Why Unity as engine?

[Little Wanderer]

Why Unity as engine? Unreal Engine hasn't pulled the game? By the way, graphics not strongly improved.

[bukkie661]

I believe it has to do with the engine on top of Unity. The devs have developed an engine that's made specifically for visual storytelling using Unity. I'm told that BtS is meant as a showcase to Square Enix. Something of an overgrown proof of concept.

[eZudo]

To be honest, if it wasn't kinda thrown at your face at the games startup, I probably wouldn't have noticed the game uses Unity instead of Unreal. They did a great job at porting everything into Unity, even the menus look and feel exactly the same. And I feel like some things definately improved, like lip-sync and facial animations, although that could probably also have been done in Unreal.

[bukkie661]

Originally posted by eZudo:

To be honest, if it wasn't kinda thrown at your face at the games startup, I probably wouldn't have noticed the game uses Unity instead of Unreal. They did a great job at porting everything into Unity, even the menus look and feel exactly the same. And I feel like some things definately improved, like lip-sync and facial animations, although that could probably also have been done in Unreal.

Actually, since they have a licensed Unity, they were able to disable that splash-screen. I would've advised the team to do just that, as Unity is a red flag for many people. Many games have a screen where they list all the third party software (Speed-tree, Cryware, etc). That would've been a better choice than the 'DON"T BUY THIS GAME!" Unity splash-screen.

[v00d00m4n]

Its because this is different studio, they have no t toolset of original DONTNOD studio (their UE3 was highly customized for Remember Me), or probably more familiar with UNity... and it sux. I really hate unity for many reasons .NET code core, slow performance, lack of tweakability and modability via INI, poor modding support, poor controller support, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ lighting, etc. However there could be another reason - they considered UE3 not worth for modern hardware and transition to UE4 was probably harder for them than transition to Unity.

[mysticfall]

Originally posted by Bogor Represent!:

Actually, since they have a licensed Unity, they were able to disable that splash-screen. I would've advised the team to do just that, as Unity is a red flag for many people. Many games have a screen where they list all the third party software (Speed-tree, Cryware, etc). That would've been a better choice than the 'DON"T BUY THIS GAME!" Unity splash-screen.

Actually, that stupid license policy from Unity Technology was what has earned a bad name for their engine.

Unity is a pretty competent engine if you know how it works, but because of that license plan most of the good games made with it don't reveal the fact that they are using Unity while many hobbyists who don't even care to pay for a pro version are required to do that.

As long as that bad reputation Unity has acquired that way was quite groundless, I don't think the developers at Deck Nine should care as long as their game looks good.

[bukkie661]

Originally posted by fender:

Originally posted by Bogor Represent!:

Actually, since they have a licensed Unity, they were able to disable that splash-screen. I would've advised the team to do just that, as Unity is a red flag for many people. Many games have a screen where they list all the third party software (Speed-tree, Cryware, etc). That would've been a better choice than the 'DON"T BUY THIS GAME!" Unity splash-screen.

Actually, that stupid license policy from Unity Technology was what has earned a bad name for their engine.

Unity is a pretty competent engine if you know how it works, but because of that license plan most of the good games made with it don't reveal the fact that they are using Unity while many hobbyists who don't even care to pay for a pro version are required to do that.

As long as that bad reputation Unity has acquired that way was quite groundless, I don't think why should developers who made this game care as long as it looks good.

The engine has earned most of it's bad reputation because it's the weapon of choice for russian and assorted eastern-european asset-flippers and meme-game makers.
Steam is flooded with very, very bad Unity sludge.
Another reason for Unity's bad name is because of the fact that you don't need to know any real programming to make something with Unity as everything, including scripts, can be bought from the Unity store or just torrented from your favorite torrent-site.

[v00d00m4n]

Originally posted by fender:

Originally posted by Bogor Represent!:

Actually, since they have a licensed Unity, they were able to disable that splash-screen. I would've advised the team to do just that, as Unity is a red flag for many people. Many games have a screen where they list all the third party software (Speed-tree, Cryware, etc). That would've been a better choice than the 'DON"T BUY THIS GAME!" Unity splash-screen.

Actually, that stupid license policy from Unity Technology was what has earned a bad name for their engine.

Unity is a pretty competent engine if you know how it works, but because of that license plan most of the good games made with it don't reveal the fact that they are using Unity while many hobbyists who don't even care to pay for a pro version are required to do that.

As long as that bad reputation Unity has acquired that way was quite groundless, I don't think why should developers who made this game care as long as it looks good.

No, bad name Unity earned by bad programming of core of engine. Unity has great editor which is easy to use and which is developer friendly, and this is the reason it became popular - but unity has anti-customer friendly rotten core and stupid choice to use .net which is almost like virtual machine, like JAVA. And you know that VM code is slower than native, also Unity is source less.

I think since UE4 copied everything good that was about unity, there is no reason to use unity anymore, as UE4 is much better in its core and its editor is now even better than unity, and they used similar model of assets store, plugins etc, so Unity is not absolete.

This mumbo-jumbo about 3 and half russian games made by students who love memes and imageboards has nothing to do with unity bad reputation. Its reputation was bad when nobody in russian was aware of it and when it was used for many smarphone games and very slow PC games with poor graphics.

[mysticfall]

Originally posted by Voodooman:

Originally posted by fender:

Actually, that stupid license policy from Unity Technology was what has earned a bad name for their engine.

Unity is a pretty competent engine if you know how it works, but because of that license plan most of the good games made with it don't reveal the fact that they are using Unity while many hobbyists who don't even care to pay for a pro version are required to do that.

As long as that bad reputation Unity has acquired that way was quite groundless, I don't think why should developers who made this game care as long as it looks good.

No, bad name Unity earned by bad programming of core of engine. Unity has great editor which is easy to use and which is developer friendly, and this is the reason it became popular - but unity has anti-customer friendly rotten core and stupid choice to use .net which is almost like virtual machine, like JAVA. And you know that VM code is slower than native, also Unity is source less.

I think since UE4 copied everything good that was about unity, there is no reason to use unity anymore, as UE4 is much better in its core and its editor is now even better than unity, and they used similar model of assets store, plugins etc, so Unity is not absolete.

This mumbo-jumbo about 3 and half russian games made by students who love memes and imageboards has nothing to do with unity bad reputation. Its reputation was bad when nobody in russian was aware of it and when it was used for many smarphone games and very slow PC games with poor graphics.

Actually no. Game engines usually use different languages for its core functionalities and user contents, and Unity itself is not written in C# and it's quite a common practice to use even a scripted/interpreted language to make game contents.

And virtual machine languages are pretty fast these days, and it's been so for quite a while. The only problem is garbage collection overhead, but it can be optimized by careful programming as is proven by the existence of number of quality games that are written in such languages.

[v00d00m4n]

Originally posted by fender:

Originally posted by Voodooman:

No, bad name Unity earned by bad programming of core of engine. Unity has great editor which is easy to use and which is developer friendly, and this is the reason it became popular - but unity has anti-customer friendly rotten core and stupid choice to use .net which is almost like virtual machine, like JAVA. And you know that VM code is slower than native, also Unity is source less.

I think since UE4 copied everything good that was about unity, there is no reason to use unity anymore, as UE4 is much better in its core and its editor is now even better than unity, and they used similar model of assets store, plugins etc, so Unity is not absolete.

This mumbo-jumbo about 3 and half russian games made by students who love memes and imageboards has nothing to do with unity bad reputation. Its reputation was bad when nobody in russian was aware of it and when it was used for many smarphone games and very slow PC games with poor graphics.

Actually no. Game engines usually use different languages for its core functionalities and user contents, and Unity itself is not written in C# and it's quite a common practice to use even a scripted/interpreted language to make game contents.

And virtual machine languages are pretty fast these days, and it's been so for quite a while. The only problem is garbage collection overhead, but it can be optimized by careful programming as is proven by the existence of number of quality games that are written in such languages.

Careful programing is not about majority of Unity devs, and say what you will, but native code will always execute faster, as it does not require run-time "translation" of bytecode into machinecode. Also until unity will provide full source code to everyone, there never will be any real good optimization.

[mysticfall]

Originally posted by Voodooman:

Careful programing is not about majority of Unity devs, and say what you will, but native code will always execute faster, as it does not require run-time "translation" of bytecode into machinecode. Also until unity will provide full source code to everyone, there never will be any real good optimization.

The problem with programming skill is exactly my point. Unity mainly has gotten a bad reputation not because it was inherently less powerful or less performant than its competitors, but because it is the most easily accessible engine for beginners and only those people are required to tell that their games are based on Unity.

And do you know that virtual machine languages or even script languages are ones that are most frequently used to process large quantity of data these days? It's because performance in software should always be discussed in a context, and for the most part the difference between execution speed of native and virtual machine code does not justify the productivity/maintainability gain the latter provides.

Provided people take proper care to avoid excessive object creation and allocation in games, it's pretty rare to see a bottleneck to reside in a managed code that runs on VM.

[bukkie661]

Originally posted by fender:

Originally posted by Voodooman:

Careful programing is not about majority of Unity devs, and say what you will, but native code will always execute faster, as it does not require run-time "translation" of bytecode into machinecode. Also until unity will provide full source code to everyone, there never will be any real good optimization.

The problem with programming skill is exactly my point. Unity mainly has gotten a bad reputation not because it was inherently less powerful or less performant than its competitors, but because it is the most easily accessible engine for beginners and only those people are required to tell that their games are based on Unity.

And do you know that virtual machine languages or even script languages are ones that are most frequently used to process large quantity of data these days? It's because performance in software should always be discussed in a context, and for the most part the difference between execution speed of native and virtual machine code does not justify the productivity/maintainability gain the latter provides.

Provided people take proper care as to avoid excessive object creation and allocation in games, it's pretty rare to see a bottleneck to reside in a managed code that runs on VM.

Not only that, but try and debug Mnemonics. I still have headaches from the Z80 days and that was single 8bit register. I think it's impossible to write Mnemonics yourself for current register-architectures. Lower languages are simply a must now and the more visual they are the better.
There's a drawback to highly accessible professional-grade tools though, and that drawback has Unity written allover it.

[mysticfall]

FYI, there are quite many games with decent quality graphics like this one, but they just don't tell they are using Unity because they don't have to with their Pro license:

https://www.escapefromtarkov.com/

[bukkie661]

Originally posted by fender:

FYI, there are quite many games with decent quality graphics like this one, but they just don't tell they are using Unity because they don't have to with their Pro license:

https://www.escapefromtarkov.com/

The best example I think is Cities: Skylines.

[mysticfall]

Originally posted by Bogor Represent!:

Not only that, but try and debug Mnemonics. I still have headaches from the Z80 days and that was single 8bit register. I think it's impossible to write Mnemonics yourself for current register-architectures. Lower languages are simply a must now and the more visual they are the better.
There's a drawback to highly accessible professional-grade tools though, and that drawback has Unity written allover it.

As I already said, Unity's core platform itself is written in C/C++. And it's quite a common practice to use managed or scripted languages for game contents, because unlike the commonly believed myth, they don't usually become a performance bottleneck as often as other parts like the rendering stack does, for instance.

[bukkie661]

Originally posted by fender:

Originally posted by Bogor Represent!:

Not only that, but try and debug Mnemonics. I still have headaches from the Z80 days and that was single 8bit register. I think it's impossible to write Mnemonics yourself for current register-architectures. Lower languages are simply a must now and the more visual they are the better.
There's a drawback to highly accessible professional-grade tools though, and that drawback has Unity written allover it.

As I already said, Unity's core platform itself is written in C/C++. And it's quite a common practice to use managed or scripted languages for game contents, because unlike the commonly believed myth, they don't usually become a performance bottleneck as often as other parts like the rendering stack does, for instance.

The biggest problem studios have when using engines isn't so much the engine that they use (provided talent and skill is present to use said tools), but the mere fact that there are virtually uncountable PC setups in the world right now. It's impossible to write air-tight code for the PC masterrace.
On closed systems like the consoles, it's much easier to come up with air-tight code. Like the good old z80 and Risk-chip days.