all i’ve wanted from unity co for the past few years is that they’d hold off on either personally launching missiles into a children’s hospital or appointing henry kissinger as a brand ambassador for just as long as it takes me to finish up whatever i’ve been working on and i’m sad to say this tenuous social contract is looking less realistic every day
fortunately good 3d gamemaking alternatives are still out there in the market
Both Unity and Unreal are racing to become the omnitool of all computer production. Unreal is a lot more constrained but what it does it does much smoother.
Getting back into Unity this year, it’s still a very good project, but they’re exactly where they were five years ago – split between trying to compete with Unreal at the high-end, serving the student and hobbyist market, delivering mobile software (this seems like their biggest competitive strength), and now all these previs and realtime rendering efforts for architecture and medical imaging and everything computers.
It’s still really nice to work in because the fundamental decisions remain very good but all their functional extensions are just a bit too shabby and limited.
“Jail isn’t real” I assure myself as I use Gameobject.find for the 200th time
ooh, I’m getting mad just thinking about you,
doing that
I barely play unity games because they all feel like mods of the same game. I don’t know how to express it. especially if there’s platforming. menu games/games where I’m not moving around a lot can distract me from THIS IS UNITY but there’s something so egregiously UNITY about unity games that I can’t shake the way I can with other game engines I guess. it’s floaty? all the objects feel like they’re full of air? the surfaces are too smooth? I don’t know but I hate it
GREAT TRIAL AND ERROR
I guess it’s a remake because they couldnt get any of their old music back? everything else is exactly the same so if you don’t have a 360 this doesn’t seem terrible
having seen so many situations in the engines I work with where the only way to get a reference to a level object is via naming it in the editor, then doing a “Find” routine for the name, I sorta gave up on the concept of “good code” especially when my other methods for making references in unity would frequently break on scene changes.
since I know it’s breadth first I keep the top level scene hierarchy fairly limited. it works. It doesn’t break. I dont have a noticeable performance hit. I think the main problem with it is that it’s generally reliable and easy, it becomes far too tempting to use.
I once used this in a shipped game on a job, management wanted to resize a UI element and I spent weeks trying to size it any other way or get a reference to it, since it was using some hacked up UI code that someone who left the company wrote. After sometime I just used Gameobject.Find to get the reference and, well, what do you know.
I want to complain about people mindlessly going off the sample code, because there’s no good reason to use the code and values they give you
But I can’t craft a diamond-sharp argument about why I don’t customize the garbage collection and rendering
BUT I WANT TO because there’s no excuse for any Unity game to really look or feel like any other
I think it’s in part a trick of perspective. Whenever a Unity game doesn’t fall into that trap of being too close to default engine settings/sample code, it’s easy not to realize it’s even a Unity game. So the idea of “Unity engine game” winds up bringing to mind only the worst examples.
As a counterexample, Return of the Obra Dinn was made with Unity for instance.
I mean I think, much like Unreal, there is a particular look to the default lighting setup, and without having dedicated lighting people or going for a particular stylised shader, those bits don’t tend to get customised much, which definitely lends a “sameness” to games even across art styles
very little these days makes me think “oh fuck i need to make a game”
but this is one of those things
All the games we’ve been group playing lately someone (me) will join and look at it for 10 seconds and go “this is unity isn’t it?”
yeah it’s painful!
i feel good when I show off the game and someone is like “did you use Unreal for this”
And you say “No, it’s Maker4D”
the big unity tell for me is when the game is massively resource intensive for no real reason
if you made a ps1 throwback it should run well on the shittiest laptops
adventure game studio on the other hand, well thats just perfect
idk if this is true but I always assumed that it was because everyone is just following the same tutorials and stuff
there is a “unity starter kit” that includes 1st and 3rd person controllers, as well as a default material that goes on everything, and I feel like that’s the source of the “default unity look” because it looks good enough, and the values are generally “good enough” so that’s typically what ships with smaller projects
