Unity needs to make a real game so they can dogfood their systems

[frosted]

I find myself constantly regretting using unity components like the input system or cinemachine.

Although like 80% of this stuff is great, there are so many little issues that end up super annoying.

Cinemachine especially, with stuff like it’s collision handling and the camera shake / impact system. Even some of its core systems like the transition system is annoying to work with at times.

The lack of real experience actually using these systems making a game ends up obvious in the bits and pieces that just don’t work as well as they need to in a polished product. The result is that you need to do all kinds of tweeks and hacks to get everything working properly.

Even in things like the input system that are 95% of the way there have issues.

For things that I end up working with pretty deeply like cinemachine I end up just regretting having used it in the first place, as stealing a couple of the good ideas and hand rolling a solution would have been better.

[Mauri]

Introducing Gigaya: Unity's upcoming sample game

Catch a glimpse of our upcoming puzzle-platformer sample game, Gigaya. Gigaya is still in active development, but when it’s done, it will be a free downloadable project designed to help developers learn from its creation process. [Introducing Gigaya, a new sample game | Unity] Learn more about Gigaya in our blog post or visit the Gigaya landing page. A Gigaya deep dive on Twitch Watch our presentation and discussion of Gigaya on Twitch (the presentation starts at the 02:47:37 ti…

GIGAYA (has dev responses inside)

[Murgilod]

Gonna quote myself again because I think it’s worth repeating:

That’s the problem. It doesn’t matter if they eat their own dogfood if they’re not prepared to learn the lessons from it, and Unity has shown time and time again that they are not prepared to learn those lessons.

There is no evidence that the highly expensive (and extremely long) process of making a game will solve any of the problems that have been described. These problems are as much managerial as they are anything else and there’s no reason to expect that this will be anything more than an incredibly long and expensive boondoggle.

This is another problem that could have been solved if Unity had better lines of communications between the thousands of developers using the engine to make games during the development process rather than broad assumptions based on extremely generalized data. I see it like this: Unity making a game is the engine development equivalent of dramatically overengineering a solution that could be solved more effectively with a few lines of code. Sure it seems like it might get the results you want, but if you’re writing 10,000 lines of code to draw a box in the upper left corner of the screen all you’ve really done is written 10,000 lines of code instead of using a UI image.

And, more recently:

Here’s the thing: if they only listen to internal feedback that’s still a massive problem. They’ve had tens of thousands of people using the engine over the years and enough feedback that you could print it all off and fill the Library of Congress. They have been so bad at listening to feedback that they closed off their own dedicated feedback site.

I don’t care what they see as limitations of the engine from an internal standpoint because we have been dealing with the results of that viewpoint for ages now. They need to listen to people who actually use the engine in a production capacity and have for a long period of time, something even a modestly large demo, which this is, will never compare to.

[neginfinity]

@frosted

I find myself constantly regretting using unity components like the input system or cinemachine.

I have suspicion that at some point people will get fed up and either make an opensource repo with half of functionality, or replace unity itself.

Cinemachine, by the way, is … very weird. Feels like 80% of thought and time was spent developing the curve-based camera shake.

[neoshaman]

What’s next for gaming? Trends to expect in 2022 | Unity at GDC 2022

There is no incentive for unity, the market grow and they grow with the market, you become an outliers in the data

[Ryiah]

@frosted

I find myself constantly regretting using unity components like the input system or cinemachine.

I’m the exact opposite. I have used both of those systems within the same project targeting both standalone and consoles and found that my only complaint was an overall lack of good documentation and examples. I found the new Input System to be very good once I had an understanding of how you were supposed to use it.

[koirat]

@frosted

Unity needs to make a real game…

Unity needs to make Unreal game

[Murgilod]

@koirat

Unity needs to make Unreal game

Honestly I think evaluating the competition in this regard would be more effective than using their own engine.

[zombiegorilla]

@Mauri

https://discussions.unity.com/t/875861
https://discussions.unity.com/t/875896 (has dev responses inside)

Please use one of these existing threads.
Closed.