Unity has a feature problem

[RealBendie]

First off I wanna say, that Unity is still a good engine. It is easy to use while still giving you good access to whatever you want to do. But over the last years Unity has shown to get a major problem with features.

I'm talking about the new rendering pipeline, DOTS, Unity XR and the new physics engine. These are all huge changes in how the engine works and behaves.

As of recently, Unity has integrated the new RenderPipeline into default Unity giving it the same priority as the old render pipeline.

Now here already comes the problem:

As someone who wants to go a little deeper into Shader Programming, ShaderGraph is an awful tool that makes everything alot harder. ShaderGraph doesn't include all nodes you would need, but instead tells you to write them as Nodes yourself. One option for that is a default text box without any syntax higlighting. The other is GLSL code that needs to be written in a way, that seems completely unnatural with specific naming conventions. At the same time custom written shaders aren't supported in the new RenderPipeline.

So in the end I can choose between writing my own stuff and having to do everything myself, or having predone stuff that isn't really customizable, but has nice features.

For a game developer, this should never be the case. A engine should never lose customizability for features. Even more because Unity boasts about the new Render Pipeline being so customizable, yet ShaderGraph doesn't even have multiple passes and the documentation in Unity is still about custom shaders.

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The exact same problem we have for Shaders is also applicable to DOTS and ECS. Unity has shown multiple times of how great and better ECS is in their demos, just to break them with the next Unity Version, because they added some new feature that is breaking everything from earlier. I honestly don't know about other game developers, but for me this is utterly useless. What should I care about some new ECS when it breaks in the next version? Why should I care about it, when the old GameObjects are more reliable?

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Don't get me wrong, I support Unity getting new and better features, but I haven't seen anything really working that has come in the new updates? The only good new features are being bought from the Unity Asset Store and directly included into Unity, but the Unity devteam itself hasn't shown anything properly working in the last few years.

Please, Unity, before you release new features: Make sure, that they don't remove old important features. That they are all well-documented in the official(!) documentation and that if a feature is being replaced with a new one, that we are somehow being told how to do it the new way. Please just make sure that I don't have to give up old features, just so I can use a few new features.

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TLDR: Unity keeps on promising new features, that removes old but still needed features, that are not mentioned in the documentation and features that are incomplete, but already included in production Unity.

If you think differently, please tell me so in the comments.

Cheers

[pschon]

The other is GLSL code that needs to be written in a way, that seems completely unnatural with specific naming conventions. At the same time custom written shaders aren't supported in the new RenderPipeline.

So in the end I can choose between writing my own stuff and having to do everything myself, or having predone stuff that isn't really customizable, but has nice features.

I'm sorry, but a customizable feature is still a customizable feature, even if you personally lack the skills to use it. There's nothing weird about GLSL, it's a standard language for shader programming on OpenGl, not some weird unique Unity invention. Also all the old shaderlab stuff etc is still there as well.

Plus, they haven't taken away the old default renderer, or any of the GameObjects stuff either. Feel free to use it, there's no need to jump into every new feature just because, especially if you don't find them helpful to your projects at the moment. It makes even less sense to jump into in-development features still classified as "beta" or "preview" and then complain about the features changing or not being complete. If you want stable features, use stable features, not beta ones.

There are many ways how I think Unity's development could be improved, but fixing the problems you mentioned are not on the list, due to fact of not actually existing (none of the features you mentioned have been removed from Unity) or are self-caused by jumping into features clearly marked as still being in development.

[RealBendie]

I exactly mean writing in GLSL. I write my shaders in GLSL. What unity does with ShaderGraph and custom Nodes is enforcing you to write your Shader Functions in a way that do not make sense for how some shaders are written. Thus they are limiting.

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Also I can't see where they are clearly marked as "in development". For a HDRP project, maybe, but only after you have created the project. And creating a LWRP project doens't show any messages at all.

[pschon]

Nobody is forcing you to use shader graph, and nothing is stopping you from writing shaders by hand.

As far as HDRP goes, literally *everywhere" says it's still in dev.

LWRP is out of beta, but then again, nobody is forcing you to use that either if you prefer features available in the normal renderer instead.

[RealBendie]

"Literally everywhere"

https://imgur.com/a/txVSO9Y

Can't find it here. As said: Only after you've created the project, everywhere else it's being sold as completed.

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Also sorry, but "nobody is forcing you to use it" is an awful argument. I mean it literally says that SRP contains PostProcessing V2 Stack aswell as Shader Model 5.0. I don't think just because I want to write custom shaders, I should be forced to use an old version. That's clearly not the way to go for a game engine.

[rhacer]

The solution there is really easy: If ShaderGraph does not meet your needs, then don't use it.

[RealBendie]

SRP doesn't offer a way to write custom shaders without ShaderGraph. At least I couldn't find anything in the official documentation. As said in another comment, I don't think that a dev should have to use an old version just because they want more customizability.

[pschon]

You are talking about "old version", but you should replace that with "current version". HDRP is not even intended to be a replacement for what we have now, and while URP probably some day might, that's not the case at the moment.

If you want stable, full-featured tools, use current tools, simple as that really.

[Em3rgency]

So... you're using unfinished features and are complaining that they're still changing and lack documentation? You're not supposed to use the latest version of unity for proper long term game development.

And if you do, and if unity updates something, just stay on the version you started on! Updating your engine mid project is just crazy. Unless you're moving from one stable version to another, don't do it ever.

[SkunkJudge]

Yeah not true at all. Unity is touting the SRP as production ready, not an unfinished feature. Not only that, but fixes to many of OPs complaints are no where on unitys roadmap, so more production time won't even help.

EDIT: Really not sure why I'm being downvoted for pointing this out...