The problem is that the alternative is to work with features that were so behind the curve that Unity themselves decided to rewrite them years ago, instead of fixing them. That's my issue.
All I'm asking from Unity and its evangelists is honesty: you either have ready to use features or you don't. Putting all the good stuff that you're advertising behind a "preview" label and claiming it's the customer's responsibility when it doesn't work well is not ok.
The features that these new ones supplant on not "behind the curve" just because their replacements take a lot of effort to make!
I don't know what it is that has rotted the ability of some devs to understand the concept of things that actually work without constant refresh, this isn't NPM that's why they can afford to take a couple of years on features and still have a state of the art engine without it .
Literally DOTS is coming down right as we're seeing a reworking of how games approach data and latency.
If Unity had never said a word about DOTS and released it next year, they'd be fully "on the curve". In fact in that specific example, they're ahead of the curve, DOTS is really a rethinking of architecture that no middleware type game engine has tackled yet.
And look at HDRP, it's landing right as Unreal also releases their first major graphical shake up in half a decade next year with Unreal 5.
Do you even know what "the curve" is for middleware game engines? It honestly sounds like you don't
> All I'm asking from Unity and its evangelists is honesty: you either have ready to use features or you don't. Putting all the good stuff that you're advertising behind a "preview" label and claiming it's the customer's responsibility when it doesn't work well is not ok.
That's how things work when you don't care about your relationship with developers. I feel like some devs just don't know what good software practices look like when I read stuff like this.
I mean abject insanity to find someone complaining a company is putting things out, make it very clear that they're in progress, not even letting you use them without changing settings! and then gasp replying to developer feedback?!
Incorporating that feedback into their roadmap even though landing multi-year projects is already hard enough with just internal input?!
After all it's not like Unity is dangling carrots here, even these preview packages are getting treated with the same rigor that normal ones do in relationship to bugfixing, and they are always cognizant of the fact that even preview packages have users if you actually look at their conversations in the forums
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What you seem to be missing is Unity would still be a top engine if they never mentioned another preview package again. But it'd be a worse product.
Taking external input? Constantly cleaning up your work to put it over the fence? Having it end-user ready years before completion? That's a lot of work.
Unity features would be less work for them if they didn't do that.
But the features would have come out after spending a bunch of time in that state are better for everyone involved.
This all started with people whining about breaking changes, you think breaking changes would be better or worse if they weren't happening incrementally with real users in preview?
Read again. They're not behind the curve because there's new replacements. They were already behind many years ago, and that's why Unity decided to rewrite them instead of upgrading. Non-preview replacements still haven't arrived for a lot of those features. Maybe that's ok for you, but it's not for me. The end.
The rest of your post seems to be making the point that Unity is great for people who want to give input on how to create an engine. Sure, but I'd personally rather have software where the major advertised features are ready for use without having to "deal with the fact... they're unfinished".
You expect wrong, I'm point out how hilarious your complaint is.
That hard to implement features are in beta (And pre-beta!) for a long time so that we can actually contribute to their development cycle with feedback and bugs, instead of Unity getting them almost done then throwing them over the fence...
It's insane to me someone would try and spin this as a bad thing with a straight face, and in fact it makes me question if I'm talking with someone who just has never dealt with the stuff behind the scenes here (like actually having to implement features of this scope)
Every single feature you just mentioned was Unity reaching deep into the bowels of their engine and reimagining something. DOTS is literally a reimagining the core concept of how entities exist in Unity! Literally a core tenant of the engine.
You're complaining features like that are developed in the open? You realize the gnashing of teeth that probably forces them to go through to allow it? Are you joking?
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> If I strictly follow your advice I would have to virtually stick with features from 2015. Thanks, but no thanks.
No, you'll get to use plenty of features, it's just you won't get to use the unfinished ones unless you're ready to deal with the fact... they're unfinished...
Unity doesn't make that confusing to know either, they literally won't even show you a preview package by default!
Hard stuff takes time, when development happens in the open you get to see that. Unity has plenty of features people are using to ship games that aren't in preview lol, imagine acting like Unity's preview system is a bad thing
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> So, you're saying that there aren't many breaking changes and updating is easy, but at the same time saying that people shouldn't even think about updating an engine mid-project because it's reckless?
Lol that's a uh... creative straw man, I'll give you that much
Literally the words you quoted spell it out, breaking changes happen during major revisions and that major revisions are not a frequent event or easy to track.
They used to happen twice a decade. But that also meant it was very awkward for them to ship big things.
Now they happen once a year but to avoid forcing you to track breaking changes once a year they switched to the LTS model
So now you have 3 whole years to deal with breaking changes.
Can't deal with that, it's kind of on you.