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KronisLVyesterday at 10:44 AM4 repliesview on HN

> There's not a lot of churn in Unity

Deprecating entire languages (probably the right call long term, oddly enough Godot is keeping GDScript around).

Render pipelines (URP and HDRP to be merged, built in likewise being deprecated).

Most of the things around DOTS.

Most of the things around networking.

The whole package management system (I mean, it’s a nice idea, still counts as churn).

Also multiple approaches to UI and input.

I would say that a lot of the new stuff is built on good ideas but I sometimes wish they’d slow down a bit and ship actually thought out and finished features.

And most of the above already had alternatives previously, this isn’t even getting into wholly new things like Sentis, if you are working on an old project thankfully it will mostly keep working, but if you need to keep up to date with the current mechanisms and practices, there’s a lot of churn.

Maybe not as much as in Godot, but to be honest that other engine is going through a lot of evolution so instability and a feature explosion is to be expected (despite terrain still being a plugin, while Unity’s own terrain implementation is oddly dated and abandoned, while their water system felt like a tech demo and more often than not the asset store is expected to do the heavy lifting), while Unity tries to appeal to everyone and capture headlines it seems. Just look at the marketing around DOTS (and how long it took for it to be usable).


Replies

ndepoelyesterday at 10:51 AM

A lot of the things you mention there have been in development for the better part of 10 years already, and still haven't reach a stable, mature and production-ready state yet. Unity have also kept deprecated stuff around for much longer than they should have, which sounds great on paper for backward compatibility, but it just means they're lugging years of technical debt with them and it's slowed them down immensely.

Looking at the past year of Unity updates, since 6.1 or so, it seems that most of the focus is now going to refactoring major parts of the engine to facilitate backporting HDRP's feature set to URP. It's all good work and high time they did some cleanup and committed to a single standardized render pipeline, but it's not exactly moving the needle forward very much yet.

Machayesterday at 3:27 PM

> (probably the right call long term, oddly enough Godot is keeping GDScript around).

Even in Unity 4, it was like "You can write scripts in C#, or you can also write them in Unityscript or Boo, I suppose..."

In comparison for Godot, GDScript is very often the happy path. Things like web publishing work more seamlessly with GDScript than with C# (and miles more than GDNative/GDExtension). So I don't think it's nearly as likely to get deprecated as Unity's scripting languages.

raincoleyesterday at 4:40 PM

> oddly enough Godot is keeping GDScript around

Godot community is practically all GDScript. If they removed GDScript it'd be more akin to Unity removing C# while keeping Boo.

sphyesterday at 4:00 PM

GDScript is great, what do you mean? And I am a language snob that would be quite happy writing games in Lisp rather than Python-likes.

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