[reitzensteinm]

I'm a PC game developer that's been using Unity for 2.5 years, and it was pretty clear after getting involved in the ecosystem that Unity Technologies was just resting on its laurels, and making decisions primarily on marketing to sell even more copies. Just a few pain points:

1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, being stop the world non generational.

2) A similar story of PhysX, though I can't pin down the exact date, 2010 at the latest

3) They added a new particle system with flashy features, but no scripting access. I don't even...

4) Unity 4 added next to nothing useful (DX11 naturally on Windows only, Mechanim which was broken etc), though it was necessary to purchase to keep getting bug fixes

5) No 64 bit editor is very painful (I have 32gb of ram laying around doing nothing)

6) The project is riddled with bugs, being added and removed each release, though probably much less than hacky in house solutions which are the norm in the game industry

7) Nasty serialization formats make programatically changing the hundreds of meta files in a project next to impossible

However, I'm getting the impression that the new Unreal licensing scheme has been a real kick in the ass for UT, and they're taking the competition seriously. Nearly every major problem I've had with Unity seems to be being worked on now, for Unity 5, after a long period of atrophy.

I fully expected Unity to die a slow death, and that it was just a question of when to switch to something else (there is not much high quality competition), but now I'm not so sure. If they pull off their roadmap, it'll finally be an engine I will be happy to use and recommend. Right now my feeling is: it does the job, mostly.

Note that the experience making small puzzle games for iOS etc may be very different, I've done that kind of thing but not with Unity.

[pjmlp]

> 1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, being stop the world non generational.

I really don't get why this is like this still.

Currently they seem more willing to implement their own IL2C++ generator, than agreeing with Xamarin about a new license.

Personally, specially given that C++11/14 is quite an improvment over C++98, I would go Unreal instead.

[binarycrusader]

Or maybe these are all difficult things to solve and you're just now seeing large projects to address them finally reach completion?

Sorry, but your "resting on its laurels" is clearly not true. If you had bothered to track the improvements made to Unity's rendering engine (or the addition of Unity 2D support) over the last two years (well before the Unreal engine subscription launch), you'd see they actually have been doing quite a bit.

I do agree that the situation around Mono is pretty unfortunate, and that is clearly a business decision they've made. But they're also trying to find a way to mitigate that as should be clear from announcements made over the last year.

[reitzensteinm]

As I understand it, the projects aren't nearing completion. The features are coming in Unity 5.x, which means over the next few years (since 5.0 isn't even out yet).

If the timing were purely coincidental, and the effort routine, you'd expect to see a big problem being solved every now and then. Instead we've gone from radio silence to a barrage of activity.

You also seem to be making the mistake of assuming that the Unreal engine subscription public announcement was the first Unity Technologies realized the threat. It's a small industry, and the default assumption should be that people talk to one another and know which way the wind is blowing.

Unity2D is actually one of the things I had in mind when I wrote the post. It seemed to me to be aimed at increasing the potential market size for Unity, rather than something that made life better for existing developers.

My post was not to claim that Unity was doing nothing; only that they were not acting like they had a fierce competitor. I believe that now they are. And that is a fantastic thing. It makes me much more comfortable being on the Unity platform, because my ideal preference is to stay on something like this for a decade. I want Unity to succeed.

[ivanca]

Not true, instead of focusing in people that are a bit serious about game development they have done plenty of bad chooses, 64 bit processors on home PCs exist since more than a decade ago, and their engine was created in 2006 for 32 bit platforms, when it was clear 64 bits processors were here to stay. Also the GUI system is one of the worst GUI systems I have ever seen, yeah yeah they say they are going to fix it in Unity 5 but we need to develop games now, not tomorrow. Also calling JavaScript to their "implementation" of what comes down as just a mask for C# was a huge marketing mistake.

[jonasechterhoff]

Disclaimer: I work for Unity. -As for 64 bit support, the biggest problem for that with Unity is all the dependencies to third party technologies we integrate. We've managed to get all those resolved for the Runtime part (Mac/Windows/Linux standalone players) a while ago (we've been adding 64 bit versions of those during the 3.x and 4.x release cycles), which meant getting Mono, PhysX, FMOD, Substance, etc all working on 64 bit. For the editor, however, there are a lot more third party libraries involved (such as a web browser engine for the asset store), not all of which had 64 bit versions to start with. So there were a lot of dependencies to resolve, which is why this took time. Good news is, we have all this working in 5.0, which will be out later this year.

-For the new GUI, we are not going to fix this only in Unity 5, but already in Unity 4.6, which should be out really soon.

-About the "JavaScript" misnomer, I agree that that was a bad decision in retrospect, though it is not trivial to change at this point.

[tobz]

What is the deal with software being hard to release as 64-bit?

I'll fully admit that I don't work in C/C++ on the desktop, at all. This just seems like a button toggle problem (I know it was that way for C#/.NET apps, again, grossly simplify and apples to oranges) though, and it's surprising that you aren't just able to ping someone at these companies and ask for a 64-bit build.

[exDM69]

> This just seems like a button toggle problem

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The problem is knowing when it is or isn't. That needs building with all warnings enabled and vetting through them manually, a run with a static analysis tool searching for possible 64 bit bugs, or at worst, running extensive test suites to try to detect errors at runtime.

Some (older) software might also have some internal structures that are designed on the assumption that pointer size equals 32 bits.

This issue is made worse by the loose conventions in implicit integer type casts in C and C++. Warnings do help here, but there's going to be a huge amount of spurious warnings too.

So, at best, all you need to do is change compiler flags. At worst, you'll need a lot of manual labor in making sure that your applications build cleanly for 64 bit machines.

[pjmlp]

To the point that Microsoft even introduced 32to64 porting tools in the Windows SDK, because not everyone made proper use of platform agnostic types and helper macros to start with.

[aras_p]

> What is the deal with software being hard to release as 64-bit?

(disclaimer: I work at Unity)

It is a button toggle problem, if the code does not do nasty things (like casting between a pointer and a 4-byte-integer -> all works until pointers are not 4 bytes). Or if a code depends on, for example, inline assembly (VisualC++ remove that in 64 bit). Or if the code generates code at runtime, for example JavaScript engines - for 64 bit they need to generate different code.

In Unity's case, the biggest holdup, of all things, was WebKit (used for asset store window & some other things). Turns out, there's no 64 bit webkit for Windows (or there wasn't a while ago). We had to replace Webkit with Gecko, which was quite involved task.

[sorbits]

On OS X switching from 32 to 64 bit also means no longer being able to use many Carbon APIs.

I would imagine that cross platform software is more likely to use the Carbon APIs because they are procedural and often a bit more low-level than the “modern” Cocoa equivalents.