Tuesday, September 22, 2009

What is wrong with Unity3D?

I've worked with Unity3D for quite a while now. I really like it. It saves so much time, with all the functionality I need pre-baked and ready to use. I also think the component based architecture is an absolute artwork.

So what is wrong with it?

The last year as seen me working with a team of Unity3D developers on a project. We have three developers, and two artists. This is where Unity3D fails. The Asset Server solution which Unity Technologies provide to allow for collaborative projects is really bad. I'm often prompted with change sets from the start of the project, which don't seem to harm anything but are still confusing. The inability to merge Scenes, and the Prefab workaround is simply heinous.

The final straw came today, when I was attempting to merge in a colleagues work before I committed my own. I was receiving a simple runtime error from one of his functions which I could not resolve. In desperation, I clicked reimport all, a time consuming process which reimports all the assets in a project, during which you cannot work on the project.

Problem solved. Arrrgh.

Unity3D is awesome for solo developers, not so great for teams. These kinds of strange issues need to be fixed before a team of any size should seriously consider using Unity3D.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

A debugger wouldn't hurt either :)

Tom Higgins - Product Evangelist for Unity said...

FYI, we're working on both of those items right now. For starters we're improving our support for team based work-flows including support for both SVN and Perforce, and to do that we obviously need to make changes to how we store project files.

In parallel, and in reference to the comment above, we're also keen to get a debugger into the app as we can all see the benefits of that.

So while I agree these are weak points for Unity (team work-flow and lack of a debugger), it's solidly on our radar for the future!

Simon Wittber said...

Thanks Tom, i expect these will be the most eagerly awaited features of your platform.

Cameron Royal said...

Couldn't agree more, both for gamejam and our iphone games we've found it extremely difficult to work with even 2 programmers on the same Unity project.

In the end we gave up and worked on 2 different projects instead.

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