That's an odd thing to say. I've never used it personally. Even if it's used in the majority of games saying it's the "main point of using Unity" is overstating things. It's simply one feature out of many that Unity provides.
> The only option is to fold your shirt sleeves up and build your own engine. It's not that hard really.
Maybe for you. I wouldn't even know where to start. And I wouldn't want to - that's not the level that interests me.
If you don't need that you should _never_ even consider using Unity.
If you are not interested by the underlying tech of any category of computing, you are not a programmer.
I don't know much about Unity, but this gatekeeping ruins your credibility. It might very well be that writing your own game engine is faster than using Unity, but I actually believe that _less_ now after reading your comment. Your argument seems more pride-based than fact-based.
Programmers specialize based on their interests, and that's a _good_ thing. If we didn't have specialization, nothing useful would ever get done. Mistakenly choosing not to leverage prior work in design space[1] can come at a very high cost.
[1] Borrowing a term from "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Daniel Dennett (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_Dangerous_Idea)
Unity has saved me a lot of time and I don't use the skin mesh animation system.
This has nothing to do with the skinning method, and I agree with the other poster. It should retain the same vertex buffer in GPU RAM and simply deform it in the shader.
I guess it's a problem if you're making a zombie game with hundreds of skinned zombies active. But the bigger problem in that case is that there's no easy way to LOD the animation or GameObject hierarchy.
That said It has been done, see Heaps[0].
That leaves Windows on Intel and Linux on ARM. That is two platforms to support, not that hard really!
And really long-term Windows on Intel is going to go away too because of energy prices.
Another thing to consider is that CPUs and GPUs are not improving that much, so the engine you build now will probably last very long, if it's made well probably forever!
I want a device I can also produce on but do most consumers really want that? I think they want something simple that does one thing. This is one of the reasons I think the switch has been so successful. I can't see my portable tablet / laptop / workstation incorporating joysticks. Also with GPUs stagnating as you mentioned high end games will still need to run on high power devices like consoles.
I’ve made tonnes of games in Unity and never experienced either of these concerns.
1) As your project grows, it becomes unmanageable because the resource pipeline is hidden and you want to be able to improve that.
2) Skin mesh animation, which is the main point of using Unity in the first place, uses a compute shader which means they send all meshes from the CPU to the GPU every frame!
On the other hand Unreal takes 5 hours to compile and even Godot takes the same time as Unity ~30 min.
The only option is to fold your shirt sleeves up and build your own engine. It's not that hard really.