I haven't followed Unity closely, but I understood many employees were excited to show the new direction of Unity 7 at Unite 2024 and it was generally well received?
But this has since been jeopardized because the new CEO doesn't want breaking changes?
AMA thread on Twitter with Thomas Petersen who worked at Unity until recently:
https://x.com/QAThomasNoUnity/status/1861321957502767282
Obviously people still working there might have more info, but can't necessarily say much.
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@runevision My understanding is that there's some discussions and arguments in the area of "unity 7, how much it should be backwards compat, vs how much we should do breaking changes". Thomas' takes might be somewhat biased, I guess. But we'll see :shrug:
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@aras Of course, everyone who's passionate about something have a high chance of being biased and being recently let go surely won't help. Though even being biased does not necessarily imply being wrong.
Yeah, we'll see.
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@aras
I was able to attend private roundtables about this at the last 2 Unites and there was a strong shared feeling of "this is incredibly exciting and necessary, but you'll either start a new project in Unity 7 or stay on 6 forever" as many changes seemed very deep and unlikely to be backwards compatible.
It felt like the right way forward though, and it'd be very disappointing to see them aborting or downscaling these changes
@runevision
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@piteco @aras That's about what I got out of Thomas' thread too, yeah.
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@piteco @runevision decisions like that are hard, yo. But! If there are very clear advantages of a breaking change, that can be fine.
I guess most users would gladly change something in their project, if they never have to stare at "importing small assets" ever again, for example.
But for example "asset database v1 -> v2" transition of 2019 was not that case. "Things are new but also not clear if/how better". Or not communicated well enough.
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@aras
Yes, I'm 100% with you! In fact, all attendees there were excited about it and saw these changes as a massive leap forward - with potential challenges when upgrading seen as a bump, but well worth it in the end.
The engineers there were asking tons of good questions and seemed genuinely engaged with making this as smooth as possible.
Sometimes there has to be bold decisions like this, and bold decision makers that don't take the easy way out.
@runevision
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@runevision They're in a tough spot. There's lots of things in Unity that really need to be better, but they have a vast number of customers who just need it to work. They tried squaring that with components which had their own update cadence (2019+ ish), but IME that just fragmented the system even worse in terms of reliability, compatibility and documentation, it's one of the main things that led me to stop using it. Improving something fundamental without breaking it is not easy
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@runevision Unreal has had an easier time, both because their underpinnings were arguably better to start with, but also because they've always had an accepted way to do things that devs are expected to accept. That was hard for me at first, Unity is more of a free for all, wheras you have to do things the UE way or GTFO. But the benefit of that is they have much more defined ways they can change things while knowing what impact it will have. Still painful sometimes, but more predictable
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@sinbad Sure, Unity is all about freedom, but it used to reign it in in its own ways. There used to be one physics system, one input system, one rendering pipeline (although highly configurable, but so is Unreal), etc. It's the keeping adding new systems while also keeping the old around that makes maintenance prohibitive. Having all that overlapping functionality wasn't always part of Unity's DNA and appeal (if only because it was once too young to have gotten there yet). The contrary, I'd say.
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@runevision IMO the underlying problem is that Unity's old structure was just fine up to a certain complexity of project, but they wanted more than that. I think they hired a lot of really smart people with really good ideas but in hindsight, probably shouldn't have been working on Unity at all, because they wanted to make another Frostbite or whatever. Stitching those kinds of ideas onto a base that was designed for something else clearly didn't work.
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@runevision I had this sort of experience with Ogre back in the day, with people like Mike Acton throwing shade on us because we weren't designed from the ground up to be maximum performance etc. He was right, but also missed the point entirely.
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@sinbad Hmm, I'd say that depends on what exactly we're talking about. Many initiatives sure added a lot of friction when keeping backwards compatibility at the same time. But a lot of the work on scalability, performance and reliability has also immensely fortified Unity for the better. When discarding packages not being used, Unity 2022 (which is what I use) is snappier than previous versions have been for a long time, and at least some of that is due to work by such people you refer to.
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@runevision Maybe things have finally resolved, I stopped using Unity in 2020 after waiting a couple of years for any sign that things would stop fragmenting / deprecating and become a solid base. I was initially excited about Burst/ECS and the render pipelines but during my time with it they just made things worse in practice, because they weren’t really ready to use in production but also seemed to halt development on older methods that actually worked. I was stuck in a gap between 2 stools
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@sinbad Yeah about those things (ECS vs classic components, multiple render pipelines) I don't think anything is resolved yet. It sounds like Unity 7 was the vision for that, and that, according to some people like Thomas Petersen, breaking backwards compatibility was a key part of making that actually viable. So I guess we'll see.
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@runevision the fact that those things that were sold as a key to future Unity are still up in the air 4 years after I made my decision to abandon it makes me glad I made the decision. It was a tough one at the time
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@sinbad Sure. Unity has been troubled. I think we can all agree on that. The question is more about whether they have any hope of a better future.
The backwards compatibility has been a God-sent while everything new has been in a messy state though. Not being forced to use those half-baked systems that keep being in flux. I think it makes sense to split Unity up into a version focused on the past and one on the future to allow for a cleaner break, like Epic does with every major version too.
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@sinbad Right. But they had designed Unity 6 to last for a loooong time (a decade) exactly so that there was room to do breaking changes in Unity 7 without screwing over customers?
I agree with Thomas (based on my own experience working at Unity for 13 years) that there's so much cruft that it's hard to get anything done now and that nothing except breaking changes can fundamentally solve that.
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@runevision Having a proper LTS version is good from a technical perspective, but I guess from a management perspective that's less attractive, because you're doing 2x (or at least some x) the work for the same number of licensees, since people are still going to expect that 6 is actively maintained?
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@sinbad Yeah but that's the short term perspective only.
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@runevision CEOs these days only have a short term perspective
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