see great tools and a better engine that can do great things.
I’ve watched a few talks, they seem well meaning, but they also seem out of touch. I don’t think they really “get” tech. They think the hard part is coming up with a plan that fits the market, what they don’t understand is how volatile and fragile a game engine is, and to mold it into something incredible that can generate money, you have to REALLY respect the tech itself, and how hard it is to get these massive digital environments to do complex things in a usable manner, you can’t just come up with some monetary scheme and fit the engine to it, the best strategy is to come up with an amazing engine, and others will find ways to monetize it, and you can share in those gains.
At the 13 minute mark, you can hear the current chairman of the board kinda admit some fault for the current trajectory of Unity:
At the 40 minute mark they talk about the dangers of a company making too much money purely off of speculative value, which is exactly what drove Unity so far off path.
Overall, I don’t really have faith in these people to know how to shape this engine or to properly prioritize a service of great value to us. It’s not reassuring to see so many people who have never made a game have so much control of the engine’s future. They don’t understand the Unique strengths of the Unity engine. Instead of chasing Unreal’s success in high end graphic tech, they should instead be looking at Roblox. Make an easily used engine that can easily create amazing things, that’s the strength of Unity, and they don’t seem to see that these days.
this may take the cake of the reply of the month. CEO managed to destroy a company, alienate all its client base, create countless dramatic issues for honest workers that had given their passion for this company and for this engine and you are ok and justify his bonus paycheck. Riccitiello is it you? Have nothing better to do all day?
Again, he retired, he didn’t get fired. Are you mad that this is just how companies work, big or small? They can’t just kick him out the door and not pay him what he’s probably legally entitled to through his contract and through law. Hence “entitled”.
I would also like to be entitled to being paid for what I’m owed. That really shouldn’t change no matter how small or large the sum is.
In layman’s terms, he work for company, company pay him. Would you also like to be paid when you work for company? I would.
I’m not justifying it. It’s just the way these things work. I don’t even know why this is something you care about. It’s such a non-issue thing to discuss. Dude made millions. He’ll make some more. It doesn’t change the outcome and caring about it doesn’t make a difference.
Riccitiello isn’t and wasn’t the source of all of Unity’s problems, so there is no point on focusing on him.
It is also the reason why “cut the new guy some slack” is pointless. One person can’t fix Unity’s numerous systemic problems, whatever the position. He said it himself: “business as usual”.
His retiring felt like a PR move. One you could see coming from a mile away.
I’m a little ambivalent towards the state of the Unity editor. Most of the parts I use work well, though definitely acknowledge there are parts that do not for a lot of others.
A lot of the features in newer versions have been useful to me too. But small things like the new context menus being binned for now also lowers one’s confidence. Feels like the constant layoffs are definitely lowering the quality of what’s being developed.
But Godot and other engines aren’t suitable for my project so I’m sticking with Unity.
It’s one thing for stuff to work in the Unity Editor but it’s an entirely different story when you are ready to release your game and you find out that most features that your are using don’t work properly on your target devices
if you stay away from experimental stuff it should work fine.
also for mobile you need to be very careful because there are different devices that don’t implement all the graphic features one expects to have. Unreal has the same issue. On unreal I’ve found that for each version they list the minimum devices specs the engine will work with. I think unity should have this info somewhere. It was hard to find for unreal on their website too.
If you find out that your project doesn’t work on a lot of your players devices you should study this and try to downgrade to a different unity version that has more coverage of the devices your player base use.
I’m talking about stuff like Lens-Flares in URP they work on some android devices, on others they are inverted or not rendered at all. And this is just the tip of the iceberg to be honest.
I don’t agree that we should be responsible for testing standard unity features on a wide array of target devices (not possible for a small team)
the way graphic fails on devices is different than on desktop. on desktop it may fail to start or crash miserable if you ask the GPU to do something it can’t.
on mobile it may still work even if not supported with certain features disabled or strange artefacts, black spots, no textures for certain objects.
then on mobile there is the issue that CPUs may be or are personalized for each device makers. Where a cpu should have a certain graphic feature but instead is missing or underpowered because the device maker asked that from the CPU maker. They do this to cut costs or increase battery power or whatever else. But they don’t tell the user or the developer.
The actual problems are when you’re upgrading to a somewhat newer (but still same year) LTS and some things are (more or less) subtly broken.
So, yeah, you shouldn’t be near a release and then find out things that things don’t work, but the real pain is after release, when you need to update, having to constantly re-check everything you’ve been relying on still works properly. For an editor that has a lot of its feature set marked as legacy / not actively maintained anymore, basic things break a lot more often than they should. (from the top of my head some examples include, animator, old input manager, multithreaded rendering, camera stacking in BIRP)
Will Unity be the same in another 4 years? I’d love to one day read something positive about Unity, but that day is not today, nor it will be tomorrow.
Undoubtedly, there exists a distinction between retiring as a personal decision and being compelled to retire. Don’t you agree? I’m sure that if he had declined the offer, they would have terminated his employment by force. Context is important here.
Have nothing better to do all day?