Never Again Unity.

Pardon me for judging a book by it's icon, I couldn't find any pages to turn :| ...but hey, I bet none of you correctly assumed I was a robot with a god complex.

Haha, I can totally see someone from my generation naming one of their kids "Lobster Doge".

 

Here, have a page:

Ah, you got me, I was assuming you were a god with a robot complex.

--Eric

 

WOAH ERIC! I feel strange...

 

Eh, that works. Just go with it.

--Eric

 

What am I even supposed to think of this?

(Skips long rant about everything (that's utterly wrong with Unity (and everything else)) ) but overall, a good engine.

My only nag is how "Never again Unity" really advertises the opposite of what this post was trying to say.

And why are some people trying to change this into a discussion about string comparisons. Does string comparison count as elegy?

 

Yeha that was intentional.

Also I am curious about the Utterly wrong things. I know there are many imperfect features. But I dont know to much about the Utterly wrong.

 

I can confirm that Aurore definitely is Sylvester Stallone.

 

Lobster Doge! There you are So, you're Andy....

I didn't know about that that might be useful in the future. Unfortunately, a strong part of my character is that I am often oblivious.

Female from great britain... I shall now read all of your posts with the voice of Zeigsden!

 

I knew you'd come back all along. I was wondering why it took so long, but whatevs! Time to maek gaems!

 

I've mulled this over a few times. Maybe try out one of those other engines with all of the fancy AAA effects and lighting. I always realize that for what I do the other engines make no sense. I'm one guy, I can't really make a game of the scope that would require all of those fancy effects. I'm not a massive studio with a huge team making unvelievably expansive worlds. Unity is perfect in that sense. It's a tool that my brain can compile easily and it doesn't hinder my creative capabilities.

 

I plan to try out leadwerks at some point... but ONLY to try developing on linux. But I got a new windows machine so it's not necessary.

 

Now that would explain a lot....

 

I still remember when I tried making my own Game Engine...

My first attempt was using a C++ framework such as wxWidgets to make window management easier as opposed to other solutions (I was just starting to learn about game development btw). I quickly realized that the task became increasingly difficult because I was doing everything on the CPU side in terms of drawing to different windows. Suffice to say, I ran into screen/image flickering issues that I didn't know how to get rid of.

I was then recommended by the primary developer of wxWidgets to use OpenGL and learn that method of drawing things if I needed optimized performance.

And so, I had to do research for another problem domain. I did some reading on OpenGL and tried integrating it with wxWidgets. I ran into a LOT of issues trying to integrate it into wxWidgets, and apparently there didn't appear to be a lot of support for using OpenGL with wxWidgets (at least, that's what I thought at the time, I was pretty ignorant about builds. My biggest problem was attempting to build projects just to see if my configuration was correct so I can actually start learning how to work with 3D rendering tools).

As a result, I looked towards alternatives outside of wxWidgets. No offense to the developer(s) for it, I just wanted to learn how to use a modern method of drawing images to the screen in an optimized manner.

So I look towards FreeGLUT since it is an OpenSource version of GLUT and had significantly better documentation than wxWidgets, at least in regards to using it for 3D purposes. It also seemed a lot easier to integrate OpenGL with FreeGLUT.

It still took some time to do, researching the proper build settings and having to use other tools such as CMake to generate the appropriate OpenGL headers and object files so FreeGLUT could interact with my GPU.

I then had to learn how to initialize OpenGL before I could start rendering to my screen. And even after I got this far, I had to learn how to work with the concept of different spaces and some Linear Algebra concepts I never even knew about.

I'm kinda glad I was forced to learn these things, but I'm pretty sure it took me... oh I don't know... several months just to get that far, and the hard part is yet to come...

I ran into more problem domains that I had to solve on my own - deciding on how I want to implement a Game Loop (a Physics Update in line with Update, a Physics Update that catches up to Update, a Physics Update that interpolates values to match Update times, etc), deciding on which mathematics library to use (GLM, Custom, Assimp's library, etc), Image importing (Assimp, etc) which actually made way for new problem domains of having to learn the structure of these developers' libraries just to draw a few polygons and images to the screen.

It was very quickly spiraling out of control. I knew I had more work ahead of me (Shaders, finding ways to optimize state changes with the shader, visualizing the mathematical operations I'm performing on objects to understand why they are transforming a certain way, etc).


I thought I was making major progress with an understanding of 3D development, but after discovering Unity and looking at how easy it is to import images, models, work with them in an intuitive manner, learning the Component-based approach, having extensive documentation and classes to assist with common functionality (even things that are difficult but seem trivial, such as floating comparisons with Mathf.Approximately, etc) and much more really made me see the light! I'm extremely glad that Unity exists.

And while, yes, there are some perks to rolling your own Game Engine, its not worth the effort without a solid amount of knowledge of how Game Engines work. Maybe I'll give it another go after using Unity for a decade, who knows.

In any case, thank you Unity!

 

It all goes back to the wheel having been already invented, and they're giving them away...!

 

Wouldn't it be much easier for us to admit when we're not sure where to begin with developing our first game?

 

Have I capitalised utterly now, have I?

I'm not in the mood to spoil a thread that's managed to attract such a happy crowd. PM about this or open a thread named "Utterly Wrong Things", and that's totally gonna go way out of hand and might get locked within 72 hours and I'll be getting way too much flak from people who confuse clumsy workarounding with workflow but I'll be with you on that one, for the better and especially for the worse. But not here.

As a programmer, Unity helps me to think of code as "assets". It helps me to forget that I'm a programmer, forget that I can write my own shadow mapping system and focus on game design. Not all bad.

 

I have had a similar path down the road, starting with SDL -> OpenGL / FreeGlut -> Unity. At some point I wanted to make a simple mesh creation tool in SDL that would compile into OpenGL classes that could be rendered. I know I could do that. But then again. I find 30 days of potential work ideas for every day that I work, so I have to filter some things out.