Thirdstar, on 16 January 2013 - 07:50 AM, said:
I wouldn't know anything about programing even if it came up and bit me but I didn't realize that Unity was so bad? I thought it was the Indie Dev scene darling. Only Unity game I played recently was Endless Space and that seemed to work just fine.
Also seems that Wasteland 2 and Project Eternity Devs both plan to use Unity so it can't possibly be as bad as you posit.
Yeah sorry whenever someone mentions Unity I sort of just explode!
The thing with Unity is that for cross platform development, it's a gem. We can take our internet game, or PC/Mac game and chuck it onto an iPad/iOS device (theoretically, though in practice you either need to begin development for the most restrictive device and work that way, or be prepared to change a lot of features).
The PROBLEM with Unity is it's asset management system is just ***, for example, in order to synchronise development among a group of designers, programmers and artists etc. you need some way of keeping track of who is working on what. This is where source control comes in - I as a developer would "check out" a particular file I'm working on, preventing anyone else from developing with that file in parallel (or allowing them to in some cases, with the provision that we would merge our changes later). Unity is absolutely bad at this, although things have gotten better recently.
Another issue related to source control is the re-use of assets across different applications, at the moment Unity (3.x, don't know about 4!) doesn't allow you to import asset libraries from a central location without you manually setting this up.
Then there's the development pipeline itself - Unity is excellent for developing 3D applications, but there's no dedicated 2D mode, which is especially bad on devices with only a little horsepower, such as iOS. As an example, I had to write my own method of displaying 3D text for one of our puzzle games for the iPad because Unity's 3D text system is so inefficient.
So basically, I use Unity because it's the best thing out there for cross platform development, but honestly I hate it so very much.
[Edit]
This is all commentary about Unity 3.x, as we've not moved to the recently released 4.x platform yet, so perhaps some of my gripes have been addressed (and I'm sure they will be eventually, they're a pretty big point of discussion)
Edited by RickySpanish, 16 January 2013 - 08:14 AM.