Garry Newman

I always have this quote from Garry Newman of GMod & Rust (a Unity Project) fame at the back of my mind when hearing any news about Unity's new demos. > The short movie demos aren't impressive. It's embarassing when half your keynote is a group of artists explaining how they spent 6 months re-writing half the engine to render something that they could made in Maya in a week. - https://garry.tv/unity-2020 Really wish Unity stopped being recommended as a great first choice for hobbyists with a bit of programming experience in general. In my experience I've found it a lot harder to get going with it, and requires dealing with a lot of systems which are in various stages of deprecation or early access compared to UE.

Like some others who are commenting, I use Unity for my job every day, and it's not been a great experience these last few years, each 'part' (graphics pipelines, documentation, Editor and tooling, and so on) has been steadily deteriorating over the versions. This article from Garry (from Garry's Mod, Rust and so on) from earlier in the year is still all accurate: https://garry.tv/unity-2020 Sadly, I wonder how much the last few years of very obviously aiming at Going Public has led the company and Unity as a software to this state. When the forums are full of "what is going on with Unity" threads and the company blog is full of "we've bought this cloud company" and "we're investing in AR for automative engineering", something isn't matching up.

Garry's blog post about this was particularly insightful.[0] He shares a graph of his progress and how it goes both forwards and backwards, as well as the things he's learned along the way. 0: https://garry.tv/2018/10/17/fatty/

Dyon (from that link) looks very cool! I'd also like to add that JavaScript is another language used in this arena, and there is a crate with V8 bindings (https://crates.io/crates/v8). Even Garry Newman (creator of Garry's mod) wrote that he believes JS would have been better than Lua for scripting: https://garry.tv/2014/08/16/i-fell-out-of-love-with-lua/

Unity is great and really took the mantle from Flash/Director back in the day. Unity is also a big part of why mobile games have taken off, that combined with the ability of anyone to publish to mobile stores and more. The problem is definitely churn and shaky foundations. Unity has a "version 2" problem, the "second-system effect" is a major tenant of Unity engineering which sucks [1]. I really wish they locked down features like they did back when the team was very small. Maybe that is the problem, too many cooks. The "move fast and break things" has also made very unstable systems and updating a chore. I like moving fast, but only break things if what is gained is more than before, not back to the same footing. I have been using Unity since 2008, shipped many, many titles on it but due to their churn and every changing APIs/libs/features, updating games is a major pain even mere months out. Networking is a major problem, always in flux and Photon is still the best probably. There are other third party solutions to it but I don't know I'll ever trust a Unity networking library again. UI is a major problem, again always in flux, from GUI, to UnityUI, and now to UIComponents. Unity loves to push off all problems with a shiny new future thing that never really solves much but adds more problems. Everyone knows about IL2CPP, the animation changes, particle system changes, rendering pipeline flux and more so I'll spare you [2]. It seems much of what Unity changes…

1. Indexes start at 1. That's your opinion. 2, 3. Using "it's easier for new users" is not a good argument for a good programming language. x = x + 1 is not hard to grasp. It's not, but it's more typing. I would argue that ++x and x += aren't that hard to grasp. 4. Javascript has bitwise operators even though it only has doubles. It simply casts it to an int32 before doing the operation 5. Continue is very much necessary in loops like this, unless you want some deeply nested code: for(...){ if(...) continue; if(...) continue; if(...) continue; if(...) continue; if(...) continue; ... } 6. It's what the most popular languages out there use. It doesn't have to be !=, which is why it's towards the end of my list, but being different than everyone else is even worse for new users, which is the opposite of what you're arguing for. -- Garry Newman blogged a bit about this too. His game used Lua extensively, but he changed his opinion about it: https://garry.tv/2014/08/16/i-fell-out-of-love-with-lua/. Now, I don't like JavaScript, but at the moment, it's the best scripting language for embedding out there. I have embedded both lua and v8, and I consider v8 simpler in terms of getting it to work with your code.

I haven't used Unity, but from what I've read, Unity has a reputation for promising shiny new APIs and then neglecting/deprecating the old API before the new one is production-ready. This blog post describes some examples: URP or HDRP Render Pipeline, current UI system vs new UIElements, current UNet multiplayer support vs new system that will require integration with DOTS, ... https://garry.tv/unity-2020

The creator of Garry's Mod and Rust had a relevant blog post on this recently. There's a section specific to the multiplayer issues. https://garry.tv/unity-2020

Not a woman, but Garry of Garrysmod fame has a very interesting set of blog posts about dealing with and eventually befriending his internet stalker in an attempt to curb the guy's worst behavior. http://garry.tv/2015/11/10/stalkers-and-abuse-part-1/

They're not working on a production device, but they have an internal prototype which the few third-parties who've tested it consider mind-blowing even compared to OR's Crystal Cove. It might be the result of Ellsworth's work though https://twitter.com/DaveOshry/statuses/423961443889717248 (Palmer is Palmer Luckey, founder and CEO of Oculus Rift) https://twitter.com/TheDavidHensley/statuses/423591891171426304 https://twitter.com/TheDavidHensley/statuses/423592847531466752 (Tripwire, Killing Floor & Red Orchestra) http://garry.tv/2014/01/16/steam-dev-days-day-1/ (Garry's Mod author) http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1vc9gz/im_a_dev_that_got_to_tr… (random schmuck who got to try it)

This article hit close to home, albeit my contact with a cyberstalker was (thank god) very brief it was a nerve-wrecking experience, to which end I panicked and deleted a lot of accounts and profiles in an attempt to make it harder to track my online activity. I was scared the stalking and harassment would become more personal, "leaking" in to the real world -- but it thankfully did not. A lot of the (non-technical) internet users probably don't know how easy it can be to link an online identity to your person, be it through handle (nickname) re-use or simply having a pattern of likes and dislikes or hanging out with the wrong crowd. Once the connection is made you have nothing left to shield yourself with and will have to, like the person in this article, deal with it on a daily basis. I've since grown up a little, grown a thicker hide and conquered my paranoia to a degree thanks to therapy, and have started to comment and share online again but the fear of coming across the wrong person with too much time on their hands still feels chilling to me. Garry Newman (the guy behind "Garrys Mod" and "Rust" (game)) published[1] a rather interesting chain of emails, a peek in to the mind of his stalker. [1] https://garry.tv/2015/11/10/stalkers-and-abuse-part-1/