1. What aspect of the rendering did you feel you didn't have control over with your own vertex, fragment, and compute shaders?
2. You can hook into most if not all of the physics internals by overriding Update() and FixedUpdate() functions.
Unity is definitely less flexible and powerful than rolling an AAA 3D engine and editor.. But that takes years, and 95% of the time there's a way to solve the problem in Unity.
1. the primary issue is you can't properly optimize rendering and if what you want to do doesn't fit neatly into unity's architecture its gonna be dog slow and your gonna spend forever writing hacks and work arounds to get it to work.
you don't have to roll your own everything for a custom 3d engine, theres a lot of libraries out there. the idea that everyone should use tooling that reminds me of visual basic to make games is weird to me.
2. i don't know about that. my experience is that you don't have easy access to the actual physics code
This is the kind of misguided mindset that effectively discourages people from making games. It’s as if someone urged people to look into lumber and the papermaking en route to making their own card game.
This fellow’s mindset is a common one, and likely he’s passing it on from his own experience...Telling that engineering culture discourages the shortest routes to creativity
engine development is one of the more interesting aspects of game dev to me and many other programmers, having so much focus on clunky monolithic closed source platforms like unity is lame. just providing a counterpoint to the unity hype, one rando comment is not gonna turn the tide on its popularity lol.
FWIW the latest versions of Unity are moving in the direction of exposing more of the render pipeline ... Whether you agree or not with doing it through C# is a different question but they are pretty invested in the language ... From my perspective, this approach is a decent compromise for someone that wants to build a render pipeline (basically define how objects are drawn to the screen) on top of an abstraction of the different graphics APIs for all the platforms they support while still maintaining all the other functionality provided by Unity for gameplay and tooling
2. You can hook into most if not all of the physics internals by overriding Update() and FixedUpdate() functions.
Unity is definitely less flexible and powerful than rolling an AAA 3D engine and editor.. But that takes years, and 95% of the time there's a way to solve the problem in Unity.