Great learning project, but for production just use Unity unless you absolutely, positively (triple-check) cannot. You will be massively more productive.
Umm, no. Unity has lots of problems that make it not ideal for games that have fast action or are developed by a larger team.
Like, the fact that it uses an old version of Mono on not-Windows, which uses a mark and sweep garbage collector. You end up with frequent stop-the-world garbage collection pauses that freeze the screen for seconds at a time. Play any Unity game on the PS4 and you'll see it frequently.
I've also heard that Unity's project asset management doesn't really work for teams that have more than 10 people working together, but that's something I don't have direct knowledge of.
> You end up with frequent stop-the-world garbage collection pauses that freeze the screen for seconds at a time. Play any Unity game on the PS4 and you'll see it frequently.
This is a coding problem, not an engine problem. A game should have almost no dynamic resource allocation.
Then what about Unity leads everyone who uses it to allocate dynamically, somehow, on every platform but Windows?
If everybody makes the same coding problem, and the common denominator is one of their dependencies, it makes you wonder what's wrong with the dependency.
I don't know what projects you're referring to specifically on the PS4 but I'd suspect the difference comes down to hardware spec on the PC masking the issue, it probably being the primary platform and/or lack of time to work on optimisation for the port.
It's the use of C#, which generally written in a manner that creates garbage and lack of experience with programming games that causes many people who use it to go wild with allocations. Both intentionally and by accident. These days you can actually get pretty far before it's ever a problem on a gaming PC. Unity is also incredibly accessible so more people with less technical chops are programming games without even opening the profiler.
There's a lot of FUD surrounding Unity, although I cannot comment on PS4, specifically, as I have not shipped for that platform.
On mobile, and/or desktop there are very few empirical reasons not to use Unity. If you have the skills to develop your own engine and tools, then you certainly have the skills to work around Unity or garbage-collection issues.
When I'm hiring a game developer and they'd rather work on engine or tools than making games, this is a red flag. I've seen projects waste person-decades of development effort all because one or two senior devs wanted to do roll their own thing instead of using Unity.
The engine and toolchain that is always has flaws that the utopian engine and toolchain that could be don't have (yet).
>On mobile, and/or desktop there are very few empirical reasons not to use Unity. If you have the skills to develop your own engine and tools, then you certainly have the skills to work around Unity or garbage-collection issues.
I guess. The question is why should I have to work around Unity?
I mean, everything is a trade-off. I understand that for many teams and games, the hassles of Unity are worth the benefits. But that is not every game and every team.
>The engine and toolchain that is always has flaws that the utopian engine and toolchain that could be don't have (yet).
We don't have to compare Unity to utopian engines and tool chains when we can compare it to its competitors like Unreal.
> I guess. The question is why should I have to work around Unity?
When shipping a production-quality game there's almost always going to be something you have to customize or work-around with any engine. What often happens with home-grown engines is that the cost of tools friction or engine implementation is not properly accounted for, because it's kind of fun although it's unproductive.
> But that is not every game and every team.
Agree, but I'm fed up with the amount of FUD around Unity. I've watched teams burn money rather than putting up with some annoyances. I'm an older dev (40+), so I've seen many iterations of devs refusing to use existing tool X in favour of supposedly more convenient but less battle-tested tool Y. This is in game development, and software development, more generally.
There are also holistic benefits to Unity, like 1-2 second recompiles. This is a game-changer in terms of debugging and allowing you to try more iterations of things.
> We don't have to compare Unity to utopian engines and tool chains when we can compare it to its competitors like Unreal.
I think Unreal is a great engine, and I'm admittedly less familiar and therefore productive with it than with Unity.
That said, I would say that for mobile or small-footprint games Unity still has an edge. This is based on the experiences of several studios / devs that I've talked to. They make great headway with Unreal, but then the project bogs down when it's time to actually ship. That said, this could be Unreal FUD from developers who are new to that engine.
To get the benefits of Blueprints in Unity, just buy PlayMaker. It's $65 dollars a seat, and you'll never write another Finite State Machine.
