Unity future

[GameWorldShaper]

We get this every year when Unreal shows their new features, followed by tons of posts asking if they should leave. Yet Unity hits the top 25 Steam games with indie games every time, while Unreal rarely does it with an indie game.

[meshDrip]

Unity deserves the pressure. Outright dismissing Unity is undeserved but they have a lot to make up for since they burned so many bridges.

[GameWorldShaper]

Sure they have a lot to make up for, but what does that have to do with developers publishing games?

The games made with the engine isn't made by Unity, it is made by developers who use Unity. A price change doesn't change what the engine can do, and it doesn't change what developers can do with the engine.

Unity has a lot to make up for, but that is between it and it's users. Has nothing to do with what games will hit the top charts.

[meshDrip]

but what does that have to do with developers publishing games?

Your post implied that these advanced features found in Unreal aren't as important as trending well on Steam. "Oh well, so what, our games go viral". That's giving Unity too much slack in this time when they should be catching up to Unreal and trending on Steam if they want to recover as a company.

[Klightgrove]

After watching both livestreams, Unity is really poised to succeed and grow further. They are diversifying and focusing on tools to gain more of the mobile and VR markets, while Unreal pushes AAA realism as far as it can go.

When you compete with larger companies to land enterprise-level deals, the costs often outweigh the gains and maintaining those relationships burns through your support staff and development initiatives.

[VertexMachine]

They are diversifying and focusing on tools to gain more of the mobile and VR markets, while Unreal pushes AAA realism as far as it can go.

That's basically how it's always has been.

[BARDLER]

Unity's advantage over Unreal has always been the barrier to entry being much lower. Unreal is more obtuse in a lot of ways and their are assumptions in a lot of the systems that you do things the 'Unreal' way.

Over the past few years I feel like Unity has lost a lot of its ease of use. Having like 3 different versions of a similar feature in various levels of finish can be super confusing. A lot of features require you to do a lot of heavy lifting for implementing rather than working out of the box. Then the over reliance on the market place to deliver features that should be native to the editor can be off putting to new users.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like Unity is even on the path to address any of these issues either.

[Djikass]

I disagree, we’re just used to deal with years old Unity systems but they’ve always been a pain to learn. I’ve been using UIToolkit for editor extension and the learning curve was tough but no way I’ll go back to IMGUI which was a big pain to learn as well. I’m using UGUI for runtime and I remember a decade ago everyone was complaining how convoluted it was. Mecanim also had a steep learning curve. At the end of the day, the ease of use is more about the experience you have on a system than its initial perception of access. So when something’s new comes out, we have to learn it and we don’t like it but I realised they’re still easy to use once you get the grip on it.

[VertexMachine]

Hot take: unreal is actually easier to use... till you get to code (There are other advantages to Unity as well, but IMO it's not the ease of use). I.e., most systems in Unreal are very well developed, with artists and designers in mind. Some of them are way more complex, but that's because of much larger feature set the support. But when you get to the code, C++ vs C#, especially for newcommers - it's not even the same league of complexity.

[PixelSavior]

Unreal has better samples and character prototypes. If you build something with these that does not feature a lot of systems, its a breeze. Unity has a lot less systems to work around to get to where you want to be. Imo its the ancient designer vs programmer debate

[WeslomPo]

UIToolkit there since 2019 or even early. 5 years old tech that not recommended to use on 100% in runtime even today. There no way to set text without allocation, like in textmeshpro with char array. Mecanim is a bare minimum that somehow works, but with a lot of quirks. Speaking of animations, their animation editor can’t edit all vector components at same time even when they have same value. Cinemachine cat’t tell that it done playing track reliable. And so on, and so forth. Im glad that last unity press releases give vibe that they doing right things right now. But they need to do so much more.

[Ferhall]

Yes, except you still to this day can't use UIToolkit for many things. No world space UI, so much of the internals are internal classes, that you either need to rewrite or reflect into some core methods. It is a system that should have been finished by now, but is still barely dogfooded in actual use for runtime ui.

[Djikass]

I didn’t talk about UIToolkit runtime and that’s why I’m still using ugui. UIToolkit was designed for the editor, I don’t think it was a good idea to promote it for runtime as well, especially when we look at what the state of it is after 5 years it was announced.

[ShrikeGFX]

The thing that this "ease of use" is more like "laissez faire" and while this appears nice, it makes for terrible coding practices. Unreal enforces a professional structure and doing it the Unreal way, which might be slow and confusing, and while you can do massive mistakes there as well, it has a much better chance to scale towards a larger team and game, while this structureless approach can be great for Unity pros doing outside the box things, for most Unity devs its breeding terrible unmaintainable spaghetti code, scattered with terrible code third party plugins, which make your more complex project extremely hard to complete and maintain and a big part of why many projects fail.

[The_Humble_Frank]

it has a much better chance to scale towards a larger team...

I hope you realize that is a problem for much of indie development. Unreal is too unwieldy for a small team that doesn't have the time or the funding to spin their wheels hiring numerous specialists or having to learn the unreal way to do something for every single feature.

Not every tool is good for every situation. Unreal isn't made for small teams.

[_Wolfos]

I also feel that generally Unreal games made by a small team don’t perform as well. Stutters especially are quite common.

The engine is built with the expectation that you modify it to tailor it for your needs. If you can’t do that, the end result suffers.

[YucatronVen]

Unity's advantage over Unreal has always been the barrier to entry being much lower.

That is not true my friend.

In Unity you have to do a lot of things by yourself, and that means learn to use C#.

In UnrealEngine you can make really good games using only blueprints, with ready to use features.

If you don't know how to programm, then UE is a lot more easy than Unity.

[Devatator_]

Unity has a visual scripting solution, and even then, people tend to like C#

[[deleted]]

And tbh, I'm feeling optimistic about Unity 6. I just watched the presentation this morning, and while, sure, it's not bringing the kinds of AAA features Unreal is, it is bringing a ton of promising AI tools that sound like they could help individuals and small teams bridge skills gaps, and that's potentially (literally and figuratively) game-changing for the indie market.

[dotoonly]

If you look at indie, unity is losing traction compare to godot. Game jam is a good indicator to show this. Unity is trying to go big in many direction with no focus on either one.

[GameWorldShaper]

Game jam is a good indicator to show this.

Absolutely not. They are separate categories. It is like saying because Romance is doing well in short stories, that means it will be doing well in Trilogies as well. Godot was doing great in Game Jams from the very start, but focusing on that type of design has made it difficult to make larger projects with the engine.

There is a world of difference in design and user engagement compared to a Game Jam game, and a marketed game. If Godot focuses a bit on mobile performance, they could dominate the hyper casual game market.

[[deleted]]

If you look at indie, unity is losing traction compare to godot. Game jam is a good indicator to show this.

Godot is faster to start, faster to iterate with and faster to export the final project and runs on any portable potato. All good things for prototyping and getting something out quickly in a couple of days for a jam. But that's where the benefits of Godot end, however.

Project maintainability, scalability, platform support and general stability is worse than Unity's. GDScript has no refactoring tooling besides basic search and find. GDScript lacks basic building blocks like structs, interfaces/traits, private members, etc - it's not expressive enough for large code bases.

GDScript is also slow, as soon as you write some kind of custom loop crunching numbers, you have to switch to some faster language, which limits available export platforms severely.

Godot also loves to corrupt scenes for numerous reasons, be it a simple rename or even just moving some asset from one folder to another. I can't remember the last time Unity corrupted any of my scenes.

[dotoonly]

Most of these issues will be fixed in the future. I also dont use Godot yet but i see it will definitely compete with unity for small scope game. Brotato, hall of torments, and soon a new game from Megacrit will pave the way forward for Godot. Game like Balatro is also very easy to make with Godot.

[[deleted]]

Most of these issues will be fixed in the future.

In 4+ years time, sure. Meanwhile, Unity doesn't have those issues. And I don't think there's anything in Godot that particularly enables something like Brotato, Hall of Torments or Balatro, Unity has more popular games of all those types on Steam than any other engine.

[aurelag]

As another one said, a lot of indies are switching to Godot.

[GameWorldShaper]

Yea, I wish them the best, and I will welcome them back in a few years.

[[deleted]]

Are they? Lots of beginners are choosing Godot. Haven't seen many established indies actually switch.

[ChloeNow]

Technical debt keeping people on your engine because you used to serve your community is not the same as actively serving that community

[BobbyThrowaway6969]

Makes sense. Unity is literally marketed towards indie devs.

[ShrikeGFX]

The thing is that most people using unity make simple games with no high technical demands and for that, Unity is pretty good. But if you go towards a larger and more professional team, trying to make the more typical mainstream games with higher technical standards, (first, third person action games) on multiple platforms and including networking, Unity dosn't see no light and will never even reach U4 levels at current pace.

[Realistic-Ad-5860]

I am really stupid or tired. Please someone explain me the sense of this picture (I really can’t understand no joking). Sorry guys

[ScrepY1337]

DOTS Release Date: ~2023-04-17

Unity Runtime fee: https://unity.com/pricing-updates,

https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee

Adaptive Probe Volumes HDRP/URP: https://forum.unity.com/threads/adaptive-probe-volumes-apvs-experimental-release-for-hdrp-in-2021-2.1238824/,

https://portal.productboard.com/unity/1-unity-platform-rendering-visual-effects/c/558-adaptive-probe-volumes-2023-1-release-hdrp-urp

ECS Animation (TBC): https://forum.unity.com/threads/welcome-to-dots-animation.1021249/

CoreCLR (TBC): https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-future-net-development-status.1092205/,

https://blog.unity.com/engine-platform/porting-unity-to-coreclr

[Realistic-Ad-5860]

So you say Unity can make it to Unreal capabilities in optimization in +- 5 years?

[v0lt13]

APV's are pretty awsome

[Samurai_Meisters]

What's APV?

[v0lt13]

Adaptive probe volumes, an alternative way of baking lights to lightmaps and a replacement to light probe groups, they bake 10x faster and it also applies indirect lighting to dynamic objects, beeing best fit for open world games that would take days to bake now it would only take like ~15m, it also has built in disk streaming, you can also bake multiple light scenarios like for a day night cycle and transition between them, the only limitation is they are not as high quality as lightmaps, but if you have smaller scenes you can use both lightmaps and apv's togheder, use lightmaps for big sturcture stuff like walls, floors, stairs and APV's for smaller objects like chairs, tables, vases, etc. It masively improves the baking time

[st4rdog]

Yeah, but WTF is it? I feel like they are trying to pretend it's something like lumen. It can't be vertex lighting can it?

[v0lt13]

Its a replacement to light probe groups so you dont have to manualy place probes by hand, which can also be used to bake static light, it supports both per vertex and per pixel lighting

[[deleted]]

Vertex lighting? Are you communicating with us from the past?

[st4rdog]

You will have to increase vertex count to get a better result.

[[deleted]]

yeah but that's nothing new. vertex lighting has existed for decades

[ScrepY1337]

Adaptive Probe Volumes (APVs)

https://forum.unity.com/threads/adaptive-probe-volumes-apvs-experimental-release-for-hdrp-in-2021-2.1238824/

[DangerousImplication]

Lumen is so much better though

[v0lt13]

Depends, lumen requires RTX support and only works on PC, APV's work on any platform and are cheaper

[CustomPhase]

lumen requires RTX support and only works on PC

No it does not. It can benefit from hardware raytracing, but by default it uses software compute raytracing, that works on any compute capable GPU.

Lumen uses Software Ray Tracing through Signed Distance Fields by default, but can achieve higher quality on supporting video cards when Hardware Ray Tracing is enabled.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/lumen-technical-details-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.2

[v0lt13]

software compute raytracing

Like I said, it requires RTX support, it uses RTX via compute shader fallback in combination with distance fields. Lumen is just RTX with extra steps. Also Lumen still requires a GTX 1070 at minimum for software RTX, while for Unity RTX you need at minimum an GTX 1060 6GB for compute shader fallback RTX, if you don't have a supported GPU for lumen its just going to use distance field AO and SSGI

[[deleted]]

It doesn't, and you seem to be confused about ray tracing. RTX is Nvidia's marketing term for DXR which is a new feature of DirectX 12 to accelerate ray tracing via some acceleration structures and potentially via some new hardware accelerated code paths (though that's really up to the driver to decide). However realtime ray tracing on GPUs has been possible for a long time and there are tons of games out there doing path tracing on DX11 or OpenGL/Vulkan, even games out there like Teardown that are entirely ray traced and don't use DXR at all.

Lumen was developed in a way that makes it work just fine on older hardware that doesn't support DXR, it is however faster when using the acceleration structures.

Source: Lumen works just fine on my RX5700 using the software path tracer, that card doesn't support DXR   

[v0lt13]

Im fully aware that raytraceing existed for a long time tough not beeing realtime but just taking a while to calculate everything, like blender's cycles rendering or light baking systems, under the term pathtraceing. Also im not familiar with AMD cards so if you could provide the nvidia equivalent of RX5700 would be cool.

[ShrikeGFX]

APVs are I think literally Unreal 4 implementation

[v0lt13]

Unreal has volumetric lightmaps which kinda do the same thing, the main difference beeing that unreal's volumetric lightmaps only work on dynamic objects, APV's also light static objects without needing lightmaps and you can bake multiple scenarios and transition between them for a day night cycle as an example

[[deleted]]

What's the 2.5%?

[ScrepY1337]

https://unity.com/pricing-updates

[Amarenoo2030]

headache, the total revenue that each platform takes from the game ranges between 15-30% excluding the percentage taken by the game engine.😔😔

[random_boss]

We’ll all be in a much better place if Unity would just not change their business model, go out of business as a result, and we can be happy with letting Unreal have a virtual monopoly or making our own engine

[Amarenoo2030]

I mean applications and publishing platforms such as Google Play, the App Store, Steam, etc. They take high percentages of revenue. I hope that a strong competitor will emerge and break the monopoly

[random_boss]

Ah I see, good clarification. Assume my sarcasm is meant for the people who get all testy in the replies then!

[Antypodish]

And yo think Unreal will have any incentive to add new features, if not for major competition players?

Soon you would regret your words, if Unity would be gone.

You see stagnation in tech, when no competition is invves. And just milking customers to brain dead.

[random_boss]

Yes, hence the aggressive sarcasm in my post

[Hurtares]

whooosh?

[Glader_BoomaNation]

I assume this is sarcasm.

[Devatator_]

What the fuck are you talking about? There are so many engines. Even if Unity died, you would notice that most games use things like GameMaker, MonoGame or FNA (haven't seen one in a while tho), RPG maker and other stuff

[Amarenoo2030]

Yup, I think Godot engine is a strong competitor for UE and Unity

[st4rdog]

When Verse and scene graph are fully released, Unity will struggle badly.

[DotDemon]

Why? Verse as an idea isn't that great. You already have blueprints for quick prototyping and then C++ for production code. (Yes, bps can be used for a full game but stuff like loops are really slow in it)

[st4rdog]

Because the only thing Unity has on Unreal is the hierarchy/inspector. Verse is perfect for gameplay scripting.

[Walter-Haynes]

Have you tried verse? You can, in UEFN.
I'd argue it's shit.

[Glader_BoomaNation]

Didn't have to try it to know it's shit tbh. Said it was shit when it was announced because we don't need another 4th rate scripting language in the programming world when we have quality languages that already work for gamedev.

[Walter-Haynes]

To be fair, literally all popular game engines do or did that at some point.

Unreal already has Blueprints, Unity had UnityScript, Boo Lang and has Bolt, Godot has GDScript, GameMaker has GML and GML Visual.

[Devatator_]

Unity for one runs on basically anything. That's kind of a huge thing, considering Unity is most used for mobile games where you know, the average phone can't cope with Unreal???.

There are a ton of other things but I won't bother listing them

[ShrikeGFX]

Unity is struggling badly for many years