I’ve been following the engine battle (Unity vs Unreal) throughout the year 2014…
I must say that I haven’t been disappointed from them (Unreal), release of the source code, fast development iterations, roadmap exposed, Epic / users communication channels via Twitch, and lot of blog entries about what is going to happen next…
On Unity’s side… well nothing much have changed from me to be honest, except maybe the new GUI framework that was already promised years ago…
For 2015 I really hope to see more changes and less promises, cause I think your tool is awesome nevertheless, but you should not take your success for granted too much.
Firstly, there isn’t an ‘engine battle’; Unity Technologies and Epic games haven’t drawn swords and are fighting to the death by combat. We are merely two companies who are releasing gaming technology that aims at relatively different developers and audiences (But there is sometimes an audience overlap).
Secondly, In 2014 the following things happened from Unity:
Announced Unity 5 which has upgraded visual, audio, physics, animation, lighting, 2d physics and “thousands of other improvements” which will be released in due course of it being stable enough and production-ready for a full release.
Open Beta’d Unity 5 for those that have preordered it or subscribe to Unity Pro.
Open Beta’d Unity 4.6 so everyone could try out the new GUI
Released 4.6 with the new UI System.
Released 4.5 which had a ton of bug fixes.
Partnered with Sony, Oculus, Microsoft (And probably some other companies) to collaborate on tools to help developers ship to platforms that those companies provide.
Made Oculus Plugin work with Unity Free.
Announced that WebGL content will be generated in Unity 5.0’s Free Version.
Had a Field Team that has pretty much lived on the road with the purpose of training new Unity developers, meeting game studios, helping out at game jams and pretty much talking to anyone and everyone about how they can make content with Unity. Personally, I have attended and presented to 60+ community events in Europe during the year and probably met well over 100 game companies to see what they are making with Unity.
David Helgason stepped down from the CEO position to focus on helping the Unity Community.
John Riccitello has stepped up to the CEO position. He is a pretty awesome guy.
Formed a Sustained Engineering team who aim to push out patch fixes on a very regular basis (about a week apart) for any unplanned last minute bugs that pop up.
Had a constant and regular stream of various blog posts from our engineers, to our community, participating in regular news updates: http://blogs.unity3d.com/
Announced Unity Analytics: to help developers understand how their games are being played by their community.
Announced Unity Ads: So developers can integrate video ads that could generate revenue for their company.
Announced Unity Cloud Build: So developers can automate builds of their games and test/deploy them to devices remotely. Its REALLY fun to use.
Worked more on integrating gameplay recording, and sharing, with Everyplay’s technology.
Held a Cloud Hack Week to try all sorts of other cloud based systems: Unity Blog
Released a Sample Assets package to help out new, and old, developers with prototyping and beginning new game concepts and ideas: Unity Blog
Added more video content to the Unity Learn section: Learn
Ill be honest, I could probably go on and on with about hundred of other things that Unity has done in 2014, and im sure some others will probably chip in with various info.
In terms of 2015, we of course have lots of goals, plans and things in the works; some short-term and some long-term. They’ll be announced in due course once things are aligned in place.
Jeez, guys, that’s all you’ve done? Stop slacking! I heard the UE devs saved the world like five times last year, and killed Satan, AND they’re going to include MMORPG creation tools in UE that will allow a single developer to create a WoW killer with the click of a few buttons!
I demand a cup holder patched into Unity 4.6. Immediately.
Well, that all sounds great, but I’d be willing to bet that Epic does think there is an engine battle and Epic wants to grab Unity’s very large market share. I’ve used both engines, and I personally prefer using Unity. I do think Unity would benefit from taking the Unreal Engine threat seriously, though.
If you’re trying to say that “comprised of” is wrong, then no, it’s generally accepted usage.
This is disappointing, and something you should definitely change in 2015. Selling tickets to engine developer gladiatorial combat would certainly fund Unity 6 (assuming there are any survivors).
I might avoid it if I was in a room full of bad-tempered old-school grammar nazis who are carrying sharp knives, but for a semi-informal infographic I wouldn’t be concerned.
I do read the blog, regularly actually, I just get surprised a bit more with what’s going on on Unreal Engine’s blog to be honest…
You claim to be the biggest game development tool on the market… then why is the development of the UE4 just seems to be more serious and to offer much more regularly update than Unity then ?
Second point I disagree with people saying that there is no engine battle… with UE4 already deploying on mobile consoles and also HTML5 (which you are guys are trying so hard to achieve with IL2CPP) I would say there is a pretty serious battle going on IMHO…
Don’t get me wrong though I love using Unity in my work, I’m just frustrated at how slow things go sometimes, like for the current .NET version for instance…
While that list is cool and the gang, and I am sure you’ve been waiting to dump it out here as soon as a topic presented itself, that is a list of what Unity the COMPANY has done, much less so the engine.
Before everyone jumps all over that, yes, there are Engine specific things in there, but that list is 75% the company.
CEO stepping down?
Launched a Sim Vis Showcase on the website?
New Unity Branding?
New Partners?
etc…
That is not to say these are not good things, but I think the OP context was centered around the actual product, Unity the game engine, not Unity the company.
Hehe, I actually typed that list up after reading OP’s initial poster at 1am; the girlfriend wasn’t happy that I woke her up so that I could do some forum posting…
The reason why I listed all of the things, including ones outside of the engine’s developers is because Unity Technologies now offers alot more than just an Engine/IDE; we offer the asset store, analytics options, gameplay sharing (Everyplay), game ads, community events, free tutorials and training… the list goes on. Whilst none of these things are results of our core R&D team’s efforts, they are all things that Unity does that ends up channeling back into the core engine and benefits it. For example, we collaborate and partner-up with people like Oculus and Microsoft so that Unity users can benefit from free development tools and better hardware support. Which i’m hoping is what our users would want?
Im not really sure where you get the idea that Unity isn’t serious or active in development; for most of the year we have been releasing patch releases to the latest version of the engine almost every week and since about August we have been releasing weekly Unity 5.0 beta releases which has TONS of new features and content in it.
Epic Games can view an ‘engine war’ however they want; after all they are a completely different company to Unity Technologies.
On the other hand, at Unity we are interested more in advancing the tools that developers have and want and we also look for ways that we can fit the gaps and take the pain out of a developer’s workflow (Unity Cloud Build), understand how their game players are experiencing their content (Unity Analytics), integrate gameplay recording and sharing for discovery (Everyplay) and give them easy integration for ways for them to make a bit of extra money to pay the bills (Unity Ads). All bundled into one API, one SDK and one engine.
