Sunday 18 December 2016

Annoyed about Unity

Disclaimer: This post is what I call a "weighted opinion" post, where I can choose to subjectively value certain shortcomings of Unity over areas where it excels, because the areas where Unity excels do not align with my own skills and beliefs.

The Unity editor is one of the most popular visual editors in use in the indie game industry. I've even seen some (unconfirmed) reports that No Man's Sky uses the Unity engine.

Unfortunately, despite its somewhat misleading nomenclature, Unity is anything but unifying when it comes to multiple operating systems.

I've tried to use the Unity editor on Linux, but unfortunately it crashed every 3 minutes or if I right clicked on a drop down menu(I'm not even joking, this happened constantly). Not to mention the problems that Windows developers have when compiling for Unity, half the time it doesn't work despite the fact that it claims to have functionality for cross-compiling.

Also, Unity2D is awful, as someone who has tried, it's just awful. I spent about 3 hours one day and a couple more hours the next trying to get it to do really anything that I wanted it to do, and with minimal luck. Of course it didn't help that it crashed so often. Did I mention the crashing?

Godot is the natural successor to Unity. I've seen nothing that Unity can do that Godot can't. Unless you're doing something hyper-experimental which somehow can't be accomplished in Godot, there really is no reason to use Unity over Godot apart from the fact that Unity is the "industry standard".

It doesn't help that Unity is proprietary software (which I'm sure is why it's so awful on Linux) so modifying it is considerably harder than it could be. Godot is free software(MIT license), so modifying this isn't so bad(if you know how, at least).

Also, Unity is considerably heavier, has even sloppier built-in assets(ragdoll physics, UI presets, etc) and is just overall awful to work with. It has an ugly UI, too.

Unfortunately, Unity still dominates the indie market even still. So many people haven't bothered to learn Godot because they know Unity already, and all the employers know Unity. This results in it being kinda difficult to get employed using Godot because it has such a tiny market share.

Oh well, I suppose that the option of trying to become a one-man development team is also open. Wish me luck, it's only getting harder and harder to compete in such an overfilled market.

2 comments :

  1. Godot uses a custom scripting language with a built in editor.. No thanks.

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    1. The custom scripting language is very similar to Python so it's not a massive hassle to learn, but I understand if you're afraid of some unnecessary overhead because of this.

      However, you can use primarily C++ if you really dislike GDScript so I don't see this as too much of an issue, though I haven't tried actually doing that so I can't speak to its effectiveness. Thanks for reading!

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