In case anyone is insterested, I just saw that Godot 2.0 is released. Godot is an open source game engine and development environment somewhat like Unity, some say better than Unity when it comes to 2D. And of course its free and open source, so thats a big plus.
I would say that in some corner cases Unity is useless. Sure it may provide a solution to a majority of problems, but when performance, for example, is the ultimate goal - you may lose.
Also the pipeline is a little bit weird and the code is bound to game objects - not always you would want to have this that way.
About Cities: Skylines - it’s really impressive they did this with general purpose game engine.
In my place there’s a saying: if something is for everything - it’s actually for nothing (it’s useless due to it’s bloat).
This happens to be true to some degree.
I personally like doing things hand-crafted to the most fine detail, but there are also times, when I like things just out of the box.
More about Unity is that - if you start a project with it - you are bound to the engine. This makes you also bound to the producers because you are dealing with a software, which is proprietary.
This may feel uncomfortable.
But in the end the result matters, not the engine - if you made something that’s fun and doesn’t lag on every click/touch - you’re done.
Unity performance might not be the best but it still probably better than most of the home brew engines. Unity use industry standard occlusion culling system Umbra which is really hard to match with your own solution. It’s also has all sorts of Frustum culling, static/dynamic batching etc. On CPU side you might have bit more struggle.
Programmers rarely can cope without artists no matter what the tool you use to make game.
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That’s true indeed. I just noticed one of my favorite games (Nuclear Throne) is actually made using Game Maker. And it’s really, really good. Not good as in look-at-my-awesome-engine-that-is-boring-as-hell-good but fun-good. Discussions like these usually boil down to viewpoints based on making fun games and those based on making awesome engines. Both are fine things to do.
IMO far too many of us have wasted too long making engines and not games. My productivity output is measured in the games i release and how well they sell. Not how good or if anyone likes my code in that game.
And in other news i finally got Unity to work on 2 different computers, but simple hello world game only works on one >:| . Both jME and Unity import our art from blender about the same. Unity will be more “push button” for deployment, but well that is such a small thing so far down the road…
Unity is a bit of a standard. Getting a “job” later is easier if you used unity.
If unity doesn’t work, your boned. Well with OS ones you can at least hack the crap out of it. In fact jME is quite well written, i was able to go over most of the source and understand it in less than a day.
In Unity you have to do thing the Unity way. For better or for worse.
Personally I don’t see clear winners here. Given a set of parameters for 2 different projects, and any of the “free” engines could be your best choice.
But writing your own is always the wrong choice IMO. Oh and yea i have done it myself as well.
@princec I disagree, I have yet to see value in the thread. You can see numerous examples of unity not being “shit” with some quick searching (as well as it looking terrible). Anybody here can see what unity is and once you’ve worked with it for more than a few minutes can tell a number of pros and cons it has as a tool.
We don’t need this topic, and we definitely don’t need it presented in such a manner.
I’ve only dabbled with Unity really. I’m more interested in graphics and low level systems programming and so I’ve tried to avoid using it in the past. As time goes on, I’ve appreciated it more, even if I don’t really use it.
What I appreciate…
- Low entry barrier.
- Excellent editor performance and UI.
- Broad range of assets available.
- Excellent documentation.
- Excellent and smooth content pipeline.
What I dislike mostly comes down to C#, class/OOP based languages, and component architectures (I need more experience here).
I would opt to learn UE4 instead of Unity if I could, but it’s far too performance demanding, and it’s interface seems incredibly bloated and space consuming.
Further than that, I would opt to code from scratch rather than use an engine. I personally value performance and flexibility over development time and ease.
Many others will hold more value on development efforts, and that’s perfectly fine, in which case engines become a better tool. Many good games might not exist without those people.
My favourite Unity game at the moment is Block N Load.
I think the biggest impact on improving what we see could be made with the release of higher quality learning resources from experienced developers.
Many resources cover the same topics over and over again, rarely adding anything new. Many display blatantly poor programming practices. Many never get finished. Many just never answer the questions people are thinking.
I’ve personally only dabbled superficially with Unity, so my opinion isn’t backed up with experience.
I personally feel that, sometimes, using Unity can be overkill, in that certain games don’t really need all the bells and whistles that Unity offers, and could possibly be better off using a different tool.
For example, if you are going to make a standard sprite-based JRPG, RPG-Maker is probably a better fit (haven’t used it either though, so just using it as an example).
What really worries me, as has been mentioned by others, is to end up with Unity (or any other engine) being the “standard”, and thus forcing the “unity way” into everything, specially if said standardization is based on popularity rather than usefulness (wouldn’t surprise me if that’s Unity’s business plan).
As has been repeated from the start of the thread, Unity is just a tool and must be regarded as such.
But hey, just the opinion of someone without much experience anyway. 
With my experience, there just needs to be one standard library for windows which is fully extendable. That’s why I love Lua so much. I don’t want things to be compiled and obfuscated to the point of no return. I’d love an open source, readable OS in an editor mode - one that anyone can decompile at any time to change anything or implement new things.
That’s a dream though.
You only need Java and Lua to be happy with everything a computer has to offer. I have yet another project I am going to do in the future. Probably once I am 40, like another project I want to do - make my own language using assembly to machine code. I actually have no idea how to do this as I stated elsewhere. I just know the theory of assembly.
I’ll probably take a minimalist linux and study the hell out of it. As long as it fits my purposes, I am good.
It’s about time we got a Lua driven OS. We’ve had python.
Thanks for the heads-up Spasi.
I thought this link was their CLion project but it wasn’t.
Cheers!
If someone wanna 3D engine, why you do not use JMonkeyEngine? Why do you want to switch to C# or so if you have engine in Java? :o
Many people don’t just know one language, “switching” usually isn’t a problem because languages are fairly easy to pick up if you know what you’re doing. Not to mention C# has some sweet syntactical sugar that I love using.
And I’ve never used JME, but if I had to guess it’s probably not as powerful/complete as Unity.
You pick right tool to right problem. If you narrow your tool scope just to ones that use your flavor of the month language then you aren’t really looking objectively.
Syntax does not matter in programming, in general. I’m learning Java more than 4 years, but I can’t say that I’m good in Java Platform. I will learn it many year. But I know a lot of programmers who know more than 4 programming languages. All of them can not create something serious or something cool for any platform which they know. 
Maybe your answer is the answer for my old question: “Why JGO is so poor for finished games”…
Anyway I agree about right tool for the right problem.
PS: A lot if us forget about one main thing - Unity used Mono, not C#. Please, keep it in mind.
I didn’t ask a question…
My 2 cents on Unity2d after some tutorials:
- I really like pipeline: creating animations, handling sprite, importing assets… simple and easy
- C# not a really problem. I’m a programmer, not only a Java programmer, I can use it (different thing is to master it!)
- strange solutions: sometimes tutorials make a great job, but I’ve found some problems in following them, mainly because with component architecture, every GameObject can have a script, or logic and in that “logic” I can handle everything. For me is more clear, for example, have Systems, and every system handle a component. I think is because I have to learn more on Unity2d
- webgl, android, ios exporter… in this Unity2d is amazing!
Haha, that’s funny
Cas