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by mustacheemperor 2914 days ago
I wouldn't fret much about trusting the editor, it's no more magic than the scene appearing when you load it from XML. But I agree that this remains my biggest frustration with Unity. It's fun to use, it's very fast to prototype with, but you hit the nail right on the head that "everything feels second class to using the GUI," and once you've worked in an engine that accommodates a text-first workflow it can really feel like mandatory training wheels sometimes. Maybe someone with more professional Unity experience can drop in, it's such a popular platform that it seems to me like there must be productive workflows that aren't hampered by the GUI in use out there.

Most other engines have different tradeoffs in my experience, and Unity is hard to beat because of how relatively robust and stable it is.
1 comments
pjmlp 2914 days ago
I have yet to see a professional game engine that wasn't GUI oriented.

Professional game studios are mostly Windows based, and developers are actually a minority in teams, mostly responsible for low level engine code.

So understandably the workflows are optimized for animators, artists, level designers, gameplay developers, script writers, ...

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mustacheemperor 2912 days ago
Aha, that's a very good explanation. Most of my experience with 3D development has been alongside something LOB oriented rather than a "game" per se; like the other commenter suggested Monogame is an example of what I had in mind in my post above.

I have to add the note, Monogame is absolutely up to par with "professional" engines in many ways. I quoted because Monogame originated from such an engine, XDE, Microsoft's managed SharpDX framework for developing games for Xbox Live Arcade. The community took over when MS cancelled XDE. I don't know if it can compete with Unreal or Unity on everything these days, given some of the demos I've seen of Unreal's lighting etc.

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icsllaf 2914 days ago
I believe MonoGame can be used as text oriented. At least when I tried to use it to make some small games. It's definitely not on the same level of professional use as Unreal or Unity though I think.

http://www.monogame.net/

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