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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

> Any reasonably complex interface is essentially a game whether it's a music composition app, simulator, MMO or even a basic form.

I've been out of the game development arena for a while, but I can't help but pause here. Are people really writing DAWs and big desktop app interfaces in Unity?

The last time I played with a game engine, I would have said UI was its weakest aspect. Clunky, slow controls, visually unappealing, and certainly lacking in accessibility. Without researching more, I would feel pretty confident placing a bet that if I pointed JAWS at a Unity Window, it would say "Game Window" and that's about it. Windows accessibility hooks and tab navigation certainly didn't work out of the box, and I would say that is bare minimum for a UI toolkit.

So while it's valid that Unity is a beast and game engines will eat the world for games, I have a really hard time taking them seriously for UI-driven application development.

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> Are people really writing DAWs and big desktop app interfaces in Unity?

Arguably the biggest non-game applications are in virtual cinematography, architectural visualization, non-game simulations, and immersive art installations. Most of those uses don't result in discrete "apps", though, they're just workflows within Unity designed to produce a specific type of output.

One prominent example of a discrete pro app made from Unity, though, is Digital Monarch Media's filmmaking toolsuite, which is built on Unity.[1] But it fills some unusual hardware and interface needs that Unity is built, or has plugins, to provide (touchscreen interfaces, motion tracking, color grading).

That said, I see non-game apps in the vein of content creation or productivity pop up more frequently now in Godot development than Unity. There are some proof-of-concepts, like the Godello[2] Trello clone that was posted here a while back, but more useful examples are Pixelorama[3], an open-source pixel-art editor built with Godot, and Heavypaint[4], a painting/sketching app.

[1] https://www.vfxvoice.com/instant-feedback-expozure-expands-i...

[2] https://github.com/alfredbaudisch/Godello

[3] https://orama-interactive.itch.io/pixelorama

[4] http://www.heavypoly.com/heavypaint

Just wanted to say thank you for the excellent resources

Godot is written in Godot. Anything you see in its UI can be used by Godot developers.

Which can be abused in fun ways! https://twitter.com/yafd/status/1294719274657787904

According to Bloomberg[0], non-gaming clients make up 10% of Unity's business.

> [Unity] helps Volkswagen AG train employees, was used by filmmakers to shoot the recent “Lion King” movie and by the Hong Kong International Airport to simulate changes in passenger volume.

I don't know enough about these domains to say whether it's a good (or bad) idea, but I've also heard of Unity being used for other kinds of modeling and simulations too (climatology, traffic, etc).

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-07/unity-tec...

> Lion king

I'm fairly sure this is incorrect.

Unsure about Lion King specifically but all of the other recent Jon Favreau titles (The Mandalorian, The Jungle Book) have done virtual production with Unreal Engine.

From Engadget[0]:

> The workflow of The Lion King was vastly different to The Jungle Book. MPC worked on 'master scenes' in London with industry-standard tools such as Maya. It then developed an "asset management system" that could translate the scene into something that was compatible with Unity, a popular game engine.

Also, this YouTube video[1] goes over the process in more detail.

[0]: https://www.engadget.com/2019-07-29-lion-king-remake-vfx-mpc...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCnayCnM6Zk

Ah interesting, I guess it makes sense considering its a different workflow from the two titles I mentioned which were compositing people into CG backdrops.

Thanks for the correction.

> Are people really writing DAWs and big desktop app interfaces in Unity?

I’d love to know if Unity is made in Unity. The Godot game engine’s development environment is made in Godot (which is why it was able to be run in web browsers using WebAssembly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23354286).

Unity is not really made in Unity - the core engine is in C++ that is separate from the userland C# scripts. However, it uses the same UI library that's available to users (IMGUI, and being upgraded to UIToolkit), which makes it easy to extend.

This is an example of someone who has built a robotic simulator in Unity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvZgbB71yb8&feature=youtu.be

"...I have a really hard time taking them seriously for UI-driven application development."

It's been a long time since I've done serious UI work, so am not aware of the latest grievances.

But it'd be great if stock UI frameworks were more like game (simulation) engines. Scene graphs, composition, event loops, command objects, etc.

Just like sufficiently complex C programs become buggy implementations of LISP, interesting UIs eventually recreate a poorly conceived and terribly implemented simulation engine.

Potential advantage to Unity is it was developed from the ground up to do all that. Unlike the browser.

Potential advantage to using a browser is that it actually works. Unlike Unity.

But in the end, Electron or Unity doesn't matter, both are equally bloated.

Problem with the browser is it's optimized around countering network latency and security issues. All those optimizations are essentially worthless when running a native application.

For quickly making a cross-platform mobile apps, it is definitely going to emerge as the new first choice. I've been burned so much by cross-platform issues trying to do anything complicated or graphical with phonegap/cordova/electron/react...

I think GP meant that a lot of patterns that are common in game dev could also be applied to other kinds of software.

It doesn't read that way to me, since it ends with "can't wait to buy shares" and is sandwiched between other examples of how Unity brings them joy - implying Unity is the platform on which all of these things will be built. I guess OP can clarify if they desire, and my comment still stands regarding Unity's UI toolkit.

Labster uses Unity to simulate lab work for science students:

https://www.labster.com/

Unity's co-founder David Helgason is an investor in Labster:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/06/virtual-science-lab-startu...

I've made a node-editor based UI heavy application for real-time texture synthesis in Unity[0], for which it is quite good. Although I agree that it doesn't integrate platform native UI patterns well.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xU4Dtp7cV8

Agree. Unity has rather verbose graphs to describe GUIs, so it is more like XAML, which I guess works, but isn't exactly elegant. And no, Unity doesn't have any accessibility by default. Plus it tends to have a few ms of mouse cursor lag, which can be pretty infuriating to power users.

Yes, I guess. I was installing an app called Rekordbox (its a library manager and a performance app for digital DJ hardware on the Pioneer DJ platform) and, sure enough, spotted a bunch of Unity DLLs being copied in the setup program.

Unity's homepage lists four industries they target and Games is only one of them. Seems clear they also want to sell into Manufacturing, Construction, Film, etc.

For MVP you can't beat speed of development with Unity. You can create a complex UI with full logic in a matter of days.

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