3 ms·

The problem is that Unity always has 2 or 3 ways of doing things for each feature, and the "proper" way that's actively maintained (and recommended by the commu

by ratww 6y ago

The problem is that Unity always has 2 or 3 ways of doing things for each feature, and the "proper" way that's actively maintained (and recommended by the community) is always the one that's still in Beta and missing features, so you're kinda cornered into updating. Of course you can not update, but then you might be relying on half-finished/half-broken features that could be fixed just by upgrading. Also, the whole upgrade process itself could be improved if they put time on it. There's nothing inherent to game engines that forces Unity to have so many breaking changes all the time.

BoorishBears 6y ago
> The problem is that Unity always has 2 or 3 ways of doing things for each feature, and the "proper" way that's actively maintained (and recommended by the community) is always the one that's still in Beta and missing features, so you're kinda cornered into updating. First part of this sure, Unity likes to have different ways to do stuff and I do wish they'd focus more. The roadmap approach they're taking shows that they are committed to working on it, and I'd say they've done well tackling that. But the second part? About getting cornered into updating by new features, not buying that for a second. If the feature is done enough to use it in a game with a large scope trying to follow a real development schedule, it's not disappearing. If it's not, don't use it. LTS releases are getting 3+ years of updates, before that we were going 5+ years with the same unity version, so when you say "actively maintained" when you mean is they're not getting changed anymore. Which is a good thing. Unity 5, from 5 years ago, is still getting security updates. Where you get cornered is trying to pull in beta features into a game that has a hard schedule then getting screwed when the beta feature takes advantage of has breaking changes during a major release... which is kind of the point of a beta. Unity has a huge community with a wide range of expertise and scope in their projects, if you're just blindly following what people in the forum are talking about, you'll follow some people working on small projects with small lifecycles. Unity has never been for rug pulling, if something works well enough for your game today, it's going to work well enough tomorrow, they're not going to yank it just because it's not the new hotness. Even Unityscript ended up getting a smooth path into the sunset with a converter tool despite being used heavily in under 4% of projects (and being used exclusively by <1% at the time) - > Also, the whole upgrade process itself could be improved if they put time on it. There's nothing inherent to game engines that forces Unity to have so many breaking changes all the time. Again, where are these breaking features "all the time"? Unity 4 => 5 was half a decade? Now they have their date-based versioning, but LTS releases still get at least 3 years of support, and the next LTS is the next year, not the old 5+ year cadence, so you get an incremental upgrade path with 3 whole years of smoothing. Outside of major releases I've only ever seen a tiny handful of breaking changes per release, the majority of which where back when we were going 5 years between major revisions so they'd hold everyone's hand with a detailed guide and "pay once, cry once": https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UpgradeGuides.html https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UpgradeGuides.html Note how now only LTS versions need these... I mean, someone brought up Monogame here, apparently not aware that XDA 4 which it targets was a major breaking event from XDA 3. Game engines have breaking changes on major revisions. Software, often has breaking changes on major revisions. Don't build your software, on other software, hoping to blindly chase every major release painlessly, it's just not going to happen once you get to a certain level of complexity. These companies are not abandoning previous releases instantly, they still get maintained I could Ctrl+R Unity for Unreal in this comment and nothing would change, it just comes with being a swiss army knife of this sort
- ratww 6y ago
  > Where you get cornered is trying to pull in beta features into a game that has a hard schedule Nope. Unity still has a lot of very important features that are or were in Beta or unfinished state for a very long time, at least until very recently. DOTS, SRP and HDRP, to give a few examples [1]. If I strictly follow your advice I would have to virtually stick with features from 2015. Thanks, but no thanks. These problems with Unity have been going on for about 5 years and the official line by their team is that "we're rewriting stuff and it's going to be great, but in the meantime just wait". -- > Again, where are these breaking features "all the time"? > Don't build your software, on other software, hoping to blindly chase every major release painlessly So, you're saying that there aren't many breaking changes and updating is easy, but at the same time saying that people shouldn't even think about updating an engine mid-project because it's reckless? Sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Notice how you're blaming users for everything here: they can't update because it's hard, but at the same time we can't complain that it's hard because Unity is great and doesn't have many breaking changes. Also there's some whataboutism going on when you mention that Unreal and Monogame. This doesn't matter since them both don't have the crazy update schedule that Unity has where a major-upgrade is released every now and then. -- [1] And btw I fully expect an answer like like "Oh but you're not up to date on those, feature X has been finished in version XXXX.X, you just haven't upgraded yet". Well, guess what, there are breaking changes and I can't easily upgrade.
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    > And btw I fully expect an answer like like "Oh but you're not up to date on those, feature X has been finished in version XXXX.X, you just haven't upgraded yet". Well, guess what, there are breaking changes and I can't easily upgrade. You expect wrong, I'm point out how hilarious your complaint is. That hard to implement features are in beta (And pre-beta!) for a long time so that we can actually contribute to their development cycle with feedback and bugs, instead of Unity getting them almost done then throwing them over the fence... It's insane to me someone would try and spin this as a bad thing with a straight face, and in fact it makes me question if I'm talking with someone who just has never dealt with the stuff behind the scenes here (like actually having to implement features of this scope) Every single feature you just mentioned was Unity reaching deep into the bowels of their engine and reimagining something. DOTS is literally a reimagining the core concept of how entities exist in Unity! Literally a core tenant of the engine. You're complaining features like that are developed in the open? You realize the gnashing of teeth that probably forces them to go through to allow it? Are you joking? - > If I strictly follow your advice I would have to virtually stick with features from 2015. Thanks, but no thanks. No, you'll get to use plenty of features, it's just you won't get to use the unfinished ones unless you're ready to deal with the fact... they're unfinished... Unity doesn't make that confusing to know either, they literally won't even show you a preview package by default! Hard stuff takes time, when development happens in the open you get to see that. Unity has plenty of features people are using to ship games that aren't in preview lol, imagine acting like Unity's preview system is a bad thing - > So, you're saying that there aren't many breaking changes and updating is easy, but at the same time saying that people shouldn't even think about updating an engine mid-project because it's reckless? Lol that's a uh... creative straw man, I'll give you that much Literally the words you quoted spell it out, breaking changes happen during major revisions and that major revisions are not a frequent event or easy to track. They used to happen twice a decade. But that also meant it was very awkward for them to ship big things. Now they happen once a year but to avoid forcing you to track breaking changes once a year they switched to the LTS model So now you have 3 whole years to deal with breaking changes. Can't deal with that, it's kind of on you.

by ratww 6y ago

BoorishBears 6y ago

> The problem is that Unity always has 2 or 3 ways of doing things for each feature, and the "proper" way that's actively maintained (and recommended by the community) is always the one that's still in Beta and missing features, so you're kinda cornered into updating. First part of this sure, Unity likes to have different ways to do stuff and I do wish they'd focus more. The roadmap approach they're taking shows that they are committed to working on it, and I'd say they've done well tackling that. But the second part? About getting cornered into updating by new features, not buying that for a second. If the feature is done enough to use it in a game with a large scope trying to follow a real development schedule, it's not disappearing. If it's not, don't use it. LTS releases are getting 3+ years of updates, before that we were going 5+ years with the same unity version, so when you say "actively maintained" when you mean is they're not getting changed anymore. Which is a good thing. Unity 5, from 5 years ago, is still getting security updates. Where you get cornered is trying to pull in beta features into a game that has a hard schedule then getting screwed when the beta feature takes advantage of has breaking changes during a major release... which is kind of the point of a beta. Unity has a huge community with a wide range of expertise and scope in their projects, if you're just blindly following what people in the forum are talking about, you'll follow some people working on small projects with small lifecycles. Unity has never been for rug pulling, if something works well enough for your game today, it's going to work well enough tomorrow, they're not going to yank it just because it's not the new hotness. Even Unityscript ended up getting a smooth path into the sunset with a converter tool despite being used heavily in under 4% of projects (and being used exclusively by <1% at the time) - > Also, the whole upgrade process itself could be improved if they put time on it. There's nothing inherent to game engines that forces Unity to have so many breaking changes all the time. Again, where are these breaking features "all the time"? Unity 4 => 5 was half a decade? Now they have their date-based versioning, but LTS releases still get at least 3 years of support, and the next LTS is the next year, not the old 5+ year cadence, so you get an incremental upgrade path with 3 whole years of smoothing. Outside of major releases I've only ever seen a tiny handful of breaking changes per release, the majority of which where back when we were going 5 years between major revisions so they'd hold everyone's hand with a detailed guide and "pay once, cry once": https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UpgradeGuides.html https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UpgradeGuides.html Note how now only LTS versions need these... I mean, someone brought up Monogame here, apparently not aware that XDA 4 which it targets was a major breaking event from XDA 3. Game engines have breaking changes on major revisions. Software, often has breaking changes on major revisions. Don't build your software, on other software, hoping to blindly chase every major release painlessly, it's just not going to happen once you get to a certain level of complexity. These companies are not abandoning previous releases instantly, they still get maintained I could Ctrl+R Unity for Unreal in this comment and nothing would change, it just comes with being a swiss army knife of this sort

ratww 6y ago
> Where you get cornered is trying to pull in beta features into a game that has a hard schedule Nope. Unity still has a lot of very important features that are or were in Beta or unfinished state for a very long time, at least until very recently. DOTS, SRP and HDRP, to give a few examples [1]. If I strictly follow your advice I would have to virtually stick with features from 2015. Thanks, but no thanks. These problems with Unity have been going on for about 5 years and the official line by their team is that "we're rewriting stuff and it's going to be great, but in the meantime just wait". -- > Again, where are these breaking features "all the time"? > Don't build your software, on other software, hoping to blindly chase every major release painlessly So, you're saying that there aren't many breaking changes and updating is easy, but at the same time saying that people shouldn't even think about updating an engine mid-project because it's reckless? Sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Notice how you're blaming users for everything here: they can't update because it's hard, but at the same time we can't complain that it's hard because Unity is great and doesn't have many breaking changes. Also there's some whataboutism going on when you mention that Unreal and Monogame. This doesn't matter since them both don't have the crazy update schedule that Unity has where a major-upgrade is released every now and then. -- [1] And btw I fully expect an answer like like "Oh but you're not up to date on those, feature X has been finished in version XXXX.X, you just haven't upgraded yet". Well, guess what, there are breaking changes and I can't easily upgrade.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  > And btw I fully expect an answer like like "Oh but you're not up to date on those, feature X has been finished in version XXXX.X, you just haven't upgraded yet". Well, guess what, there are breaking changes and I can't easily upgrade. You expect wrong, I'm point out how hilarious your complaint is. That hard to implement features are in beta (And pre-beta!) for a long time so that we can actually contribute to their development cycle with feedback and bugs, instead of Unity getting them almost done then throwing them over the fence... It's insane to me someone would try and spin this as a bad thing with a straight face, and in fact it makes me question if I'm talking with someone who just has never dealt with the stuff behind the scenes here (like actually having to implement features of this scope) Every single feature you just mentioned was Unity reaching deep into the bowels of their engine and reimagining something. DOTS is literally a reimagining the core concept of how entities exist in Unity! Literally a core tenant of the engine. You're complaining features like that are developed in the open? You realize the gnashing of teeth that probably forces them to go through to allow it? Are you joking? - > If I strictly follow your advice I would have to virtually stick with features from 2015. Thanks, but no thanks. No, you'll get to use plenty of features, it's just you won't get to use the unfinished ones unless you're ready to deal with the fact... they're unfinished... Unity doesn't make that confusing to know either, they literally won't even show you a preview package by default! Hard stuff takes time, when development happens in the open you get to see that. Unity has plenty of features people are using to ship games that aren't in preview lol, imagine acting like Unity's preview system is a bad thing - > So, you're saying that there aren't many breaking changes and updating is easy, but at the same time saying that people shouldn't even think about updating an engine mid-project because it's reckless? Lol that's a uh... creative straw man, I'll give you that much Literally the words you quoted spell it out, breaking changes happen during major revisions and that major revisions are not a frequent event or easy to track. They used to happen twice a decade. But that also meant it was very awkward for them to ship big things. Now they happen once a year but to avoid forcing you to track breaking changes once a year they switched to the LTS model So now you have 3 whole years to deal with breaking changes. Can't deal with that, it's kind of on you.