Indie developer blames game journalists for widespread Unity Engine hate

Blueprint is by no means a substitute for lacking programming skills. Or even a bad option for making a game.
It's just a visual wrapper for a language that is pretty much on par with Java 1.4 (basically everything before generics were introduced) or a stripped down version of C#.

The only performance hit you take with Blueprints happens, if you try to build a fully object oriented architecture, not relying on function librarys and just instantiating all your logic as objects in the world.
But even then that only really makes a difference if you access the tick-event of those objects each frame and execute some elaborate function with it. The overhead from the instantiation itself isn't all that much.

My go-to solution so far was instantiating controller classes (though in newer code I've just been switching to function categories to keep BPs well organized), keeping actor-specific data in structs on the respective blueprint class and pushing everything that has to be persistent into the game instance.

Another thing people tend to do a lot is type casting. Despite the fact that Unreal fully supports message based interface calls due to it's Entity-Component nature.
That probably takes its toll on the performance of many games as well.
I believe I even saw that in an Update/Tick event on one of official Unreal tutorials once. Now either Unreal does some kind of casting magic to make it into a super fast operation or the guy just didn't take the time to save a casted reference. Think it was one of the animation blueprint tutorials. So no idea if he even was a programmer.

 

It's called CPU heatsink piglet girl.

 

Holy shit, the guy isn't even a game developer:


Some of his "projects": https://adrianforest.itch.io/


He's the exact reason why the prevailing impression of the guy he screenshotted exists in the first place and just extremely about it.

 

The exact same problem can also be seen with web development, so it's not just vidya nerds that can't/refuse to write proper code anymore.

 

unity is the engine of peace

 

People just don't bother anymore.

It's really frustrating and common with all software industries. They don't feel the need to optimise things.

 

For the same reasons some use Java and Basic. It'S the only way they can put in some meaningless crap push a button and get a working program.
If there were marketable I bet there would be games written in VBA, running on MS Excel or html.

 

There is a reason why engines have always been of the favorite excuses by developers next to blaming the publisher. Just think about all those bugged games where some guy is quick to point out the "technical difficulties" in "fairness".

 

Load times and performance issues (given what it's displaying) are the primary issue. From Pillars of Eternity to Wasteland 2 to Shadowrun to Tyranny to Blackguards to Might and Magic X to Expeditions.

 

Not true. Until consoles moved to CDs, they seldom had loading times at all. And when computer games moved from floppy to hard drive, load times were quite rare as well, and generally quite short. The assumption that games have to be made up of small areas with significant load times between them is either too old (relating to the floppy/low system memory era) or relatively new (relating to the 3D engine era). Even some games with pretty 3D graphics, like Soul Reaver, had no loading delays because they found ways to finesse it (in Soul Reaver's case, by having curving hallways that acted as "airlocks" between areas, in which the game could unload the old area and load the new area).

[EDIT: Unkillable Cat got there before me, I see. The only thing I can add is that I'm not sure that it's purely a "bloat" problem so much as a priorities problem. When gamers make load times an issue, it gets better; when they don't, it gets worse. While I'm mostly out of the FPS genre these days, I remember there was a period post HL2 when levels were made up of tiny segments with noticeable load times between them. People moaned, and the design improved.]

 

Torment might have, but I recall people saying that Wasteland 2's load times encouraged them to not bother with save scumming loot. For me, they're around 10 seconds long, which isn't too bad when it happens infrequently, but can be a pain when it's more-than-infrequently.

Another thing to consider is that something like New Vegas loads in seconds on my SSD and it tracks a lot more stuff in the world than Wasteland 2, so I'm wondering what's going with Wasteland 2 Unity.

 

The Unity Engine seems nice. It's cheap, can primp itself up to look attractive. Friendly to almost anyone. And then one day you come home to see it boiling your CPU in a pot.

 

Name a unity game that doesn't run like shit. I'll wait.

 

Weren't you the one praising Ori and the Blind Forest?

 

Okay, I must really suck at english, because both of you guys didn't get what I meant and seem to only debate this single sentence.

Sorry, I'll try to clarify. What I really wanted to say is that cases of "long loading times", however you wish to define them, did occur for a long time now in gaming and were usually quickly bashed by gamers and reviewers alike. "Long loading times" didn't magically appear along with Unity and are not Unity-specific "feature". But I gotta agree with Unkillable Cat on one thing - that it's difficult to discuss which loading times are "long" without the knowledge of what happens under the hood.

Gotta agree here. Software doesn't exist in void, there's usually a chain of frameworks, plugins and other dependencies that affect it. But what alternative do we have? Like you said, we could go Cleve's way and spend 20+ years developing games. But if you want to create a game in a realistic timefreame, you really need to rely on preexisting tools.

Let me use your own reaction gif:



Dude, no. Not even close. I mean sure, the technology has moved forward, but so did games and their requirements. Read up on some postmortems, dev diaries and so on and you'll see the amount of hacks, workarounds and clever ideas the devs have to employ to have their games running decently. Game development (and programming in general) is a constant struggle to find compromise between processing power, memory usage, gpu, texture memory and so on (this isn't true for ALL games obviously, a tetris clone will not suffer from this).

So, are you a programmer yourself by any chance? Are you speaking from experience? Because in my few years as a programmer I noticed that the leading causes of shitty code are either time constraints (your manager needs the fix now, or the higher ups will have his ass handed to him) or programmer's incompetence (either because the programmer is just inexperienced or he just sucks and should become a gardener or something). Writing shit code out of laziness will, ironically, result in more work when you eventually have to rewrite or work around the pile of crap you created.

What I'm trying to say here is - you're trying to provide a simplistic explanation for a complex, multifaceted problem that is the software development. Saying that "programmers are lazy so the software is slow" is just... well... lazy .

And now if you'll excuse me, I'll get the latest version of Unity and go back to developing my game. I promise I'll do my best to ensure it doesn't melt your cpu .

 

The typical preachy rant from a barely-professional that you see nowadays.

Sure there's some players who have kneejerk reactions to a game's engine before buying, it's their right as consumer, and the vast majority don't have kneejerk reactions, they have specifically noted engine-based flaws from PLAYING, whether it's Unity's load times and just general slapped-together feel, or the almost universal lack of key rebinding in games made with UDK, players notice this stuff. "professionals", enough already with your half-baked mic drop rants over the slightest criticism from your customers, or what would be your customers if you were actual game developers and not a twitter account and a hello world tutorial.

 

The only thing i can say about this subject is that i'm actually extremely happy c and c++ are getting more and more marginalized. Its a pity it's with C# but that's somewhat predictable. If some faux-macho programmer wants to do 'real programming' and 'show how it's done to the C# fans' my peace of mind as a consumer is much better if he uses rust over c++. Fucking segfaults.

 

I remember trying Wasteland 2 after release. Suddenly the graphic card started to work like I was trying to play Crysis on Ultra settings. The room was filling with hot air, and it was the most immersive post apocalyptic experience I've ever had while moving through the desert.

 

Numanuma overheated and broke the charger on my laptop as I was playing while plugged in. True story.

 

Not really...

 

Paper Sorcerer worked like a charm, although it doesn't feature AAA graphics.

 

Unreal has its own set of problems.
But Unity doesn't give you source without a big payout, AFAIK.
With a decent set of coders you can fix Unreal's idiosyncrasies, but without source access you are probably stuck with the problems built into Unity.

That is the biggest problem that Unity has IMO.