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Comment by eriknstr | Hacker News Reader

Your original comment read as if you were saying that Unity was to blame for what the graphics look like.

Again I would say that if he did say that, he would be correct.

Sit me down in a room of 20 games, and tell me to identify unity games by simply playing each computer. On the 20% chance that I can't instantly tell by looking, a wee swipe of the mouse and the complete lack of responsiveness finalizes all I need for 100% success rate.

I could do the same, and I could also tell you which games were made with Unreal Engine, which with Source Engine, etc. Game engines have distinctive traits that are hard to eliminate from a game but easy to notice while you play. That isn't an argument against Unity per se.

It is with Unity because it equals bad performance. It isn't like other games which, if you throw a beefy rig at it, you get more performance for the most part. It has a "It is 2001 and my Flash Player Animation is running at 24fps and the fans are burning out" feel to it.

It is most definitely possible to achieve great results, including performance, with Unity. It requires creating the game from the ground up with code, though -- and that does not seem to be the audience that Unity markets towards the most.

That said, it's not easy though it is certainly doable; it basically means you're using Unity largely as a "rendering pipeline" which may or may not be overkill, depending on the use case/game in question.

Finding any information on "Pure Code" setups for unity is impossible. As in, I think http://jacksondunstan.com/ has the only article on the internet.

I know this is an old(er) post now, but thank you very much for the link. We actually had not seen that site before, and it's a treasure trove of fantastic information -- some of which we've found out ourselves, much of it new to us altogether.

You're right -- there's very little written on the topic. Though Unity has a fantastic community, and a large swath of information & user help to be found, a lot of it is directed at the newer/simpler developer (or mobile specifically).

Much of our work, and findings, has been derived from running our own tests & benchmarks as well as reading research/white-papers. In general, we've kind of found that many [advanced] game dev related topics are not well publicized or are fairly tightly-held. Our best source of information for things like highly advanced pathfinding, or low-level & high-volume multi-agent modeling/simulation strategies, have come directly from published academic research which has also been a treasure-trove of information.

We've read more research the last year or two than we did through all of school and the first ~10-15 years of our careers combined! =)

Out of sheer curiosity, what are the tell-tale signs of other engines?

That has more to do with Unity being more accessible to beginners, thus more titles being released by less experienced people.

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