I'm a highly experienced programmer and I can't get started with Unity. Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now. But I just want to see some code and drive from code. The workflow of starting from objects and scenes in a GUI and attaching scripts is totally foreign to me. And then most of the tutorials seem to be videos, which I have no patience for, with text I can skip around and tailor my learning to my personal needs. And then I have no idea how to predict if any given video or documentation or sample project is out of date. It's extremely frustrating and makes me feel dumb and old.

I work on AAA games and this is exactly how I feel, especially about the online ecosystem around Unity, it's a big pile of garbage with maybe 1% of it being reasonable, best-practices documentation/advice.

I originally had this mindset. Still kind of do. But the way of managing things through gameobjects, serializable components, and the scene hierarchy UI is very beneficial when you have non-programmers working on your game with you.

It's annoying when you're a solo dev who wants to handle everything in code, but they're definitely trying to optimize the workflow for a small diverse team rather than for a programmer or group of only programmers.

> And then I have no idea how to predict if any given video or documentation or sample project is out of date.

100% agree with this. I wish I could just buy a comprehensive book on an older version of Unity and stay on that as long as I can. But I can't really find much for more advanced Unity that doesn't exist as a video or GDC talk. (though an exception would be the catlikecoding tutorials)

> the way of managing things through gameobjects, serializable components, and the scene hierarchy UI is very beneficial when you have non-programmers working on your game with you.

honestly it's extremely useful even if you're an experienced programmer working alone. Being able to pause the simulation, move some objects around in space, and then resume the simulation is extremely powerful. Typing out the coordinates into code would: be ridiculously tedious -and- force you to commit to disk (by writing the files) the changes to something you really only need in memory. Being able to play with the state of the simulation by hand is extremely powerful.

the old tutorials were better. Roll-a-Ball is still the best intro.

honestly just think of the scene as being analogous to a browser DOM and learn which methods the game engine invokes on the objects and in which order. That's described here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ExecutionOrder.html

You can instantiate, position and script objects in code too. It is helpful to have an asset pipeline to import your models, textures, etc. but then, once you have your prefabs, you can reference them from code and instantiate as you see fit. There is a performance penalty to instantiate at runtime so best practice is to initialize your objects from code at load time, or the start of a scene. Object pooling is also very helpful.

Have you done any game programming before? A heavy reliance on an interactive GUI is very common because there are many things for which you want visual interactivity, such as placing 3D objects in relation to each other. That kind of task is either difficult or impossible to do effectively purely in code.

I have. Placing objects in an editor is obviously essential, I agree. I just expect to find code at the bottom driving it, loading the map etc, and it doesn't seem like any example projects or learning documentation for Unity is geared that way. Basically I expect to follow code at the bottom until it loads some asset, which may create a bunch of objects, and register some scripts. Then I return to the code which can then get those objects if it wants.

sure but like, you don't have that expectation of a browser, right? Like to write a web page, you don't create an instance of an HTML parser and call a parse method on some text, and then walk the tree and tell it to draw each element, right? Same deal. Just think of the scene as being a DOM in three dimensions.

I think unreal is easier to use than Unity because Unreal comes with batteries included. Unity you have to fill all the gaps with 3rd party asset store plugins and deal with all their weirdness etc.

Unity's recent changes into everything is a package is a total mess and reminds me of how Rails became a mess after it tried to move everything out of core and into gems.

I remember one Unity developer was talking about how Package Manager will enable them to deliver smaller install/download size on top of easy to update core functionality. This was like 2-3 years ago. Unity 2017 for Win64 download size is around 500MB today, Unity 2020 with Package Manager is 1.7GB

^^^This...Can't be understated what a mess Unity is right now. Meanwhile Epic with Unreal 5 is simplifying its pipeline and looks better and better.

I'd rather buy a 3rd party asset for the exact type of game I want to make.

You still have to put in effort, but if you find the right assets it can really make things happen faster.

The training material for Unity is above and beyond UE4. Any type of game you want to create already has a template on the Asset Store. UE's asset store is still packing .

Isn't UE4 free for all use cases under a million dollar of revenue ?

My joke was it takes a much larger team to get anything done in UE4 .

I couldn't imagine solo dev on an Unreal Project .

We tried it for a hackathon and after a day or so we got some stuff going. Of course it's a monster engine, but you can learn it as a side project, then after a month you can start building something. I don't see why a solo dev couldn't handle it.

C++ is hard.

The available learning resources for Unity are much better than they are for UE4. I want to add X to my game, I Google it and find ether an asset or open source project within minutes .

For my current project I found a half dozen templates to start from. Everything in UDK was ether half done or abandoned.

Of course both , or even rolling your own , are fine.

True, we haven't touched C++, only the blueprint editor. It takes you far.

https://www.playomno.com/ <-- very impressive solo dev project made in unreal.

Unfortunately , “ease of use” and “one tool fits all” are a pair of conflicting features. Unity really does a fantastic job in this regard.

Ultimately, well resourced team may choose to develop their own engine for the flexibility.