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> It’s no secret that Unity is painful to use: it’s slow to open, and it often pauses to re-scan the entire project while you’re trying to work Is this actuall

> It’s no secret that Unity is painful to use: it’s slow to open, and it often pauses to re-scan the entire project while you’re trying to work Is this actually true? I always figured Unity's selling point was being lighter and easier to use than unreal. Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product.

Entinel 4y ago
Anyone who used Unity 2.x in 08 would tell you Godot is far beyond where Unity was in 2008 in terms of features and stability.
- scottymac 4y ago
  Especially for 2D features.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  As someone who did I'd say it's a silly comparison. Godot has a decade of advancements in technology on Unity 2.x, things are generally "nicer" than when Unity started
johnfn 4y ago
The quoted statement is 100% accurate. Unity is very slow. When I worked on Unity with a larger project, I'd often have to wait 10+ seconds for Unity to rescan the entire project every time I switched windows from my IDE to Unity, or every time I ran the project. In similar project sizes, Godot was always lightning fast. > Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product. Unity does have more features - like more obscure 3D features - but that has nothing to do with how Unity deems it necessary to rescan the project tree all the time. Also, when I used Unity, I never used these extra features, so even if this were true, how come all users have to pay the price for features that only a few of us will use? Honestly, core Godot is very full-featured, and in my experience the central abstractions are much better thought out than those in Unity. I feel a lot of the FUD around "Unity has more features than Godot" comes from people that like seeing a long list of features, not from people who actually need those features.
- eatsyourtacos 4y ago
  Agreed- my limited Unity usage has been horrible just because of how bloated and massive it seems every time I try to give it a go. Whereas Godot opens up in literally 1 second and boom I am there. And for 2D projects, there is very little "lacking" compared to Unity. It's way more clear what is going on.
- TillE 4y ago
  > the central abstractions are much better thought out Totally agree. Godot is the first engine I've ever used where I don't feel like I'm fighting with it the whole time to make it do what I want. Godot is pretty clearly a solid choice for anyone making 2D games, and will eventually be a fantastic choice once we get a stable Godot 4.0 with .NET 6 and other nice features.
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  Would you still recommend Unity for 3D iOS game development, or would it be better to move on to Godot?
  - johnfn 4y ago
    Hmm, it depends how much you're going to be using the 3D features that Unity provides. If you're going down the big list of Unity 3D features and you're thinking you need a whole bunch of them, then it's possible that Unity would be a time save in the long run. But honestly I like Godot so much that it would take a lot to tip the scales. I would personally not use Unity at all because I find the developer experience so frustrating. I'd rather spend an extra couple of days enjoyably hacking something together rather than spending less time in more frustrating ways (like waiting for compiles). But I feel I'm more sensitive to these things than most people.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  I love working with Godot but I can't help but feel like GDScript is a mistake. I want better language support and community when working on a project. I want to use nice VSCode plugins that auto format my code (and give type hints... Untyped languages hurt me so much these days) I can't wait for better C# integration for Godot. It's ok now but I'd love it to be rock solid.
disintegore 4y ago
This seems to be a cyclical thing. Every now and then a new solution shows up that is built on new development and UX practices, abandons some baggage that is no longer relevant to most users, makes assumptions in its design that are better suited to the era, etc etc. Then ten or twenty years pass and it becomes the thing to replace.
okwubodu 4y ago
Personally, I think they were a bit generous there. I’m not sure what it is but it’s gotten significantly worse over the past few years and I’ve stopped recommending it to new game devs.
sfteus 4y ago
Anecdotally, there's something about Godot's structure that just "clicks" better for me. It's odd because they seem pretty similar on the surface (nested scene graph, nodes with scripts that have hooks, etc), so it's hard to determine what exactly makes it easier to understand. The only two concrete things I can point to are better documentation (IMO), and the first-class signal/observer support in Godot. I'm not sure if that exists in Unity or not, but it's a really intuitive way to handle entity interaction, and I think that makes it way more easy for beginners to get started.
Uehreka 4y ago
It is outrageously painful. Half of the craft of working in Unity is knowing which kinds of operations will trigger a 15 minute re-import and basically scheduling your day so that you have other things you can do while that’s happening. It doesn’t happen every day or every time you open a project, but sometimes you’ll be looking at your master branch in git, and then you go to check out a branch where something big has changed, and then you alt-tab back to Unity and… time to go make a fresh pot of coffee.
psyc 4y ago
I switched to Unreal after using Unity for many years, both at my day jobs and as an indie. If I had known what it is actually like to work in Unreal, rather than how the grapevine vaguely typecasts it, I would have switched a long time ago, or more likely never used Unity in the first place. Unreal is a delight. It's unfortunate that Epic ever let Unity persuade people that it's better suited to anything or anyone at all.
overgard 4y ago
It's very true; I remember one game I was working on, when you pulled down the code and new assets it'd take a long time to rebuild the "Library" (which is not something you can check in). And sometimes, if your version of the project was acting wonky and everyone else was fine, the solution was to delete the Library and rebuild it from scratch. If you were doing it from scratch, it could take hours. They've made some improvements but it's still a mess. The editor itself always seems very buggy. If you have the "Console" open (which you will if you're coding), it's pretty much guaranteed you're going to see a lot of random errors that have nothing to do with even your code. A lot of them don't even make sense or could be ignored. Like you'll get weird asset import errors if you upgrade versions, but a lot of times they're just red herrings and not important. There's also a lot of QOL stuff that's very frustrating, like arrays being annoying to edit (I'm not sure if they've fixed this yet or not). It's also easy to accidentally brick your editor on your own, with debugger shenanigans or loops that don't end. Also, if you're trying to build a an editor extension, omg was that a nightmare. Just getting things like Undo/Redo and object serialization working correctly are difficult and in some cases impossible. And frankly, you need extensions for a lot of things to actually be useful, like until recently the builtin terrain editor was basically useless, and you have things like Odin because the builtin inspector is a nightmare. There's a lot to like about Unity, but there's also a huge amount of pain points with it.
KronisLV 4y ago
> Is this actually true? I'd say that yes, at least in the last 5 or so years. I decided to make a scene which would contain a single copy of every single model that I'd like to use in a project of mine, for checking the textures, how lighting works, the scale of everything etc. By the time I got to around 200 different objects (no high poly ones, by the way), it took like a minute to just open that scene.

Entinel 4y ago

Anyone who used Unity 2.x in 08 would tell you Godot is far beyond where Unity was in 2008 in terms of features and stability.

scottymac 4y ago
Especially for 2D features.
BoorishBears 4y ago
As someone who did I'd say it's a silly comparison. Godot has a decade of advancements in technology on Unity 2.x, things are generally "nicer" than when Unity started

johnfn 4y ago

The quoted statement is 100% accurate. Unity is very slow. When I worked on Unity with a larger project, I'd often have to wait 10+ seconds for Unity to rescan the entire project every time I switched windows from my IDE to Unity, or every time I ran the project. In similar project sizes, Godot was always lightning fast. > Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product. Unity does have more features - like more obscure 3D features - but that has nothing to do with how Unity deems it necessary to rescan the project tree all the time. Also, when I used Unity, I never used these extra features, so even if this were true, how come all users have to pay the price for features that only a few of us will use? Honestly, core Godot is very full-featured, and in my experience the central abstractions are much better thought out than those in Unity. I feel a lot of the FUD around "Unity has more features than Godot" comes from people that like seeing a long list of features, not from people who actually need those features.

eatsyourtacos 4y ago
Agreed- my limited Unity usage has been horrible just because of how bloated and massive it seems every time I try to give it a go. Whereas Godot opens up in literally 1 second and boom I am there. And for 2D projects, there is very little "lacking" compared to Unity. It's way more clear what is going on.
TillE 4y ago
> the central abstractions are much better thought out Totally agree. Godot is the first engine I've ever used where I don't feel like I'm fighting with it the whole time to make it do what I want. Godot is pretty clearly a solid choice for anyone making 2D games, and will eventually be a fantastic choice once we get a stable Godot 4.0 with .NET 6 and other nice features.
Dracophoenix 4y ago
Would you still recommend Unity for 3D iOS game development, or would it be better to move on to Godot?
- johnfn 4y ago
  Hmm, it depends how much you're going to be using the 3D features that Unity provides. If you're going down the big list of Unity 3D features and you're thinking you need a whole bunch of them, then it's possible that Unity would be a time save in the long run. But honestly I like Godot so much that it would take a lot to tip the scales. I would personally not use Unity at all because I find the developer experience so frustrating. I'd rather spend an extra couple of days enjoyably hacking something together rather than spending less time in more frustrating ways (like waiting for compiles). But I feel I'm more sensitive to these things than most people.
bluefirebrand 4y ago
I love working with Godot but I can't help but feel like GDScript is a mistake. I want better language support and community when working on a project. I want to use nice VSCode plugins that auto format my code (and give type hints... Untyped languages hurt me so much these days) I can't wait for better C# integration for Godot. It's ok now but I'd love it to be rock solid.

disintegore 4y ago

This seems to be a cyclical thing. Every now and then a new solution shows up that is built on new development and UX practices, abandons some baggage that is no longer relevant to most users, makes assumptions in its design that are better suited to the era, etc etc. Then ten or twenty years pass and it becomes the thing to replace.

okwubodu 4y ago

Personally, I think they were a bit generous there. I’m not sure what it is but it’s gotten significantly worse over the past few years and I’ve stopped recommending it to new game devs.

sfteus 4y ago

Anecdotally, there's something about Godot's structure that just "clicks" better for me. It's odd because they seem pretty similar on the surface (nested scene graph, nodes with scripts that have hooks, etc), so it's hard to determine what exactly makes it easier to understand. The only two concrete things I can point to are better documentation (IMO), and the first-class signal/observer support in Godot. I'm not sure if that exists in Unity or not, but it's a really intuitive way to handle entity interaction, and I think that makes it way more easy for beginners to get started.

Uehreka 4y ago

It is outrageously painful. Half of the craft of working in Unity is knowing which kinds of operations will trigger a 15 minute re-import and basically scheduling your day so that you have other things you can do while that’s happening. It doesn’t happen every day or every time you open a project, but sometimes you’ll be looking at your master branch in git, and then you go to check out a branch where something big has changed, and then you alt-tab back to Unity and… time to go make a fresh pot of coffee.

psyc 4y ago

I switched to Unreal after using Unity for many years, both at my day jobs and as an indie. If I had known what it is actually like to work in Unreal, rather than how the grapevine vaguely typecasts it, I would have switched a long time ago, or more likely never used Unity in the first place. Unreal is a delight. It's unfortunate that Epic ever let Unity persuade people that it's better suited to anything or anyone at all.

overgard 4y ago

It's very true; I remember one game I was working on, when you pulled down the code and new assets it'd take a long time to rebuild the "Library" (which is not something you can check in). And sometimes, if your version of the project was acting wonky and everyone else was fine, the solution was to delete the Library and rebuild it from scratch. If you were doing it from scratch, it could take hours. They've made some improvements but it's still a mess. The editor itself always seems very buggy. If you have the "Console" open (which you will if you're coding), it's pretty much guaranteed you're going to see a lot of random errors that have nothing to do with even your code. A lot of them don't even make sense or could be ignored. Like you'll get weird asset import errors if you upgrade versions, but a lot of times they're just red herrings and not important. There's also a lot of QOL stuff that's very frustrating, like arrays being annoying to edit (I'm not sure if they've fixed this yet or not). It's also easy to accidentally brick your editor on your own, with debugger shenanigans or loops that don't end. Also, if you're trying to build a an editor extension, omg was that a nightmare. Just getting things like Undo/Redo and object serialization working correctly are difficult and in some cases impossible. And frankly, you need extensions for a lot of things to actually be useful, like until recently the builtin terrain editor was basically useless, and you have things like Odin because the builtin inspector is a nightmare. There's a lot to like about Unity, but there's also a huge amount of pain points with it.

KronisLV 4y ago

> Is this actually true? I'd say that yes, at least in the last 5 or so years. I decided to make a scene which would contain a single copy of every single model that I'd like to use in a project of mine, for checking the textures, how lighting works, the scale of everything etc. By the time I got to around 200 different objects (no high poly ones, by the way), it took like a minute to just open that scene.