What Unity Is Getting Wrong, by Garry Newman (Developer of Rust, Garry's Mod)

[delete12345]

When I added Lua to Garry's Mod my intention wasn't primarily to make things moddable. I wanted to make things easier for myself. By wrapping a few functions and coding in Lua I could iterate a million times faster. I didn't have to close, compile and re-open every time, while also hiding all the bullshit and hard stuff.

Click to shrink...

Unity was about that when we first started with it. They hid all the hard stuff in c++ so we didn't have to think about it. The more time has gone on, the more bullshit has crept to the forefront. The've gone from hiding the hard stuff to moving more and more stuff into C#.

Click to shrink...

So while other engines have been trying to catch Unity up in terms of developer friendliness, Unity has been going the other way by making itself more unfriendly.

Click to shrink...

What Unity Is Getting Wrong

Developer QOL When I added Lua to Garry’s Mod my intention wasn’t primarily to make things moddable. I wanted to make things eas...

garry.tv

There is a lot to take from this. Unity 2020 doesn't seem to address some common complaints about the underlying issues many Unity developers are facing. Especially with UNET, which I personally used in the past for prototyping my real-time strategy game, linked below. UNET is now deprecated for 4 years, and no prominent solution was given as to what roadmap Unity Technologies has in store for us.

GitHub - tommai78101/Multiplier: Real-time Strategy Unit Balancing Tool, written in Unity 5 with UNET support.

Real-time Strategy Unit Balancing Tool, written in Unity 5 with UNET support. - tommai78101/Multiplier

github.com

Here's a good summary, from the Unity developer of Throne of Lies:

Let's not forget how they like to abandon entire modules and make you upgrade to reap the benefits/fixes (defeating the purpose of LTS).

• Did you know UNET was only made by TWO devs, none dedicated to docs, support, or anything? No one from Unity knew anything about their own product that they were charging for in an alpha-like state, only to abandon it completely not long after. UNET is coming back in a different form soon, but swept under the carpet (LTS will not get fixes).
• Only in Unity 2020 (not LTS) did they fix their massive number of Unicode issues, even though Unity is pretty much the only engine used in Taiwan and other Asian countries. Every time the user typed in Chinese or a foreign language, it would show garbage text surrounding your text while typing among other breaking issues.
• Editor performance still a major issue for medium+ scope projects, where every small change will "refresh" your ENTIRE project synchronously on a single thread. Working on a small scene and change a text box and save, but your project is 15gb? Expect your project to be locked completely for up to 60s. Slightly better in Unity 2020 btw (not LTS), but the root isn't fixed. I heard that in Unreal, when you save a big project, it saves INSTANTLY (smart scans?).
• Still tons of performance issues (both in editor and standalone), and DOTS is a good direction ... but this means that any performance issues for those not yet adapting DOTS (existing projects) will be swept under the carpet to never be seen by LTS versions.
• If you use Unity, you probably want to, well, use the native text engine! Well, we (and millions of others) used many, many textboxes and interactions throughout the dev process. Guess what happened? Instead of fixing all their bugs/issues/lacking features, they bought TMPro and swept the bugs right under the carpet. LTS will never see any fixes.
• Leading up to ... there's no point of LTS for Unity. If there are bugs, they'll just abandon the system and have an excuse to never fix it. "Just upgrade and spend hundreds of hours swapping to our new systems that we'll change again next year with your small, indie team with limited resources!"
• Heck, I read on the Unity forum in a feedback thread that they purged all their bug reports (including unresolved) on their open src repo (BitBucket, iirc?). I wish I could find this link to verify (can someone help me out?). Just stuff like this. Burying issues as if it'll resolve everything.

Unity is a marketing company. It needs to be a gamedev company. They don't make games with their own engine, so the people making these big decisions are likely from investor pressure to do something that may look good in their head, but likely never made a game in their life. These are the type of people that think "ooh, implement x feature" instead of asking the important things like "how's the stability? How many bugs do we have?"
Unity is great, don't get me wrong -- but they leave a lot to be desired. They're the only enterprise company that has such unstable "stable" features and adds features BEFORE editor performance/bug fixes. I mean what if Visual Studio froze for 30+ seconds every time you saved??

Click to shrink...

r/gamedev - Garry Newman (Developer of Rust, Garry's Mod): 'What Unity is Getting Wrong'

1,725 votes and 470 comments so far on Reddit

www.reddit.com

More discussions in the link above.

 

[V has come to]

Is he related to Edgar Newman?

 

[TeaberryShark]

he isn't wrong, it's almost like Unity can't decide where they want to go with it so they are pulling a jack of all trades, master of none move and I don't know that its working... Sure, in a few years, if all the pieces come together, they will have a hell of a platform/servce... But they start and stop projects as fast as I do lol

 

[LewieP]

Yeah echoes what I've heard from several devs, and he's quite clearly spelled out what a lot of the issues are.

Obviously still a very useful tool, and plenty of devs continue to use it despite these frustrations, but I hope they begin to address problems in the future.

 

[PowerThroughLov]

Unreal going royalty free until 1 million in sales has got to start enroaching on Unities stanglehold here. Unity is still far simpler, but its got to be worth the time for some devs to invest in Unreal knowing they get support/updates and a (imo) better tech stack.

 

[Weltall Zero]

The list of issues is entirely accurate. Unity has an awful story of fixing systemic issues in major revisions (or not fixing them at all for years), forcing you to invent creative, often painful and time-consuming workarounds.

If you use Unity regularly, it's a very common experience to google an issue, then find a thread in their forums about it with several people complaining about it and zero responses from the Unity team (or worse, dismissive and rude responses!). The pattern of having people fix glaring issues with Unity through third-party extensions that are pretty much mandatory purchases is also pretty common. TextMesh Pro, mentioned in the article, is at least now free and included with Unity, but it's still not ideal to force users to migrate all their text displays, instead of at least adding barebones functionality to the base text display. And good luck implementing multiplatform controller support without Rewired, which is a separate purchase.

 

[FSP]

They're a garbage vendor of a resonably OK product. Epic could kill them off somewhat easily if they wanted to.

Much like many, many aspects of modern computer programming, Unity gets away with murder because it designed itself to be easy for someone trained in Java to pick up.

 

[Kyuur]

All tools have problems. I don't think complaining about breaking changes being well, breaking, has much merit.

The list of issues is entirely accurate. Unity has an awful story of fixing systemic issues in major revisions (or not fixing them at all for years), forcing you to invent creative, often painful and time-consuming workarounds.

If you use Unity regularly, it's a very common experience to google an issue, then find a thread in their forums about it with several people complaining about it and zero responses from the Unity team (or worse, dismissive and rude responses!). The pattern of having people fix glaring issues with Unity through third-party extensions that are pretty much mandatory purchases is also pretty common. TextMesh Pro, mentioned in the article, is at least now free and included with Unity, but it's still not ideal to force users to migrate all their text displays, instead of at least adding barebones functionality to the base text display. And good luck implementing multiplatform controller support without Rewired, which is a separate purchase.

Click to shrink...

Isn't the new input system designed for just this?

 

[PennyStonks]

The part about dots is funny. part of the reason I'm messing around with EU4 now.

 

[darkfall]

The killer part of Unity for me as a solo developer is just how easy is to extend the Editor itself for customized workflows, and "fix" some of their issues if you know how it works.

Its doable in UE but much more complex, due to cpp as a native language. I can make a bullet hell editor in a small amount of time in Unity but not UE (in fact I made a bullet hell demo in an editor view in UE instead for fun). Though this was a few years ago things might improved a lot.

I feel recent years Unity just kept adding new shiny things but they never fully usable. Packages have been marked as experimental / beta for years but still there, while old bugs in existing ones are not fixed, which is kind of weird for game development workflow. And the new shiny tool or workflow things are often made by programmers, not designers that use them. From a usability point of view a lot of them are just made to expose some functionality but not made to be user friendly.

Updating often breaks things so people I know usually stick with a relatively old version. In fact, established studios all have source code access so they can fix bugs on their own and often heavily modify the low-level engine part.

 

[Deleted member 60295]

AHAHAHAHAHA. This is hilarious. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sure the points Garry is making are valid. That's not the problem. The problem is he's the last person who should be saying this shit, because this entire blog entry is a blatant pile of hypocrisy. Let me explain.

So, I dunno if any of you were aware, but facepunch studios used to have an accompanying message board. forum.facepunch.com. It existed for almost as long as garry's mod, in fact, because it was the central community hub for the game. Said community, of course, is the biggest reason garry's mod became as big as it did. And members of facepunch forums also produced tons of other creative works, including games like the Stanley Parable and Jaboni Brawl (formerly Jaykin Bacon).

This community had its ups and downs, but damnit, it was our community - for better or for worse. And then Garry had to ruin everything. See, the forum's code was understandably very old, and was increasingly posing a serious security risk to everyone who was a member. So Garry decided to make a brand new forum, which we all moved over to in 2018. Great idea, except for one problem.... Garry couldn't be damned to listen to any of our feedback, because he had a specific direction in mind for facepunch 2.0 that completely misunderstood why we loved the facepunch forum so much.

No, instead, our experience very much resembled exactly what he's criticizing Unity engine for in his blog post:

An engine works best when it's used as a foundation that can be improved without all the houses built on top of it having to be rebuilt.

There's no doubt that Unity are improving things, but it's like living in a house that is continually being renovated. You've got comfortable in a room, installed all your fitted furniture, decorated all the walls, and then Unity come in and tell you they need to take the floor up again.

Hopefully this is just a bad period for Unity and there will come a time where they stop ripping the floors up.

Click to shrink...

See, garry mistakenly believed the fundamental foundation of facepunch was broken, because sites like reddit were the supposedly future of social media, and traditional message boards were obsolete. Obviously, everyone that was currently a member of facepunch disagreed. And rather than listen to our feedback, garry would randomly make massive changes to the forums without prior warning. And these changes were received very poorly. So, inevitably, the relationship between us and garry grew really sour over the next year.

And then finally, Garry decided to pull an Eric Cartman and shut down the forums, just so he wouldn't have to deal with us anymore. None of us actually wanted this, though, cause even though we were frustrated with Garry, we didn't hate him. The feeling, unfortunately, was not mutual. And Garry acted like a child through the entire ordeal.But don't take my word for it, cause I've got the receipts:

(Knockout, btw, is an entirely separate forum made by a former moderator of facepunch.forums, that served as a life raft for the facepunch forums member base after we were forced off of the site.)

And after all of this, he had the gall to deface what little was left of the forums with this blatant pile of lies:

http://web.archive.org/web/20190613114312/https://forum.facepunch.com/

Garry is a decent developer - at least as far as the coding side goes - but make no mistake, he's also a massive dick. The fame and riches clearly went to his head, given how young he was when garry's mod blew up, and he has no appreciation for the massive community that helped build his empire. And like many former facepunch forum members, I personally will never give him a single further cent of my money. Not after what he did to our community.

 

[Weltall Zero]

All tools have problems. I don't think complaining about breaking changes being well, breaking, has much merit.

Click to shrink...

Because platitudes like "all tools have problems" have a lot of merit. :P

The complaint is the frequency and necessity of breaking changes, especially when they come at the expense of not fixing basic issues with already implemented official systems. Characterizing that as "complaining that breaking changes are breaking" is as helpful as characterizing criticism of COVID response as "complaining that deaths from coronavirus are, well, lethal".

Isn't the new input system designed for just this?

Click to shrink...

I haven't looked much into the new input system; it wasn't out when I started developing and I needed something then, so I moved on to Rewired, which "just works" (more than I can say of most Unity systems). That said, I checked it out of curiosity when it released and it seemed pretty trainwrecky (much like most of Unity's new systems). Apparently you can't even do anything as simple as a GetButtonDown during a FixedUpdate out of the box; it's all handled via events. Which, sure, you can write around, but that's the entire point being made here; new systems that force you to change all of your code base.

 

[Onix555]

.

Click to shrink...

Ok but we're talking about Unity

 

[RazorbackDB]

Sadly UE hasn't been that great on the stability front these last versions either, crashes everywhere and pick your poison in which bug you want

4.22 Broken Early Z-Pass
4.23 Scene Capture tanks performance
4.24 Broken Landscape physical materials, landscapes are in general a crash fest now.
4.25 Lightmass is all weird now.

Just to name a bug in each version. So okay your issue get's fixed in the next one or two versions, great! but you have to deal with all the bugs introduced in between. Maybe refactoring everything for RT, VT, Chaos, Niagara is having a toll on the stability and while all the new features are great we need better maintenance of earlier versions.

 

[SaberVS7]

words

Click to shrink...

Dude, just... Use Knockout like the rest of us.

Garry made it very clear in his last few years running the forums that he wanted to focus his efforts on being a software developer, not a forum administrator. And that the FP forums were distracting from the actual business making him money.

 

[Bunkles]

Unity is great but fuck if it's not one of the most frustrating programs when you have to program hack wordarounds every time they update / break shit.

 

[KDR_11k]

I mean what if Visual Studio froze for 30+ seconds every time you saved??

Click to shrink...

Then it would be called Eclipse...

 

[Akela]

You have no idea how awkward it is trying to use those two render pipelines. I really don't know why they went down that route where the engine has essentially three different renderers with different feature sets which are for the most part completely arbitrary. Surely the developer should be the one to choose if a certain rendering feature is too heavy for their specific project, instead of packing up different different feature sets into two pipelines making the develop choose between them?

I've been working on some art projects recently to sell on the asset store and it's been a complete nightmare - 3 different versions of every material. Two different shader graphs that are virtually identical except one uses the PBR shader and other other the HDRP Lit shader. For a engine that prides itself on it's ease of use they've made even basic functionality extremely complex recently for no apparent reason.

 

[Kyuur]

Because platitudes like "all tools have problems" have a lot of merit. :P

The complaint is the frequency and necessity of breaking changes, especially when they come at the expense of not fixing basic issues with already implemented official systems. Characterizing that as "complaining that breaking changes are breaking" is as helpful as characterizing criticism of COVID response as "complaining that deaths from coronavirus are, well, lethal".



I haven't looked much into the new input system; it wasn't out when I started developing and I needed something then, so I moved on to Rewired, which "just works" (more than I can say of most Unity systems). That said, I checked it out of curiosity when it released and it seemed pretty trainwrecky (much like most of Unity's new systems). Apparently you can't even do anything as simple as a GetButtonDown during a FixedUpdate out of the box; it's all handled via events. Which, sure, you can write around, but that's the entire point being made here; new systems that force you to change all of your code base.

Click to shrink...

Haha, fair enough!

It's just that stuff like improving performance and text rendering aren't bugs. They make no sense for LTS. Would it be nice to have some compatibility for people who don't want to move over? Absolutely (as long as its not holding back newer APIs). I just don't think you should expect it for LTS.

Maybe they are doing a bad job for everyday bug fixes in LTS but most of the examples given seem (besides the unicode thing) seem like larger pieces of work.

 

[Jebusman]

AHAHAHAHAHA. This is hilarious. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sure the points Garry is making are valid. That's not the problem. The problem is he's the last person who should be saying this shit, because this entire blog entry is a blatant pile of hypocrisy. Let me explain.

So, I dunno if any of you were aware, but facepunch studios used to have an accompanying message board. forum.facepunch.com. It existed for almost as long as garry's mod, in fact, because it was the central community hub for the game. Said community, of course, is the biggest reason garry's mod became as big as it did. And members of facepunch forums also produced tons of other creative works, including games like the Stanley Parable and Jaboni Brawl (formerly Jaykin Bacon).

This community had its ups and downs, but damnit, it was our community - for better or for worse. And then Garry had to ruin everything. See, the forum's code was understandably very old, and was increasingly posing a serious security risk to everyone who was a member. So Garry decided to make a brand new forum, which we all moved over to in 2018. Great idea, except for one problem.... Garry couldn't be damned to listen to any of our feedback, because he had a specific direction in mind for facepunch 2.0 that completely misunderstood why we loved the facepunch forum so much.

No, instead, our experience very much resembled exactly what he's criticizing Unity engine for in his blog post:



See, garry mistakenly believed the fundamental foundation of facepunch was broken, because sites like reddit were the supposedly future of social media, and traditional message boards were obsolete. Obviously, everyone that was currently a member of facepunch disagreed. And rather than listen to our feedback, garry would randomly make massive changes to the forums without prior warning. And these changes were received very poorly. So, inevitably, the relationship between us and garry grew really sour over the next year.

And then finally, Garry decided to pull an Eric Cartman and shut down the forums, just so he wouldn't have to deal with us anymore. None of us actually wanted this, though, cause even though we were frustrated with Garry, we didn't hate him. The feeling, unfortunately, was not mutual. And Garry acted like a child through the entire ordeal.But don't take my word for it, cause I've got the receipts:

(Knockout, btw, is an entirely separate forum made by a former moderator of facepunch.forums, that served as a life raft for the facepunch forums member base after we were forced off of the site.)

And after all of this, he had the gall to deface what little was left of the forums with this blatant pile of lies:

http://web.archive.org/web/20190613114312/https://forum.facepunch.com/

Garry is a decent developer - at least as far as the coding side goes - but make no mistake, he's also a massive dick. The fame and riches clearly went to his head, given how young he was when garry's mod blew up, and he has no appreciation for the massive community that helped build his empire. And like many former facepunch forum members, I personally will never give him a single further cent of my money. Not after what he did to our community.

Click to shrink...

Tbh you sound more like an child than he does. On top of this having absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand.

 

[Costa]

This sounds like surface level complaints and doesn't really get into the why these things are bad.

Unity's got problems. It's even got a lot of them. But it's a game engine that's free to get into, has an easy and powerful scripting engine, as well as an incredibly robust editor that you can customize to do whatever you need in it. It might take longer than, say, GameMaker 2.0 to get a prototype going but for long-term dev work, it's easy to get a new system going and integrated with the editor. There's nothing better if those are important to you.

The UI engine, as much as I've gotten used to its quirks, definitely needs a revamp for sure though.

 

[Ventrue]

I did find the text mesh pro thing mentioned in the article particularly galling when using Unity. Really dumb way to solve the issue.

Do they have a better version control solution baked in yet? I seem to remember their one not having branches.

 

[Calabi]

I kind of agree it feels like Unity currently is in a bit of a confused mess. Like DOTS isn't very easy to use currently you have to know how to use matrix functions you have to be really good at maths to use it whereas normal monobehaviour has lots of straight forward helper functions to do common basic things. I'm really useless at maths and programming I have no clue why I keep continuing to struggle with using it, but it is kind of really early in its development. I mean it is helping me do multithreaded code which there is no way I would be able to do that normally though. I'm hoping they will make it more accessible to the lay person whom isn't an expert at maths.

There's lot of half finished packages that are in active development, and it does feel like they don't really know how their users use it. With these new innovations in Unreal Engine 5 I was briefly tempted to try it out but unless things have change recently then it has a few problem of its own for new users. Its not as accessible as Unity, you can only program in C++ or its Visual Blueprints thing, I know I would struggle a lot more to do the things I want in Unreal Engine than I would Unity. All these Engines have their problems and trade offs.

 

[Weltall Zero]

It's just that stuff like improving performance and text rendering aren't bugs. They make no sense for LTS. Would it be nice to have some compatibility for people who don't want to move over? Absolutely (as long as its not holding back newer APIs). I just don't think you should expect it for LTS.

Click to shrink...

Sure, but on top of that there's actual bugs that don't get solved, or take ages to solve. At this point I've already made peace with the fact I will have to keep updating my game with newer Unity releases for as long as I keep developing it.

Tbh you sound more like an child than he does. On top of this having absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, that was just an overlong ad hominem that has nothing to do with the actual matter at hand.

Do they have a better version control solution baked in yet? I seem to remember their one not having branches.

Click to shrink...

You would not catch me dead using a source control solution of all things made by the Unity dev team in a freaking million years. I would sooner let Homer Simpson pilot a plane I'm a passenger of. For all I care Linus Torwalds himself may praise it for weeks and declare Git obsolete in comparison; I still wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

 

[kiguel182]

A lot of working with Unity just seems to be "install these package instead of using what comes pre installed". Its a mess.

 

[1-D_FE]

I did find the text mesh pro thing mentioned in the article particularly galling when using Unity. Really dumb way to solve the issue.

Do they have a better version control solution baked in yet? I seem to remember their one not having branches.

Click to shrink...

The tutorials thing was probably the biggest for me. They're so awful, but that networking one is especially hilarious.

I also don't understand why they're making things so confusing of late. Like he says, just pick something and roll with it. Especially since they're notorious for their lousy documentation and tutorials. This fragmentation is just making these issues stand out even more.

I have the least issues with the Text Mesh Pro stuff. He mentions it's a one way street for the upgrade. This is true. But it's one way street out of a bombed out warzone. Why would you ever want to go back? I just can't see any reason why anyone would want to ever roll back after they've made that upgrade.

 

[Rolento]

I use to use Unity for all my 3D development but for these very reasons in the OP, I have jumped ship to UE4. Yes, Unity seems to be getting less user friendly while UE4 and GoDot just get better and better consistently.

 

[delete12345]

Kind of wondering if Godot has built-in networking.

 

[Kyuur]

A lot of working with Unity just seems to be "install these package instead of using what comes pre installed". Its a mess.

Click to shrink...

Packages are absolutely the better way to go for the future.

I imagine they'll eventually strip a lot of the basic stuff out once more of the replacement systems are out of preview. It's just an ugly transition period.

 

[HypedBulborb]

Yeah, i'm getting more and more annoyed working with Unity. Too bad this was the main platform that was used during my studies so I can't easily switch to something like UE4 because of the c++ barrier.

 

[Gay Bowser]

Unity's got problems. It's even got a lot of them. But it's a game engine that's free to get into, has an easy and powerful scripting engine, as well as an incredibly robust editor that you can customize to do whatever you need in it.

Click to shrink...

The thing is, literally all the competition is also free to get into now. Unity doesn't get points for being "the free option" that's accessible to hobbyists any more; they're an enterprise software vendor that is selling a software platform that people are running their businesses on. They want to play in the big leagues, and we should treat them accordingly.

 

[1-D_FE]

Oh, on a plus note, I've noticed you can finally get refunds for Asset store purchases.

This whole situation had to have been doing a number on that. I essentially stopped buying anything because of the high probability it would be broken. I felt like I was getting the finger on my last couple purchases.

 

[dock]

When I first used Unity in 2008 you could pretty reliably change code while the scene was running in the editor. It is a whole different world now.

 

[Menx64]

I was doing some testing in Unity but decided to move to UE after a while. From my programming background, but limited game dev experience Unity looked like the best option. Now I am testing the cryengine and having some fun.
Note, this is not for a game, but just fun.

 

[Paz]

I wish a billionaire would just donate a couple million to Godot so we can just move on from Unity's ever growing list of 'why are they doing it like this' issues.

 

[Anacaona]

Use Godot

 

[AntiMacro]

Unity is great but fuck if it's not one of the most frustrating programs when you have to program hack wordarounds every time they update / break shit.

Click to shrink...

Easily my two favourite phrases around Unity development are "holy fuck how do I make this work now" and "holy fuck why does that even WORK?"

 

[Vanillalite]

I wish Godot would add official VS support vs just VSC.

 

[Bjones]

 

[johan]

The problem with Unity is that it doesn't work all that well when you use it like they describe/show in the docs. In some tutorial video's they write code that's straight up bad code. Fine for rapid prototyping perhaps but you shouldn't write production code like that.

DOTS/ECS is so rigid that it forces you to write good code. But it's obtuse and hard. Will still take a long time before it's ready for use probably. I really like the ECS paradigm but the new Unity ECS is a terrible way to learn it and I think scares a lot of devs

When you use Unity basically as a rendering engine it works pretty well. Drawing meshes directly using Graphics.DrawMesh with poco's and the like instead of using Mesh Renderers on GameObjects for instance.

UGUI sucks very much though. The new UIElements/UIToolkit is far better, but it's not finished yet and knowing Unity that will take a while

Also I think you can't really compare C# to Lua. Can't hot reload C# like you can with Lua

 

[CommodoreKong]

AHAHAHAHAHA. This is hilarious. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sure the points Garry is making are valid. That's not the problem. The problem is he's the last person who should be saying this shit, because this entire blog entry is a blatant pile of hypocrisy. Let me explain.

So, I dunno if any of you were aware, but facepunch studios used to have an accompanying message board. forum.facepunch.com. It existed for almost as long as garry's mod, in fact, because it was the central community hub for the game. Said community, of course, is the biggest reason garry's mod became as big as it did. And members of facepunch forums also produced tons of other creative works, including games like the Stanley Parable and Jaboni Brawl (formerly Jaykin Bacon).

This community had its ups and downs, but damnit, it was our community - for better or for worse. And then Garry had to ruin everything. See, the forum's code was understandably very old, and was increasingly posing a serious security risk to everyone who was a member. So Garry decided to make a brand new forum, which we all moved over to in 2018. Great idea, except for one problem.... Garry couldn't be damned to listen to any of our feedback, because he had a specific direction in mind for facepunch 2.0 that completely misunderstood why we loved the facepunch forum so much.

No, instead, our experience very much resembled exactly what he's criticizing Unity engine for in his blog post:



See, garry mistakenly believed the fundamental foundation of facepunch was broken, because sites like reddit were the supposedly future of social media, and traditional message boards were obsolete. Obviously, everyone that was currently a member of facepunch disagreed. And rather than listen to our feedback, garry would randomly make massive changes to the forums without prior warning. And these changes were received very poorly. So, inevitably, the relationship between us and garry grew really sour over the next year.

And then finally, Garry decided to pull an Eric Cartman and shut down the forums, just so he wouldn't have to deal with us anymore. None of us actually wanted this, though, cause even though we were frustrated with Garry, we didn't hate him. The feeling, unfortunately, was not mutual. And Garry acted like a child through the entire ordeal.But don't take my word for it, cause I've got the receipts:

(Knockout, btw, is an entirely separate forum made by a former moderator of facepunch.forums, that served as a life raft for the facepunch forums member base after we were forced off of the site.)

And after all of this, he had the gall to deface what little was left of the forums with this blatant pile of lies:

http://web.archive.org/web/20190613114312/https://forum.facepunch.com/

Garry is a decent developer - at least as far as the coding side goes - but make no mistake, he's also a massive dick. The fame and riches clearly went to his head, given how young he was when garry's mod blew up, and he has no appreciation for the massive community that helped build his empire. And like many former facepunch forum members, I personally will never give him a single further cent of my money. Not after what he did to our community.

Click to shrink...

I remember back when Garry decided he didn't want mega threads anymore but just regular threads on different topics, everyone decided just decided to make thread after thread where the OP was just a shit post.
I made a shit post thread in the Team Fortress 2 subforum about the one Valve employee that occasionally posted in the TF2 subforum about TF2 and got that Valve employee to shit post in that thread, which was his first post in facepunch in like 6+ months. It was great.

 

[Popstar]

.

 

[ArchedThunder]

So with the new "No royalties until you've made a million dollars" thing with Unreal Engine what is there to keep devs using Unity?

 

[Aureon]

They're a garbage vendor of a resonably OK product. Epic could kill them off somewhat easily if they wanted to.

Much like many, many aspects of modern computer programming, Unity gets away with murder because it designed itself to be easy for someone trained in Java to pick up.

Click to shrink...

As a developer in an UE4 studio, let me tell you:
They can't.
UE4 mobile is an afterthought, and as small team, it's a shitshow.
For console\desktop, yeah. As the years go by, there's ever less reasons to use Unity over UE4.

 

[Aureon]

So with the new "No royalties until you've made a million dollars" thing with Unreal Engine what is there to keep devs using Unity?

Click to shrink...

Mobile.
Also legacy knowledge

 

[Jobbs]

So with the new "No royalties until you've made a million dollars" thing with Unreal Engine what is there to keep devs using Unity?

Click to shrink...

Speaking for myself as someone working on a major project in Unity I enjoy writing c# scripts. I'm not sure how I'd tackle UE4. Coding in C++ looks harder and I have no interest in doing logic via a convoluted overly busy graphical interface (blueprints).

The only real issue I have with Unity personally is some of the compile waits when testing (or like when I make a small change to a script and save it, it makes the whole editor pause for a bit). Overall I really like it.