A few months ago I ran a survey to find out which programming-languages people were using with Entity Systems:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18JF6uCHI0nZ1-Yel76uZzL1UfFMI21QvDlcnXSGXSHo/viewform
I’m about to publish a Patreon article on Entity Systems (here if you want to support me), but I wanted to put something up on my blog at the same time, so here’s a quick look at the stats.
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TL;DR: experienced CEO/CTO/TechDirector with long background in programming, sales, and business management (Corporate, iPhone/Android, Games, Education) looking for strategic roles in USA, UK, and Asia.
After a year-out to do a post-graduate degree in Education, I’m looking for something new and exciting to do next. My primary goal is to boost a company or team rapidly and show significant outcomes – increased revenue or other KPI’s – either through Consulting or full/part-time senior leadership.
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The red pyramid in this image is a custom handle (3D) that you can grab, drag, and move around the screen. When it touches another GameObject, it finds any Sockets on that object, and attempts to rotate + move + scale the first object so that they connect together, like magnets.
Some screenshots from today’s improvements. I’m moving gradually towards releasing version 2. Shortlist of changes/improvements below…
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In case you weren’t aware, in a nutshell:
In the FPS roguelike I’ve been working on, a core feature is that each ability modifies how you interact with the world – you see things differently, you move differently, etc.
I’m working on a tiny level demo to show some of my ideas together. I want one character that can see in the dark, something like the “InfraVision” of D&D.
Spec:
Here’s my orc (a test avatar I already had) sitting on top of a building:
We use Unity’s “GetComponent
[ContextMenu("Enable dark vision")]
public Shader shaderDarkVision;
public void Start()
{
if( shaderDarkVision == null )
shaderDarkVision = Shader.Find("Unlit/Texture");
}
public void EnableDarkVision()
{
GetComponent<Camera>().SetReplacementShader( shaderDarkVision, "" );
}
I want the DarkVision to be significantly less perfect than daylight vision, so let’s add a simple vignette (Unity has downloadable examples of this shader in their docs, but I only found it after I’d got mine working!).
This took me a long time to get working, just to get accurate screen-positions of shader pixels – so much of Unity’s semi-proprietary Shader language is still undocumented, after many years. I knew all the maths, and had implemented the effect in OpenGL / GLSL in minutes, but it took an hour or so in Unity. And once it was working, I got sidetracked in tweaking the exact curve of darkness of vignette.
This was easy – simply average the r/g/b components of your Color, somethign like:
avg = (color.r + color.g + color.b ) / 3f; color = float4( avg, avg, avg, color.a );
I had some problems with this:
Here’s some of the things I tried and discarded. Note how the screenshots are from many positions – I ran around a lot, testing how effective the different shaders were for hunting a quarry (or fleeing an angry mob of AI’s).
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Unity staff: please write clear, correct, up-to-date documentation on depth-buffering as supported (or not) by your proprietary Shader Lab language, and with clear details on how this works in Unity5, not some hand-waving Unity4-maybe-Unity5-not-sure gumph.
I simply couldn’t get it to work. Using the proprietary built-in depth-buffer samplers either failed outright (0.5 across the sampler), or gave bizarre results.
Rumours suggest that we have to write 3 shaders: 2 for your proprietary system, and a third where we re-implement depth-buffer access by hand. This seems to me unlikely – I am sure Unity can handle that for you. This is the kind of feature that Unity’s ShaderLab does well (but no-one documents, and so it goes under-used by devs).
When you find or reverse-engineer instructions, ShaderLab is excellent. It’s such a pity that so often … you can’t.
Ultimately, I fell back on “Fine, I’ll use the most basic bits of Shaders that even Unity can’t make confusing” – object normals. I faked shading Old Skool: each surface is darkened by dot-producting the forwards vector ( which by definition is (0,0,1) after the MVP multiplication stage) with the normal vector. That gives a float from 0 to 1, showing how much the surface is facing towards/away from the viewer.
I’m not delighted with this – it’s not quite the effect I was aiming for (I REALLY wanted to wipe more of the diffuse detail, but…). However, it does work quite nicely, and for now it’s more than good enough.
Here’s why I like it:
A lot of us have been looking at alternative engines recently, and for me the biggest challenge is that the intersection between “game engine I can use easily” and “programming language I am willing to use” is quite small.
That got me thinking: if you started a new commercial ES today, what language does your audience want?
FYI: I picked the top 10 global languages by popularity, and then cherrypicked from the next 50 or so on http://sogrady-media.redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2015/07/lang-rank-615-wm.png – favouring ones where I have met people that I know are using them in gamedev today.
I love researching and writing about Entity Systems, but it takes me days or weeks to make a single article. I’ve written almost nothing for the past 18 months because on my current salary I can’t afford the time off work.
So … now I’m crowdfunding the long, detailed, in-depth ES articles. This gives me a way to spend the time I need to write each one while still paying rent, food, etc.
You don’t have to sign-up – I know there’s lots of people like myself who are in bad financial situations, and I hope all the articles will be made free eventually. But if you’ve found my ES articles useful, and you want more of them, and you can spare $5 once every couple of months, please do.
You can sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/tmachine
Civilization was one of the best games ever designed and shipped.
Civ5 is tragic. It’s one thing to launch a AAA title full of nerfed gameplay and obvious, in-your-face bugs, but quite another to leave them unfixed for years after. It’s one thing to officially fix your bugs only in pay-for add-ons – but quite another to keep those add-ons at full price for years after they released.
Here’s a quick view of what’s still broken in Civ5 today, if you buy it direct in the online stores:
That last point leads into the legion of game-design failures in Civ5. As I understand it, most of the game was “Designed” around the idea of dumbing-down: apparently the Youth of Today are so stupid and lazy that they cannot play games that are deep, enjoyable, or interesting. The way to make money is to make games idiot-proof with as few options as possible and no meaningful decisions.
Ironically, this is the exact opposite of what the legions of Civ fans had shown they valued in the Civ franchise, via the overwhelmingly popular mods for civ4. Master of Mana added depth, difference, more depth, more variety, more difference, and yet more depth, across the board. It hacked the tech tree into becoming 5 different tech-trees, all running in parallel (WTF? Oh, yes!) – and players loved it.
One day, I may write a post on the flow of game design, successes and failures, and the #facepalm that civ3 and civ5 were (between the two of them, both abject failures). Strangely enough … the two things in civ5 that I remember the community being most afraid of (hexes and 1-unit-per-tile) … seem to have worked fine. The radical changes were a success; it was all the easy, “you can’t possibly screw this up”, parts that the dev-team screwed up. And that is why I consider civ5 “tragic”: they got the hardest bits right, despite the odds … and tripped over their own shoelaces messing-up the easy bits.
Civ4 had a similar trajectory, with two differences:
For Civ5, someone in charge (publisher? studio director?) appears to have decided: “hey, we shafted the consumers and exploited the franchise well there – but we could do so much better! Let’s do it deliberately this time: save money by deliberately shipping incomplete product, then use online market-controls to force everyone to pay 3 times to get a working game! We’ll be RICH!”.
In their defence, Firaxis did ship one major content update for free, which was wonderful: they added retina support. That’s unnecessary (not a bug, retina’s didn’t exist when it came out) and nice to have – but in no way justifies ignoring the rest.
I periodically write massive long documents detailing all the bugs in Unity that I know, have memorized, and have to workaround on a day-to-day / hour-to-hour basis. But it makes me so angry and frustrated – so much terrible coding, so little technology-leadership at the company – that I end up deleting it. Life is too short to be daily reminded how crappy (and yet easy to fix) our tools are.
Then, every 6 months or so, when people ask me for simple examples of how ECS’s fix Unity, I have to wrack my brains for something simple.
So I’m going to start blogging simple examples as I run into them, with only enough context for me to understand them. Here’s the first…
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New prototype I’ve been playing around with…
There’s only a few tag-cloud plugins that still work – most of them have stopped being supported.
The best one I found has super-awesome-multi-colour mode. But by default it’s disabled, and the config-options don’t include a way to turn it on. You have to dig in the developer documentation to find out how.
A new version of Unity is now out – https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-5.2 – and it’s a doozy.
I don’t normally blog a blow-by-blow account, but this set is particularly interesting.
It suggests the tech team has been focussed on fixing many “critical but un-sexy” problems. That is a noticeable change in direction from the past few years. Possibly this is a one-off to get Unity 5 working properly.
If you’re still using Unity 4.x, it is finally safe to move to Unity 5.
Unity 5 is not a complete replacement for Unity 4 – there are still major featuers of 4.x that have been removed from Unity 5 and have no upgrade-path – but it’s finally production-ready (or very nearly). That … is big news!
Please note: there will be a lot of negative comments here; that is inevitable, considering most of the change-list is “things that were broken, or wrongly implemented, or poorly designed – and are now not”.
To be clear: I’m pleased and excited by the overall shape of these changes.
Unity has (amazingly) never had built-in culling accessible by developers, which is almost unheard-of in game-engines. This suggests we’re getting towards it (although spheres are only a first-approximation for culling, and I wonder how deep the interaction is with Unity’s pipeline here. I’d assumed we’d get access to something more like BSP)
Scenes in Unity are very much FUBAR as a concept – they were created by people who had very little understanding of computer-game design and development. Ideally, we’ll see Unity remove the whole “Scene” concept in a future major release, but in the meantime this is a significant step towards reducing their weaknesses, which is good to see.
No s***, Sherlock! Yeah, most people using Unity’s “new GUI” have found it’s fundamentally broken in a bunch of places. Good to see Unity working on this, and hilighting some of the issues – but really they need to create an entire webpage listing “the following parts are broken, don’t use them – or beware if you do”.
Right now, you tend to waste hours, half-days at a time … re-discovering known bugs in Unity’s GUI.
If you’re on Windows and have the highest quality settings, this is lethal: Unity simply doesn’t work. But it’s coming in an emergency patch very soon.
If this does what I think it does, then it was essential back when Mecanim was released (3 years ago); glad to see it’s finally here.
That’s an enormous speed-up for an engine as old as Unity – this is big news. Reading between the lines, the speed up is partly a side-effect of them making it a bit more multi-threaded (which became normal for game engines many years ago).
If we thought that was a lot, wait till you see:…
… 50% performance improvement! Wow. Name-checking VR here is probably the key item. We keep seeing VR’s extreme performance-requirements forcing engine-makers to up their game, and dig deep to find perf boosts. The “minimum” hardware reqs for basic VR rigs are very high even now, several years after Oculus Rift launched.
This was the minimum we expected from the “new GUI” when it launched in Unity 4.6 almost a year ago. This fix brings the GUI most of the way towards being “production ready” … ironically, 6 months after Unity changed their website to hide the existence of the “old (but works) GUI” and pretend it didn’t exist.
This is patching a MAJOR design bug in core Unity that has plagued Unity for many years. I want to play with this some more, and see how much we can un-**** Unity’s ****ed ray-casting system using it.
(I don’t believe any experienced game-developer would have accepted Unity’s original design here – it was clearly a terrible approach that would cause never-ending head-aches when making games. It mixed concepts that were very obviously unrelated and distinct)
This one has been blogged about extensively by some of the graphics team, IIRC.
In my experience, Unity’s shaders have been OK, with a few that were terrible (e.g. all the Mobile ones), but the framework which holds them has generally been excellent: it’s isolated us from the pain and suffering of GPU-specific shader bugs. This house-cleaning doesn’t make much (if any) difference to most of us, but apparently keeps Unity’s internal code clean in a way that will facilitate rapid changes and improvements going forwards.
TL, DR: “we finally implemented masking properly in the new GUI”.
See previous comments on the new GUI, and how it’s getting much closer to production-ready.
Yes, really – Unity has finally added the “dropdown”, which has been a global expectation in UI design for 20+ years (it was made compulsory in web-browsers back in the 1990’s).
Apple told devs to remove this … um … about 3 or 4 years ago? At first, it was broken (couldn’t resize windows), then it was annoying (Unity added optional resizing on all edges, but put an illegal resize-hot-corner in bottom right that broke all EditorWindow code, because they made it a private API).
Working around that on Mac … forced you to mildly break things on Windows.
TL, DR: custom editors (as found in many/most of the best Asset Store plugins) will now be a little less-broken across the board.
Yay! I’ve not been using Substance, but I’ve met several developers who’ll be breaking over the champagne over this, given how miserable they’ve been about crashes and hangs with this in the past.
Without this feature, the new GUI was not usable in most non-trivial games. It’s hard to over-estimate the importance of this for declaring the new GUI production-ready.
Small but sweet. It’s a little thing, but makes a big difference to the frustration level of the user; in my experience, these things are often the real reason why you sacrifice the cost-savings and benefits of your own engine and use something like Unity instead.
i.e.: with your own engine, you can’t afford the time/money to polish every small interaction; 3rd-party game-engines can shine here, and should take more advantage of it.
I sometimes mention stuff like this as suggesting that Unity’s senior management team are out-of-touch with their product. Unity’s early community loved it largely because of small things, but as Unity grew, the company stopped sweating them. I suspect time will eventually tell that was a huge strategic mistake.
This window hasn’t correctly worked for at least three years; converting it to a “proper tree view” might – finally! – make the “Export Package” function do what it’s defined to, instead of exporting the wrong things, breaking keyboard and mouse interactions, etc.
(most of the bugs appeared to be a side-effect of the non-maintained, half-implemented, custom tree view code)
Co-incidentally, I tweeted about this recently: Unity could make their engine noticeably faster to develop with if they provided visual feedback on these fields.
It’s embarassing, almost shameful, how poor the UX is on these fields today. By the sounds of things, this patch merely makes them “less crap”, rather than fixing them – but the last 5 years has been so awful that any improvement is welcome!
To call this “important” is somewhat of an understatement.
Substantial areas of the Editor API’s are surprisingly poorly maintained by Unity. The bugs undermine people each time they try to use one of Unity’s overwhelmingly greatest features: its extensibility.
If this does what I suspect, it will make it trivial to fix a lot of common, frustrating “why do my shadows suck? OMG! UNITY SUXXS!!!!” situations.
SO MANY.
I don’t use Mecanim: it’s been slow, clunky, buggy – and it solved the wrong problems at launch. It felt more like a marketing excuse rather than a developer feature. For me, working x-platform and often on mobile: not very useful.
However, looking at how long the list of fixes is … it might finally be worth using it. In context of all the other changes we’re seeing – maybe production-ready for general use now?
(modulo: the performance. Last time I checked, it was still way too slow for cross-platform games unless you were happy to have a relatively small number of animated objects)
Go check it out! If you’re a long-time Mecanim user, let us know what you think of this list of changes!
Unity’s Terrain system was implemented using a nasty, ugly hack that should never have been used.
As I understand it, that was in itself an attempt to workaround some problems with the fundamentally broken – and allegedly “unfixable” – Serialization system that is core to Unity, but is too much code for anyone to fix (and will be thrown out / fixed / replaced around Unity v6 or v7. Maybe).
This change reeks of a “workaround to a workaround”: you can’t create TerrainData in the scene (which should be the ONLY option!), but you can artifically create one if you write a script to do it for you. Either way, it’s good news – TerrainData Assets are a common source of project-corruption, because they’re abusing a feature that wasn’t intended for this.
OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!!!!!!!111!11111!!!!11!!!1!
I frequently discover major bugs in Unity core; there is never anything I can do about it because Unity strips / deletes all stack traces (in most cases) before outputting anything.
If this fix does what it says on the tin … WOOOHHHOOOO! … we can finally workaround Unity crashes (by debugging them!) and give Unity much more detailed and accurate bug-reports (leading to greatly increased chances of them fixing bugs).
Cross those fingers…
As I recently tweeted, Unity’s support for custom mouse-cursors was recently broken. That’s a huge pain given most games today use custom cursors. Several fixes here, looks like they’ve cleaned them all up (I hope).
:O
:O
:O
If this is what I think it is, it’s another example of “should have been fixed before 5.0 was released” – but I’ve had so many problems with the bad system of Unity raycasts that I go out of my way to avoid them anyway.
Sounds unexciting, but … I think I’ve encountered this on some of my projects: unexplained hangs that came out of nowhere and destroyed my ability to keep working on one particular game, related to Undo.
Note: I keep saying this in public: Unity’s Undo system simply Does Not Work, it’s appallingly buggy. As far as I can tell, the person who originally wrote it had little or no experience of what they were doing, and didn’t consult the literature to find out how to implement Undo systems correctly.
Some days, I genuinely feel it would be better for everyone if Unity removed the “ctrl-z” keyboard combo, because so often when you press those letters you corrupt your game project. A lot of the time, you don’t notice that Unity has just corrupted your project – not until much later, and then you don’t realise that it was Unity’s broken Undo that caused the corruption. Instead, you blame yourself, or your co-workers. Seriously, it’s that bad.
(I’ve stopped bothering logging bugs against it)
Subtle, but … I suspect this fixes a LOT of bugs we see on larger Unity projects, where you’re frequently hot-loading complex sets of scripts, assets, inter-related dependencies, custom asset-processors, etc.
So that’s it. What do you think? Any other major items you notice in the release notes that will make your life significantly better?
What’s still broken?
There’s tonnes of blogs out there, so I only talk about the bits that other people have missed, or were too polite or inexperienced to cover. Often that means I’m the one pointing out the flaws (most people don’t want to write bad things. Screw that; ignoring the bad points does you no favours!).
Sometimes I get to talk about the good bits that – sadly – few people have noticed. Here’s one of those.
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Unity3D has a great core architecture – it’s easy to understand and use. However, it has some significant flaws.
One of the recurring problems I run into is that Unity requirs you to have precisely one “Scene” at any one time, but often you need to have multiple scenes at the same time. Problem? Yes, lots…
Unity 5 has some hacks to make it “sort-of possible” to have multiple scenes at once in-Editor.
Note: these were mentioned by Unity corp in August 2014, but aren’t available to most users yet
But they (appear to be) hacks: they help for a fraction of the use-cases. That’s fine: Unity has 10 years of software written on the assumption there is only one “Scene”; that’s an enormous amount of code to change! But can we do something about this?
If you just want a working solution, here’s the Unity Asset store page / support page, new versions will appear here first.
I’m using it myself on my own projects, and will do some beta testing with other people’s games. If it works well enough, it’ll go on Asset Store. I suggest reading this full post anyway – it’s an example of how to creatively solve small issues like this in Unity.
(if you’d like to beta-test this, tweet me @t_machine_org or email me (address at top of page). Unity Corp only let me have 12 beta-testers, so you’ll need to give me some info about what you’ll use it for, how soon, how much feedback you’ll give me, etc! Sorry :( )
One of my hobby projects is a testament to the Ultima and Elder Scrolls games – a massive open-world, where everything you do impacts the world around you. This has long been promised by commercial games – and it sucks from a gameplay perspective; it’s just not fun. But a very old ASCII-graphics game, Omega, showed a couple of ways of doing it that delivered on that promise while still being “fun” – very fun! That’s what I’m working towards.
It’s a test-bed for the high-performance Entity System I’m writing for Unity (more info here). I’m aiming for “gameplay considerably richer than Skyrim” with “graphics about the level of Oblivion”. To be clear: Oblivion was released almost 10 years ago! To reproduce those graphics today is fairly easy.
One of the things I have yet to see in any FPS RPG is believable cities, and more: cities that actually evolve. The nearest I’ve seen is the beautiful “large towns” of the Assassin’s Creed series (they represent cities, but the distances are way too small).
That doesn’t cover the “evolve” part though – even the AC cities are 100% static and unchanging. Hand-crafted, and because they cannot change (technical design choice) the player is incapable of altering them. You can’t burn down blocks, or build a new bridge. You can’t buy two houses and knock them together.
Hey, RPG industry, you can do a lot better!
This is one of the main new gameplay elements in my design. If all I managed was to take an off-the-shelf-RPG mod and add living, growing cities … I’d probably be content. What does this mean, though?
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One of Unity’s dirty secrets is that (out of the box) it’s plain awful as a prototyping tool. You can fix that, but it requires quite a lot of work. I’m going to start publishing my fixes one by one. Here’s the first: a test-bed for making custom meshes.
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If you do any non-trivial customization of Unity Editor, you’ll almost certainly extend EditorWindow. But Unity (to date) refuses to tell anyone how to do this legally, or what the contracts you’re being held to are. Without that, many plugins on the Unity Asset Store are wrong and buggy, and sooner or later accidentally cause problems for users.
Their fault? Partly, but I don’t blame them too much – rather: Unity’s fault for failing to document (and failing to test assets before approving them!).
For those of you who aren’t happy shipping crappy, broken, buggy plugins (And charging for them), here’s a guide / reference for the lifecycle of EditorWindow. Extra info, explanations, and gotchas welcome!
…Sign up here to be kept up-to-date on the project’s upcoming Kickstarter / Patreon / whatever-it-ends-up-being (if you’re already signed up, it won’t add you again)
How do you make good UX / GUI to present information to a mass-market audience with widely varying levels of education and attention-span?
This is a problem faced all the time by game designers and developers. It’s one of the most under-appreciated skills of the profession: good game developers know more about “presenting information and choices” than almost anyone else, anywhere. Because games are generally overloaded with info, and the dev teams have to filter that down and present it clearly – but if they get it wrong, the player’s in-game character dies, the game is lost, and the game itself tanks commercially. The developers then – ultimately – lose their jobs when the studio goes bust.
I’m going to start looking at non-tech examples of design and UX through the lens of game-design, and see where it goes…
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In Unity, you create new scripts many times per day, and folders but there’s no keyboard shortcuts. I fixed this, and made the popup rather more intelligent than Unity’s built-in one. I’ve decided to make the basic version available for free here:
UPDATE: there’s a bug in the 1.0 version – it WILL NOT WORK if you set your Project window to 2-column layout. This is due to BUGS IN UNITY (not my code!). I have a workaround that’s in the Asset Store version, but is missing from the free version. I’ll patch it later
FreeIntelligentNew.dll – I’m not supporting this; it’s free: use at your own risk.
Or, for $2, you can get the latest version with full source code from Asset Store – I’m supporting + updating this.
Drag/drop the DLL into any folder named “Editor” in your project.
(required by Unity; this is how they make sure that Editor scripts aren’t accidentally included in your final game)
This works by peeking into some of Unity’s internals and detecting which EditorWindow has focus. If it’s the Project window, it uses some hardcoded constants (which differ between Unity versions, due to bugs they gradually fix, I think) to get the positions right, and offer you the popup.
I did it this way because Unity currently provides NO PUBLIC API for reproducing some of their core Editor features (e.g. where they temporarily change the render-style of the “newly-created item” in a Unity windowpane, so that you can edit the name in-line. Not possible for you or I!)
With a bit more hacking, I might be able to hook Unity’s own code and enable / trigger / alter the hidden features from keyboard, but … that’s on the wrong side of “Fragile; would probably break unexpectedly in a future version”.
How I’ve done it so far it sits independently of Unity’s code, and is very unlikely to stop working, or to cause bugs later on. YMMV…
(if you want to know more, get the Asset Store version, read the source. I’m happy to answer quetsions via the support links or in the Unity Forums page for this)
