I really don't care how Unity is doing

[sinful prawn]

you don't feel like the demand for creative industrial projects is drying up?

i have.

"Just leave it well enough alone"
apple breaks shit too often for that to work, and you know, hololens is dead. it's AVP or bust

it's too bad, i mean this is something i am lamenting

[burnt citrus]

Apple also has the silicon valley need for "growth" and keeps fucking up things.
And I don't particularly care that hololens is dead, I had no intention of using or developing for it when it was alive

[sinful prawn]

lol

well you know what i mean. i am not up to date on meta's VR funding but i don't think it is as generous as it used to be.

[burnt citrus]

And to be honest I'm not even sure what "AVP" even is in this context. Pretty sure you're not talking about the 2004 box office hit Alien Vs Predator

[sinful prawn]

apple vision pro

[burnt citrus]

Ah, another pointless techwank that'll be forgotten in a year or two

[sinful prawn]

i forget if you work on VR stuff

[astral falcon]

even the apple fan bois think vision pro missed the mark

[burnt citrus]

The best way to work on VR stuff is to just treat it like the hardware it is, rather than a platform. Make your thing compatible with SteamVR or OpenXR and just let the hardware providers deal with futzing their special snowflake visor into using it

[astral falcon]

but the issue people were having is spamming the main chat, with something that is not really productive like not really the place to complain about how the company is doing when its just a thead of people asking about usage help

[burnt citrus]

"Hey this doesn't run on my Oculus Quest because it has like half a gig of ram" -> That sounds like a you problem maybe get better hardware

[sinful prawn]

if people don't make money using unity it's really, really bad.

if fortnite became less popular, that would also be really bad

[astral falcon]

sounds like you just got a bone to pick

like i bought a house and a boat with money i made working in games

[burnt citrus]

No VR support, standard render pipeline, pretty sure it's even using UNet for online play since it predates Netcode for GameObjects

[astral falcon]

unity was one of the tools i used for half of that career

[sinful prawn]

i mean, i do. i feel like i put a lot of contributions into the ecosystem, and meanwhile unity's FTEs dropped the ball

[burnt citrus]

The engine doesn't make money. The projects do

[sinful prawn]

i'm not the only one

[astral falcon]

when its no longer suited to what i do, i will find a new way

just like i did in the past before unity

[sinful prawn]

genshin impact is a bad trend for the industry. it would be like celebrating arri alexa if its cameras were used to shoot the first successful bollywood movie release in the US. do you see why that is bad? i mean it's a little nuanced, but it boils down to, you don't want it to be all about costs

[burnt citrus]

Remember when the entire tech world was hyping up Ruby On Rails as "The next big thing" and every project ever used it and then spent like billions of dollars hiring talent to gear up into this massive shakeup of the internet infrastructure and then like six months later angular JS came out and they did that all again for that?

[sinful prawn]

more like, if arri alexa were used by a successful tiktokker

[sinful prawn]

this is an interesting example, because chrome is very similar to unity in many respects. a middleware for vendors' shitty APIs. but google has taken a lot more leadership on ad quality and ad networks.

the web frameworks are more akin to asset store assets than to engines.

google is very concerned with how people make money on the web.

[burnt citrus]

I don't actually know what you mean by this.

Genshin Impact is far and away the most successful Unity product ever made and it's using basically bare-bones features that have been in the engine for 20 years plus an external asset or two, which kind of puts a sock in the whole "If Unity doesn't innovate creators are DOOMED!"

[sinful prawn]

i mean, unity is also concerned. it just didnt' execute.

[sinful prawn]

surely you see that that's bad thoughr ight

they are using unity to save money

they develop the game in a low cost country

and most of the money is earned from a mechanic that doesn't leave a lot of room for gameplay innovation, which is all indie developers have

[burnt citrus]

No? Why would it be a bad thing? It shows that the core engine of Unity can be used to create successful products, which if money is your concern, is what should be the case right?

[sinful prawn]

i used to think this way

but all it's showing is like, why bother with doctorpangloss?

why make an original game?

[burnt citrus]

Actually, they're using it for the rapid iteration cycle, being able to churn out content at a frankly absurd pace, leveraging tools like asset bundles and scriptable objects to reconfigure the game's systems into a veritable content machine that can churn out entire continents of gameplay three times a year

[sinful prawn]

i think they have succeeded in monetizing an audience other than US teenage boys, which is also true of roblox

[burnt citrus]

Whether Gacha or Lootboxes are ethical is a completely different discussion. You can make gacha games in any engine. It's not like Unity is providing the framework for that

[astral falcon]

your moving some goal posts, and not really sure where the orignal point was

but will reiterate if its failing part of its audience the best way to combat that is with competition

[sinful prawn]

i guess i am saying that in terms of taking leadership on business models, iron source provided a viable way for an indie game - vampire survivors for example, they are an ironsource customer - that works for a lot of different kinds of games on any platform or audience

[burnt citrus]

Honestly, it's part of why I see "if people don't make money using unity it's really, really bad" as a bad argument. It's pretty obvious that the best way to make money in games is to be exploitative

[sinful prawn]

but they didn't do much with it

[burnt citrus]

So, if money's your goal, make an anime waifu gacha game. No need for VR or HDRP or any of that jazz

[sinful prawn]

i think it is proving my point. genshin impact, their most successful game, is based on product development that happened years ago. it's reinforcing the view that unity development has "frozen"

[wide river]

Or they are just using what works for them?

[astral falcon]

alot of game devs are fairily pragmatic when it comes to tools and often go with if its not broke dont fix it

expecially indies

[burnt citrus]

If you want to use Unity as a form of creative expression, nothing's stopping you. Let's look at the corollary - an absolute labor of love from a small studio that wasn't expecting huge success:

Definitely less than Genshin, but more than enough for a team to coast on for the rest of their lives

So, Unity can make the artistic labors of love, and it can make the industry-shaking monetized slop.

It has the whole spectrum, and it will continue to do that whether it gets Apple Vision Pro support or not

So, who really cares if it hasn't had new features in a while? I'd much prefer they just stuck to one thing and stopped obsoleting perfectly functional stuff every other year chasing some new tech fad that'll die as fast as Ruby on Rails did ten years ago

[sinful prawn]

they needed to take some leadership on how iron source could make artistic labors of love more viable

they repeatedly dropped the ball on that one

their most important product development opportunity was fucked up

[burnt citrus]

The way to make labors of love more viable is to reduce friction between idea and execution, which Unity already does better than every other engine

[sinful prawn]

in my experience, mom and dad make labors of love viable lol

[astral falcon]

why keep bring up IronSource, even mobile games on unity targeting high user counts for ad rev find IS kinda terrible to partner with and use applovin for mediation

[burnt citrus]

Godot is getting better at that front, and when it becomes better at it than unity, then there will be a problem for Unity

[sinful prawn]

this plays out in hollywood, there are probably 10,000 to 100,000 people in los angeles right now, whose parents are transferring inheritances directly to disney, bytedance and youtube as discounted labor on film productions...

[astral falcon]

part of the old runtime fee was to force people away from IS competetiors in a pretty shitty way

[burnt citrus]

Honestly, what Unity needs to do if they want to maintain user growth is to spend less money on render pipeline rewrites and more money creating a production studio to fund a Brackeys-level content creator to make entertaining to watch tutorial content to convince people how easy Unity is to operate

[sinful prawn]

this is a good idea, among many that have been discussed in the forums lol

[burnt citrus]

The thing Unity has going for it is how easy it is to just like make game

[sinful prawn]

why is something obvious to us though not implemented? i guess this is why i say quiet quitting

nobody wants to say it

[wide river]

Because it isn't true

[sinful prawn]

and maybe because i'm more embedded in the San Francisco development culture it is more accessible to me to see first hand

[astral falcon]

for me its a tool that gives me lots of platform support at low effort, and just gets out of my way when it comes to how i approach making the game

[burnt citrus]

Because capitalism. "Good enough" isn't ever good enough for tech companies. Need constant exponential growth for the investors

[sinful prawn]

it is one of many explanations for the arrested development of meaningful features at the company

[astral falcon]

not doing my own platform support is massive, worked with a in house engine before and that was the worst part

[sinful prawn]

yeah but on the other hand, it's over. there are no new platforms

[burnt citrus]

Once a company goes public, it inevitably dies. It's just a method for the leeches of society to suck out as much money as they can before the company withers on the vine and customers move to something else

[sinful prawn]

i agree with you in general

you are right, but it's product development from a decade ago

[astral falcon]

PC, all the main consoles (sony, ms and nintendo) mobile (ios android)

thats all most people care about

[sinful prawn]

yeah

[burnt citrus]

Unity could literally cease updates entirely forever and it'd probably be just as good at making games as it is now

[sinful prawn]

i don't know, both meta and niantic have been really generous with funding developers, and i can't say that niantic being private versus meta being public is predictive of outcomes of any particular platform they are promoting for game developers

[sinful prawn]

i'm sure a lot of people at unity feel this way too

which is... bad

[burnt citrus]

Why though?

[wide river]

Means the product just works

Which is good

[burnt citrus]

Why do you need "new" instead of just "works"

[astral falcon]

it would lose mobile pretty fast, then have issues with the next console cycle if that happened

[sinful prawn]

adobe said the same thing about flash. even mobile safari has to occasionally be updated in response to improvements in chrome

[lime hemlock]

Because investors would lose interest. That's what we're talking about here, right? Needing new exciting features, AI, VR, to trick investors into funding your projects.

[sinful prawn]

it would be nice to have graphical improvements like unreal's, because graphics finances games.

[sinful prawn]

i don't know if it's a trick per se regarding graphics but you are right in general.

you do need to care about the people who hand over the money. i don't not want to be a roblox studio developer. i know someone personally who tried that business as a theory, and it was not viable

i don't want to be a steam workshop developer

you end up trading a bad network, like the app store, for a much worse network, the roblox grid and steam workshop lol

[sinful prawn]

i'm also not sure if AI is a trick per se.

it's a pretty big deal lol

[burnt citrus]

There are two games in the list of best-selling games that have "Graphics" as a major selling point

[sinful prawn]

i mean nearly every question posted in this discord, the vast majority, can be solved by a chatbot, and would probably be more useful for that end user

[burnt citrus]

Everything else is sold on a solid gameplay loop or major brand recognition

[sinful prawn]

this is kind of complicated, because nintendo owns its network

[lime hemlock]

It's a trick for 90% of startups. The Internet was a big deal, but the dot-com bubble was still a bubble.

[wide river]

Gotta slap "AI" in everything these days, even if it makes no sense

[burnt citrus]

Almost like having a history of making good things that people want to play is more indicative of success than whether or not you can see Norman Reedus's pores in cutscenes

[sinful prawn]

i think if you are a new developer, if you're not rockstar, you know, if you want money to make your game, it will need to look attractive. and anyway, for creative industrial projects, you don't wanna be one of those, needles.tools guys who is trying to convince people to spend all this budget on something interesting only to have n64 graphics

[sinful prawn]

lol

[astral falcon]

you are not even talking about engines at this point

[burnt citrus]

i think if you are a new developer, if you're not rockstar, you know, if you want money to make your game, it will need to look attractive

[astral falcon]

since to achieve teh graphics even if thge engine is capable you need the art resources and art direction

[lime hemlock]

To be fair, that's revenue. Not funding to make the game in the first place.

[wide river]

Cruelty Squad is like ground zero of "art kinda doesn't matter"

[sinful prawn]

hmm that's not really what i'm saying

[burnt citrus]

Using "industry trends" to determine success is how you end up with Concord

[sinful prawn]

and anyway hollow knight, undertale, cruelty squad, they still have a lot of artistic decisions, and a lot of artistic labor

[burnt citrus]

So maybe the actual skill of the people who make the games is more important than whether or not the engine has raytracing enabled by default or not?

[wide river]

Oh yeah ofc cruelty squad is led by a distinct art direction, and isn't random stuff. It's a fun style that is hard to describe the game with lmao

[sinful prawn]

hmm well powerful middlewares helped them save a lot of money

that they also valued their time at zero helped

it's tough

[sinful prawn]

this is kind of proving my point

[burnt citrus]

Yes, and it did that without having native support for whatever wearable tech fad just came out last year that everyone's pushing to investors

[sinful prawn]

that if you have no graphics, well, you will get like $50k up front

even if it's a phenomenal game

i'm not talking about whether or not it's a good investment, i'm saying that as an objective matter, the graphics gets your stuff financed

[lime hemlock]

It still got a huge budget, probably thanks to it following industry trends. I don't know what kind of stuff doctorpangloss is making, but "creative industrial" sounds like client work, where you don't really care about revenue after completing it, just getting the contract and funding. Very different motivations and goals.

[sinful prawn]

you might as well make a board game, and many people do

[astral falcon]

your arguments are all over the dam place

[burnt citrus]

Which is still 10x more than he asked for and enough to make a game that did so well that Toby Fox is now releasing all of his future content for free forever because he literally does not need any more money

[sinful prawn]

i am identifying the impacts of frozen unity development. a big impact is that the lack of graphics innovation results in really poor financing for its developers, who choose unity over unreal

[sinful prawn]

yeah yeah yeah

i guess the best example is that completely vaporware unreal engine asset flip thing that got money from y combinator

because the graphics looked like something

like it would be nice to have nice graphics out of the box to finance the game lol

it's 2024, and listen, i make a pixel art game, and i ran into these same issues. you can't finance a pixel art game, period, end of story

in 2024 you should have a hope and a prayer of making a demo in unity as attractive as one in unreal

[burnt citrus]

Point is: Engines don't make games. People do. The engine is not an indicator of success. There are just as many flops to breakout hits made in Unity as Unreal as Godot as GameMaker.

[sinful prawn]

epic spent a lot of time in that. unreal developers keep getting stuff financed, even if they don't end up delivering because unreal sucks 🙂

[burnt citrus]

You can plop out a wet fart of a game in Unreal, or you could take the internet by storm with a game made in Unity

[wide river]

tbh I sort of prefer less financing for unity games (as in like investment pressure) since that tends to allow for more unique games to actually exist, rather than the UE cutscene simulators, or 90% of UE5 games looking the exact same because they like art over gameplay (and kind of relies on upscalers to even be playable).

[sinful prawn]

people should be fucking freaking out about the game industry contraction

[wide river]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[astral falcon]

people are worried about it, but the solution is competition

[burnt citrus]

The reason most UE games look the same is because the "fancy graphics" that Pangy here is pushing for are actually basically baked into the engine and an absolute pain in the ass to change, while Unity has the philosophy of "Keep the default simple and expandable and people can make it look however they want"

[astral falcon]

and people being willing just use the tools that suit their work

[wide river]

Yeah true

[sinful prawn]

i mention the industrial creative stuff because i think it has a lot of opportunities for financing for many people, where not just for me, but for many unity developers, you can still make something you are proud of with a real budget

[burnt citrus]

People keep talking about how dire the situation is in the games industry, meanwhile I've got so many phenomenal indie titles getting either crowdfunded or self-funding through early access that I literally cannot get to them fast enough.

Maybe the industry should be spending less time making shiny toyboxes and more time making games people actually want to play and they wouldn't be worried about running out of money 🤔

[sinful prawn]

whereas, and this is the most realest talk there is, most indie game developers are very mercenary. they don't go and support other talent. they make their thing, and they focus on their thing, and it's not like they go and have a junior guy who goes and does his own thing and then that is huge.

every single person who worked at blizzard in 2005 has or will get their own game financed in 2025

[burnt citrus]

If companies can't afford to make games with billion dollar budgets that require a million people to play it for twenty years to turn a profit, well, maybe they should stop doing that

[wide river]

you should totally DM me a list of ones you recommend so I can find some new cool stuff

[sinful prawn]

it's the same trend in hollywood. stanley kubrick was david lean's AD on lawrency of arabia. this doesn't happen with indie games. jonathan blow doesn't have anyone in the jonathan blow studio who goes on to do something else. he's a mercenary and he's very proud of it. do you see what i mean?

they're not all uniformly good guys.

kind of a digression,b ut it's just to say that it's not about protagonists and antagonists. i am talking about financing.

graphics = financing

engine developments = graphics improvements = financing

then these problems go away

[burnt citrus]

There's this really fun arcadey shooter-ish thing with really simple graphics that focuses on gameplay and simple bang-for-your buck juice effects to make it feel really satisfying to play despite being mostly geometric shapes. You might have heard of it though it's called ||Project Ictos||

[sinful prawn]

i mean mr mojang guy, marrkrksuusss perrrssson, he worked at king

he didn't work at some indie game studio

[lime hemlock]

Can we agree that there are obviously different motivations here if the goal is to get funding from investors vs creating value for customers? Regardless of personal beliefs, shiny new features attracts more investors. I think most of us would prefer to be able to fund our own projects, or use crowdfunding, but that's not always possible.

[astral falcon]

i can tell you VC introduced to a small company is a hell hole persnally

[burnt citrus]

There are so many other ways to earn money to do a project than involving the Finance Gibbons who are going to pretend they really care about how good a video game is while demanding you add in a battle pass because that's how Fortnite makes a spillion dollars

[burnt citrus]

If a game requires Venture Capital in order to exist, in all honestly, it probably shouldn't

[astral falcon]

its like you wanted gas to take a drive, and they give you fucking rocket fuel and demand you go to space now

[wide river]

sweeps Star Citizen under the rug

[lime hemlock]

Do you feel the same way about start ups in general? If a business requires outside investment to get started, it probably shouldn't exist? By no means do I like VCs, but making games often also means making a business, and not everyone has the means to fund themselves.

[burnt citrus]

Venture Capital requires a product be as bland and inoffensive as possible to appeal to the widest market. No good art can come from such a place.

By all means, VC yourself up some public service or manufacturing plant that solves an actual, practical problem. If a Video Game doesn't get made, the world keeps on turning.

VC has a tendency to create "Solutions in search of a problem"

[lime hemlock]

I would certainly look towards government grants related to art and technology first. The motivations are purer there, to help establish some tech sector or cultural significance in your country or region.

[astral falcon]

most places hace some funding for that, or at the very least soft hefty tax breaks for it

[sinful prawn]

it's very illuminating in terms of how the unity leadership 3 years ago viewed things versus today. there was a lot of emphasis on monetization in 2021, and now i don't think there is emphasis on anything

there is a desire for a status quo

that doesn't exist anymore

[sinful prawn]

i really odn't think these things are orthogonal

they are the same thing

[burnt citrus]

Pretty sure that "emphasis on monetization" was widely considered a bad move

[sinful prawn]

i think they executed on that very poorly. leadership on the matter was weak. leadership really means, someone had to put resources into a coherent narrative about how game developers should make money

the very first thing they should have done is prepared a better story about iron source, since the company is iron source.

instead of calling developers fucking stupid

now i think things are pretty directionless. since the AVP bombed, the status quo story doesn't really make sense. the platform shaven't changed for a long time

[burnt citrus]

Pretty sure they were getting regularly clowned on for trying to push for predatory monetization so hard which led to the "Fucking idiots" line in the first place

[sinful prawn]

yeah i would have done things very differently. i'm not in charge, and there were no substantive channels for that feedback from the community

they listened to non-substantive channels like Kotaku

[burnt citrus]

The feedback was pretty clear though: "Fuck. That."

[sinful prawn]

they got mostly worthless feedback

that is pretty worthless feedback

[burnt citrus]

People don't want games full of microtransactions and ads. People are tired of whale-driven game design. The issue is, that those games don't need a majority. They need to capture the wallets of a few exploitable people and the hell with everyone else

And I think the community made that abundantly clear

[sinful prawn]

mercenary indie game developers made a loud but actionless opinion

[burnt citrus]

And also, you know, the players. The ones who are actually buying the products

[sinful prawn]

hmm i don't know. most of the players of most games are kids and they are the ones buying skins. robux $5/mo subs are very popular

however all that is showing is that making an alternative to "Powerful Network" for monetization is hard

[burnt citrus]

I think most players would be pretty happy if engines like Unity made in-app-purchases and other predatory gimmicks as hard as physically possible to implement

[sinful prawn]

that's kind of what iron source does, by synthesizing a network out of disparate games, but they didn't really tell that story

[sinful prawn]

i think they did a bad job at developing alternatives

iron source has a good story to tell there, but it's too complicated

i mean, maybe it is, maybe it's not

if you can comprehend that steam is a network and tiktok is a network and the nintendo eshop is a network, you can understand that iron source's little ads sdk can also be a network, if you're savvy

[astral falcon]

iron source is just a medation network and not even the best of the bunch

[sinful prawn]

the idea is to cross promo effectively across owners, i.e., to synthesize a network

[astral falcon]

you are literally just saying what 90% of mobile games already do

[sinful prawn]

yeah i don't think it's a particularly innovative idea

it was just a matter of storytelling

[astral falcon]

some did with IS before unity joined with it, some with applovin some doing there own medation

[burnt citrus]

I really don't think "They do this thing people hate better than other people who do it worse" is much of a leg to stand on

[sinful prawn]

i don't know when i see the ironsource playable ads at least i think, huh, they are thinking about ads quality

which is good

[burnt citrus]

Absolutely nothing of value was gained from Ironsource. Games would be better if no one could monetize in the way they provide

[sinful prawn]

they just couldnt' tell that story

[astral falcon]

every network provides playables

[burnt citrus]

Mostly, when I see a playable ad I think "Ok but what does the game actually look like" because these ads literally don't even show the product they are advertising

[sinful prawn]

it made sense though why unity would care about playable ads, or at least ads quality. there are some synergies there at an engineering level that are not as easy to do if you e.g. ran ads inside a unreal game

[astral falcon]

still nothing new, there is a reason they are fighting applovin so much and tried to use the runtime fee to compete with it

[sinful prawn]

i think we already know a lot about how this stuff works though lol

mercenary indie game developers have theirs. it's not a good audience to rate business models on

applovin - they are called data.ai or whatever now lol

[burnt citrus]

You say "Mercenary indie game developers", I say "People who want to make games, not capital"

[sinful prawn]

like yeah, there is a lot of space for a lot of success

[sinful prawn]

i am just saying that they are no protagonists and antagonists. but i will tell you now, the holly knight developers, as wonderful as they are, spend exactly zero brain cycles thinking about how my game development can be financially viable

i don't expect them to

it's not a role they should occupy

[burnt citrus]

Mobile gaming is a hellscape of dark patterns, out and out exploitation of gambling addicts and minors who don't know better, and we should be trying to eliminate that market entirely not make it easier to cater to

[sinful prawn]

it doesn't help that nintendo wants to deal with publishers, so there aren't actually any independently published games on the eshop, and so when you talk about the people who have made it, who get 1/3rd or more of their sales from switch, well, they are like any other studio

[astral falcon]

that is literally straight up false information

[sinful prawn]

yeah there have been some thoughts about how to convince apple to ban literal slot machine games

[sinful prawn]

if you want to get a switch SDK license, you know, i don't know. you are either rich enough to be able to afford to pay for a producer, in which case, maybe you are self financed, but the majority of people are working with publishers like devolver digital or similar

there's a reason there aren't many simultaneous iphone and switch releases

even though you develop on unity, it should just be a checkbox right?

nintendo doesn't wanna deal with you

apple arcade, where apple is your publisher, they want you to have a finished game already, either in the past that has "proven" that you are "successful," or one that you will put in the platform. that's publishing. nintendo looks at 10 games that are finished for every 1 that is unfinished and is that developer's only game.

it's not unique

[astral falcon]

a devkit does not cost that much once you get approval for switch dev

[sinful prawn]

well

if you wanna get in their store

[astral falcon]

for most the part its just changing some input handling and file IO stuff code wise

alot of games that are iOS are kind of a bad fit for switch

monitization is totally different

its not a approval, or dev cost/time thing

[sinful prawn]

there aren't many simultaneous switch and anything releases

maybe iphone is the wrong comparison

sufficie it to say it's not for lack of market demand. everyone thinks nintendo is kind of annoying to deal with.

i guess my point is that it's old. this is all old news

[astral falcon]

its like dealing with a company as far as devkit and support its better then xbox

[sinful prawn]

unity has delivered on, it's a checkbox

xbox has died 😦

this is what is really scary about unity chasing hte status quo

meaning how it was operating in 2013

they didn't do anything to make Apple Vision Pro a hit

it was kind of a lazy port. so the number of platforms they need to support has been contracting

i mean they Need to Support Xbox

[astral falcon]

look you don't even know what your point is anymore, and move the post no matter what people say even when they agree but think the soultion is different

[sinful prawn]

my most important point is that, at least among people who are engineers, like you and me, the very first thing is to

instead of worrying about

iron source

DOTS is a failure

[wide river]

How is it a failure

[astral falcon]

not sure what point that was supposed to have, but ok as a engineer i do not worry about IS, and well DOTS i evaluated a long time ago and it did not provided a better soultion to the problems i need to solve then the other approaches offered so i did not use it

that is the same thing a lot of devs did with it

not everything needs to be a win for every case, nor is that even possible

[burnt citrus]

Didn't return a bunch of money to the investors

As you know, any growth amount less than "infinite" is a failure

[sinful prawn]

lol i mean that

it wasn't a good idea

like from an intellectual, broad strokes point of view

it was poorly executed

and it is an evolving and escalating boondoggle

it is playing a role as a niche sales tool for poorly-informed teams who want C++ inside of C#

instead of playing a role as an actually good idea, an actually good way to engineer simulators

[wide river]

Don't see how it is niche at all.

[sinful prawn]

they took the wrong bet on how authoring simulators works

[wide river]

What about it is "poorly executed"

[sinful prawn]

Cities Skylines 2 is a big fiasco. i think if more people played the two point studios game that uses it, the issues would also be better reported there

in terms of how it is actually designed

it takes all the worst parts of programming via attributes, which nobody likes

and combines it with all the worst parts of SIMD APIs, which is new names for old things, like NativeArray

[wide river]

Skylines 2 also had shit model optimization in general, so the game as a whole was a fiasco

[sinful prawn]

yeah well, they say it was ECS, which is true, it was. they already made a pretty performant simulator in C#; or, they could have just written the simulation in C++ and written it as a plugin, or Rust, or whatever they wanted - the real story is that Unity's plugin interface is a hassle, and Unity could probably make the plugin interface 100x better with two months of product development on just e.g. making a decent CMake, vcpkg, crate, etc. packaging for their plugin interface instead of 7 years of product development in DOTS

there are random single people on github who have done more to make authoring unity plugins easier than unity has

[wide river]

Such as?

[sinful prawn]

then it's like, who cares about porting Obi Physics to burst. same story: the platforms haven't changed since 2013

[sinful prawn]

there are multiple cmake projects that try to make it easier and some do

the fact that their own developers have to reinvent the plugin toolchain every time should have been a wakeup call

this is just small stuff.

small stuff with big impacts

[wide river]

I'm asking for actual examples. Links

[sinful prawn]

https://github.com/iBicha/NativePluginBuilder it is a really tiny amount of work

i think a lot of people use valve's openxr build as a template - https://github.com/ValveSoftware/unity-xr-plugin/blob/master/CMakeLists.txt

i used com.unity.webrtc's

[wide river]

cmake my unbeloved but nice stuff

[sinful prawn]

yeah

well you see wha ti'm saying

it could be Rust

it could be whatever

i also did a .net 8 AoT XR Plugin using C# as a native plugin

and it worked fine

i was surprised i could Just get it to work

and it was mind boggling that unity doesn't do this stuff

they are too focused on inventing a bad, ad hoc, poorly specified programming language on top of C# out of codeweaved attributes

so called HPC# was a bad idea, and continues to be a bad idea, with low adoption.

it's just disappointing that it's been a few years

and literally nothing has changed

that's like $800m in product development gone to websites that don't make sense to make for $800m

it doesn't make sense to make UGS in San Francisco, CA for $800m.

there are just so many more web developers than game engine developers, i think they got caught up in the momentum of product development from 2020-2022 that doesn't really matter anymore

unity has 10x'd the amount of website they have. guys, you make a game engine, not a website

like look at the UGS channel

they didn't need to invent a key value store

do you see what i mean?

or all of kubernetes

and i've been to an openmatch meeting from 2021, and it was a wake up call

it was 9 product managers and 1 developer in bulgaria who was doing everything

so it really is a big hangover

[lime hemlock]

HPC#, Burst and Jobs is a huge value add for me, and makes other engines with C# but not anything comparable to HPC# a lot less attractive to me.

[sinful prawn]

yeah but if the alternative was first class plugin support, it would probably be redundant no?

you already use plenty of code written in other languages in your game. it's just already compiled/packaged for you

[lime hemlock]

So I can share code between my C# code and C++ code?

[sinful prawn]

yeah

or perhaps you would want to use rust

[lime hemlock]

I can use structs I defined in C# in Rust?

[sinful prawn]

or even a dedicated simd language, or python which people have been agitating about forever

[sinful prawn]

you mean in my fantasy where they do the 3 days of work to make the FFI work well? yes

[lime hemlock]

Even with good FFI, I would still need to redefine each type in each language. Unless you're talking about code generation.

[sinful prawn]

people already did this. like obi physics

[wide river]

Native error insta-crashes suck to debug

[sinful prawn]

yeah but it's certainly tractable. like i had to deal with those too, and honestly, attaching a debugger to unity and dealing with com.unity.webrtc crashes for stuff i added was not that bad. it isn't necessarily a big part of the journey, because the problem with burst is that forces you to write everything from scratch. it's not like there are libraries out there for stuff written in "HPC#". whereas if the plugin interface had a tiny bit of product development in it, you could leverage such a big ecosystem of exciting new things

an excellent example of this is their foolish cycles wasted on Sentis/Barracuda. why are they making their own second ONNX runtime implementation?

let someone else do it. it would be easy if plugins weren't a huge pain to author, and they're a huge pain to author for mild reasons like packaging.

[sinful prawn]

yeah there are a bajillion pre-existing interface descriptor languages or similar ideas. they could choose one.

[lime hemlock]

The native plugin builder is cool, but it isn't going to magically make any dependency you use cross-platform supported. There are still many things you have to consider to ensure cross-platform support, which is automatic with Burst.

[sinful prawn]

yes well they could have put some resources into that

they could provide ios building services for free, for example, which is the only thing that is truly painful.

that would go back to their core competency of being multi-platform middleware for people's shitty apis

and something only they could do. instead, it's GitHub which is fulfilling the role of, fixing the pain of building for apple. isn't that nuts?

[lime hemlock]

I love that Unity is planning on moving core engine features from C++ to HPC#. I think it's the right move.

[sinful prawn]

you know they say that

but it isn't happening.

i remember when they were talking about that 3 years ago, and then like, 1 year ago i encountered, "in order to support async better, we wrote all this bespoke C++ code"

and made things more coupled and worse

anything as an alternative to C++ would be better, but HPC# is one of the worst options

it's especially ridiculous coming from them, when features like navmesh are just some open source project they literally never talk about

which they could use because itw as written in C++

and now what? i mean, their core strategy was integrating things they lift from other places. vendor graphics apis, libraries, etc. that's not bad

but why commit to a way of authoring your code that isn't vibing with how your org actually does things? Bad idea.

hence, no new features!

there are a bajillion commits in com.unity.webrtc, which i am most familiar with, but i think is representative of their projects as awhole, that were like, "this is how unreal engine does it, and it is copied and pasted here for reference," and those developers were just from Japan so it wasn't enculturated to not put that into a commit message or a comment

UGUI was, what if we asked the china contractor team to copy NGUI?

it's just the energy of the company

that it's happening less often is bad, not good.

HPC# means that an already very expensive thing to make, a game engine, becomes asymptotically more expensive, since they cannot copy shit as easily

it makes their cost structure look like Apple (swift) and Google (golang) which is not good.

and that's why i talk about UGS so much. it is websites. they make a game engine!!

[sinful prawn]

https://github.com/recastnavigation/recastnavigation

this is the thing that is navmesh

[lime hemlock]

I hate NavMesh. I hate how inaccessible it is to me as a developer because it's this black box integrated into the core engine. If it were a package implemented in HPC#, it would be immediately more accessible to me. I could easily inspect it, add to it.

[sinful prawn]

listen if you say burst is useful it is useful but it was one of the worst choices for them

[sinful prawn]

well they could have plugin-ified it by now

[wide river]

Is HPC# an actual thing or is it more of a term

[sinful prawn]

it's their term

[wide river]

Ah okay

[sinful prawn]

it's intellectually honest of them to say what it is

i appreciate them calling it that

[lime hemlock]

Term mostly encompassing Burst, but arguably also includes things like Span, ref, any features of C# focused on high performance.

[sinful prawn]

it will never be implemented in HPC# because all the value is tied up in its being this pre-existing library they found on the internet with useful license terms

as soon as they have to write it from scratch, they are a giant company, they're going to revisit all aspects of the design

and now the cost structure looks like Apple's instead of PUN company's

so nothing. gets. shipped.

at least i am providing a coherent thesis here, on why there are basically no new features

this is why i think DOTS is the biggest boondoggle

it's not hte fucking license change

if unreal engine didn't exist, if it weren't open source, there wouldn't be HDRP either

HDRP exists because they could go and read Epic's source code

why pretend otherwise?

[lime hemlock]

It exists because they hired senior graphics programmers from other companies, probably also Epic, that wanted to implement a high definition render pipeline.

[sinful prawn]

yeah well

that's true right? it's because it exists

it's open source. everyone can go and read it

senior graphics programmer came from there, read it, can continue to read it, etc.

HPC# does not help them

and lo and behold, the CPU jobs they have written in burst for it, they are years old. development also sort of arrested there.

there's only so many shadow calculations you have to do

it was a huge distraction from fixing directx 12

which took them years

and was the bane of my existence

there's no HPC# directx 12 API

i mean, maybe they should make one!

that would make sense.

i can't get a native fence out of a graphicsfence. it's 2024. that's the whole architecture.

[lime hemlock]

I don't know enough about Unreal's renderer and HDRP to know how they compare, but I've not heard any claims that HDRP is just a cheap copy of Unreal's render pipeline. The vibe I've gotten is that HDRP was mostly spearheaded by one senior graphics programmer who wanted to create a new render pipeline from scratch to solve new problems, not just copy another legacy implementation.

And I think that developer may have left already, so development on it is stagnating.

[sinful prawn]

yeah

i'm the only one making claims lol

you can see for yourself

radiance cascades are straight from the literature, their shadows solution - which by th eway, constantly has artifacts that unreal does not have - is original

i haven't seen the unity C++ source for hdrp

if it were a more faithful copy of unreal it would actually be way more useful

and that was the criticism way out the gate, inarticulately put by poorly aggregated feedback. it was characterized as bad defaults compared to unreal, which unity responded to by saying that there is more control. but actually, there is only one naturalistic rendering look that people wanted, and their architecture, being copied from unreal, can easily support it. i don't know why they made the decision to not set up Unreal 4 Natural Rendering Style as the default.

[lime hemlock]

I don't like HDRP, so I'm not going to make any arguments for it. It's cool to make a fully physically based renderer and go all in on that, but like Unreal, it has to sacrifice customizability to reach that goal.

[sinful prawn]

it should have sacrificed customizability

i don't know. it's been years. ship defaults people like. why does it have to be so hard

[still vault]

There is no hdrp c++

HDRP is written in C# afaik https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/tree/master/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition

It's only the core drawing methods and command buffer magic is written in c++, but it's not included in HDRP, it's the base Unity engine

You can easily take a look if something is copied from Unreal

[astral falcon]

@still vault would not pay them much attention which is why we moved out out of a main channel

[burnt citrus]

Also they left the server