Unity buys glorified malware company and calls developers "fucking idiots"

[Day of the Cope]

So, a couple weeks ago, Unity revealed that they were laying off hundreds of staffers.

However, it has now come come to light that Unity is partnering with Ironsource for $4.4b. If you aren't aware, Ironsource are the minds behind InstallCore which is a wrapper for bundling software installations. If you made the mistake of running this piece of shit, you will be offered countless amounts of shit with generic names like DriverSupport to trick unsavvy internet users into installing enough browser toolbars and other bloat to bring your system to its knees. Even Windows Defender and MalwareBytes refuse to let this shit run. It also tried to convince people that Snapchat had a Windows version and instead installed BlueStacks before running Snapchat through said emulator.

In 2015 , Ironsource merged with Supersonic, who themselves were behind the development of an in-app purchase platform. In 2022, they then bought up Tapjoy, a specialist in mobile advertising and app monetization. This is relevant since Unity are looking to expand heavily into game monetization and plan on "harnessing the company's tools, platform, technology, and talent to form an end-to-end platform that enables creators to more easily create, publish, run, monetize, and grow live games and [real-time 3D] content seamlessly."

Unity already has Unity Ads, "our monetization solution for mobile games that enables game developers to monetize their entire player base", but speak heavily of using that in combination with IronSource, "Unity and ironSource's complementary data and product capabilities will give creators access to better funding for user acquisition (UA) and monetization to successfully scale their games and accelerate their economic performance."

There's also a comment from the CEO, John Riccitiello, stating that developers who don't think about monetization during the creative process are "fucking idiots". While Unity is an engine used by a number of people to create asset flips for the sole purpose of flooding Steam with garbage, it's also behind a number of well-made games. This move is likely to cause a lot of animosity towards developers who may end up fleeing towards Unreal Engine and anything that gives Tim Sweeny more power is already a bad idea.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Rest in fucking piss and don't let the door hit you on the way out. Being way too close to the engine I've seen something of this sort coming for a while and welcome Godot becoming the new unpozzed multilanguage platform for game development.

Unity's engine becomes fucking awful once you get to the point where you need to do anything low-level and it's really evident that there was a massive schism somewhere in 2019 over how to handle some of the rendering internals. Without getting too far into it anything involving runtime model generation has become a massive clusterfuck as most of the documentation no longer matches behavior and the whole engine itself is starting to resemble PHP with large numbers of nearly identically-named methods with subtle differences.

E: I think the best ways to convey how absolutely bullshit Unity's design is to programmers who haven't been exposed to it is to point out that basically none of the rendering engine is threadsafe, and if you're doing anything like loading models in a background thread you have to hack up your own scheduler to make sure the actual calls that touch the GPU run on the main thread and are properly timed so that they don't cause hitching if done while ingame. Also, input is done solely by polling so you can either poll whenever you render a frame, at a fixed rate (50 times a second) or roll your own input handler that properly handles interrupts. Sound is a similar clusterfuck. Advances have been made towards solving these problems but they're all experimental and generally lack the features of the established versions.

 

[Pissmaster]

Well, that's one way to keep cementing Unity's reputation as the IDE of choice for hacks.

Godot bros where you at

 

[Penne Dreadful]

Godot becoming the new unpozzed multilanguage platform for game development.

Godot may be the superior multilanguage platform, but it's still pozzed, as mentioned from time to time in the Open Source Software thread.

 

[Jones McCann]

From my very minor experience, Unreal Engine is vastly superior and you can read and modify the engine code itself. I haven't used Godot but it cant be worse than Unity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Unity engine written in C#? That alone makes it a joke.

 

[Nick Gars]

If your focus in making a game is how much money you can force the customer to hand over, you are everything wrong with the games industry. Having some ethics and focusing on quality over quantity is something people do recognize, it's not going to make you rich immediately, but creating good faith with your customer base will benefit you tremendously in the long run.

I blame all the normies who encroached on the industry and hobby in general. Mindless fucking drones who don't give a single thought to what they're consuming, they'll throw endless money at shit like microtransactions to score that next empty dopamine hit.

Your shitty engine is overrated, John, and you are blatantly a corporate nigger through and through. I hope all that bloatware you're gonna be shoving on your users bricks their computers and you either get sued into the dirt or take such a reputational hit that no one uses your shitty product again.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Eh, I don't consider an antiharassment clause pozzed. When they start whining about Ukraine in-engine (unity's storefront visible in a tab in the editor did this for a few days) or using 'inclusive' language in naming conventions in the code I'll start worrying.

From my very minor experience, Unreal Engine is vastly superior and you can read and modify the engine code itself. I haven't used Godot but it cant be worse than Unity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Unity engine written in C#? That alone makes it a joke.

It's C++ with a C# layer where all the user stuff lives, basically the same design pattern as UT99/source/gamemaker except with a compiled VM language instead of an interpreted one. You can write and link other languages too via plug-ins but it's incredibly convoluted and about as fun as sticking your hand into a garbage disposal.

Godot uses the same design pattern except it has bindings for both C# and C++ and you can always just hack on the engine itself if you need to do something closer to the metal.

E: I feel I should also mention GB Studio, which partially exists to clown on Unity and implements a functional GUI editor + lowlevel backend + compiled vm userlang gamedev environment that targets the original gameboy circa 1989.

 

[Fuck Y'all]

>former EA CEO calling people who didn't push for monetization idiots

man can go from EA, but EA won't go from man, I guess

 

[ZMOT]

Eh, I don't consider an antiharassment clause pozzed. When they start whining about Ukraine in-engine (unity's storefront visible in a tab in the editor did this for a few days) or using 'inclusive' language in naming conventions in the code I'll start worrying.

wasn't that just their "MUH UKRAINE" sale in the asset store to fleece retards?

Unity's engine becomes fucking awful once you get to the point where you need to do anything low-level and it's really evident that there was a massive schism somewhere in 2019 over how to handle some of the rendering internals. Without getting too far into it anything involving runtime model generation has become a massive clusterfuck as most of the documentation no longer matches behavior and the whole engine itself is starting to resemble PHP with large numbers of nearly identically-named methods with subtle differences.

I'm curious, is that for the old 3d one, the new scriptable one, or both?

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Nah take it from me; Unreal is shit.

Engine bloat, unoptimizied and the 'revolutionary and realistic' graphics look like plasteline coated in plastic.

 

[DamnWolves!]

Godot uses the same design pattern except it has bindings for both C# and C++ and you can always just hack on the engine itself if you need to do something closer to the metal.

I suspect that the more "professional" an engine gets, the less they want you to touch the metal, particularly if that engine is open to the public.

Even if your engine is best-in-class, the more people can fuck with it, the higher chance there is that something breaks. If you're reliant upon your reputation for being robust and running smoothly, some hacky dev making changes can actually hurt that reputation. It doesn't really matter for Unity since their reputation is already shit (although you can make a fine game with it; cf. Cities Skylines), or Godot, since they're newer and more "scrappy", but Epic doesn't want you to re-write their billion-dollar renderer unless you're a AAA studio and they can have some input into the process and Nvidia comes in at the end to do a pass and optimize their drivers.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

wasn't that just their "MUH UKRAINE" sale in the asset store to fleece retards?

There was a big banner on the web landing splash too (the one with the links to tutorials and docs) for a week or so.

I'm curious, is that for the old 3d one, the new scriptable one, or both?

Spoiler: rendering stuff

The rendering pipelines are actually okay as far as I know. They've only been user configurable for a year or two and haven't had multiple groups of developers trying to pull them in different directions.

The part that's really bad comes before the pipeline when you need to actually get your geometry onto the GPU to begin with. Unity wants you to just throw a mesh renderer into your scene and bind a mesh to it and it'll handle loading the mesh and all its data and textures. This works, but can be unpredictable as Unity can't decide when the load is supposed to happen. Between versions it can be when the scene containing the renderer loads, when it becomes visible to a camera, or other times seemingly at random (even with breakpoints on the callbacks for loading it's unclear why Unity decides to load when it does sometimes).

So there's a bigger problem here beyond nuances with loading and minor hitching : If you need an absolute guarantee that something is loaded and ready to go on a particular frame, good fucking luck. You also have no guarantee that Unity isn't silently transforming the mesh data in some way that gives you different output than what you were expecting (very important if you need to transform a model, bake the vertices and read it back to do something with it, like fitting a hat to a character using shapekeys). This would be okay but workable if it only applied to models being loaded via binding to a renderer, but it applies to all other ways of loading models as well leading to a giant headache if you're doing anything with shaders that's passing encoded/stateful data through in the forum of uninterpolated mesh data channels.

The solutions to these problems are a handful of callbacks you can use to customize mesh loading as well as force the renderer to do specific things when it otherwise wouldn't. Hypothetically these would alleviate most of the bitching above, except most of them don't work and the ones that do tend to fail silently if called when the mesh isn't in the state the function wants.. which is something you can't guarantee, because Unity.

Next time you play something Unity that has detailed character cosmetics in it, watch the loading screens. You'll almost assuredly see at least two or three loading phases with a big hitch between them as the accepted method for working around this shit in 2020-21 was putting every model onscreen for a frame with an invisible shader to guarantee it was actually seen by a camera and loaded.

I suspect that the more "professional" an engine gets, the less they want you to touch the metal, particularly if that engine is open to the public.

Yup. Personally I like how GB Studio and GameMaker handle it letting you essentially link in assembler or raw C if you need to but telling you all bets are off if you do so.

Unity, though, likes to focus on more pressing problems, usability be damned:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/request-petition-to-change-the-predefined-color-yellow-rgba-values.426770/

Really if you want a high-level view of what's wrong with Unity as an engine, just read this forum post.

 

[Gru]

He is so sorry for calling developers fucking idiots, he just meant that they were fucking idiots but he worded it wrong!

(Tweet) (Archive)

 

[Slav Power]

What happened with the ambition of writing your own engine from scratch? CroTeam, GSC, Bugbear, they made their own in-house engines and made some really unique games, with GSC's X-Ray Engine being so open to modding you can basically mod every single thing about their games. Hell, even Sega is using their own in-house solutions for Yakuza, and Rockstar, RAGE is their brainchild and they've made fantastic games on it. When CroTeam made Serious Engine 1 they were just a bunch of Croats trying to make something out of nothing, they were very much an indie company from the start. But I guess nowadays people don't want to put in effort to make their products unique and independent.

 

[A Happy Cheerful]

SFMLsisters we keep winning

 

[DeadwastePrime]

hey unity hows it goin'



...yeah

 

[ZMOT]

There was a big banner on the web landing splash too (the one with the links to tutorials and docs) for a week or so.

I think they do that for certain big sales like christmas etc, but not sure.

hey unity hows it goin'

View attachment 3499207

...yeah

he's not wrong tho, have you seen some of those "creatives"? he also was head of EA, imagine having to work with someone from bioware...
even your average normie has usually zero fucking clue about basic business.

usually not very good for your company to say the quiet part out loud tho.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

He says 'creatives' in that context and I immediately think of YandereDev and the Yiik guy.

What happened with the ambition of writing your own engine from scratch?

That's a rabbithole of a question but all of my theories summarize to down to the new wave of devs getting tied up with their obsessive focus on immediate results and hatred/fear of virtual machines.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

That's a rabbithole of a question but all of my theories summarize to down to the new wave of devs getting tied up with their obsessive focus on immediate results and hatred/fear of virtual machines.

Even before the complexity of modern games new developers would often end up in development hell due to their ambitious homegrown engine.