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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

What I've heard is that many of the problems are growing-pains; Unity has some really deep technical debt and they're (perhaps too hastily) ripping it out and updating things, which is causing angst for devs when a) their existing projects break, and b) in some cases the old system actually gets deprecated before the new one reaches parity. But it also sounds like all of the completely new stuff that doesn't involve scorched-earth deprecation is generally well-received (and in some cases, a long time coming).

Does that line up with your experience?

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I really, really wish it did.

Here's just one concrete example: real-time point-light shadows in the Universal Render Pipeline. URP is the new 'default' way of rendering, the old renderer is being phased out, this is the new way of doing things - as you say; technical debt as they re-engineer. But how horrid has this process of eliminating technical debt been? You've got Unity proudly announcing that URP was 'production ready' in February 2019, but you still can't have a point-light cast real-time shadows. Currently that (let's face it, really basic) feature is planned for Unity 2020.2, which is still in alpha, but even if you download the alpha you can't access that feature yet, and they've announced they're not going to backport it, so bad luck if you're using 2019 or even 2020.1 for your game.

It's actually making me a bit sad to go into detail on what watching the URP fiasco, so I'll spare any other examples involving post-processing stacks, or 'camera stacking', or Ambient Occlusion, or...

That's pretty bad, but I'd still file that under "too-hastily deprecating things before the new version is at parity". Not that it isn't a huge issue, but could it be a temporary issue? Is the newer one, in theory, on a good track for the long-term?

The newer one (URP) is already in its second rewrite after ditching the initial version (LWRP). They also completely split the post-processing stack into two incompatible stacks depending on whether you're using URP or HDRP, then backtracked and are attempting to merge them into a single stack again.

So while maybe they'll get it all fixed soon, based on their track record I'm pretty cynical and bet it's more likely in 2021 or 2022 they'll announce yet another overhaul of the rendering stack(s), probably unifying them back into one stack or something.

Absolutely. One more additional thing: the latest back-track has been the URP-is-not-a-standalone-package anymore, URP package versions going forward are going to be tied to a specific Editor version. I imagine this is going to make the ability to backport features and bug fixes incredibly difficult because the dependencies are going to be so tightly enmeshed.

I mean, I've been watching this unfold over multiple years, and I fully expect this to continue over the next two at the very least, and it applies across every slice of the engine that I'm aware of, and some that I'm not intimately familiar with (I hear second-hand that networking is somehow in a worse state?)

I guess everyone has different tolerances for what may technically be a 'temporary issue.' Yes, I have no doubt that all this engineering will lead to a better, more stable Unity, but for right now I actually have to somehow write real software and ship something to paying customers.

It's not - they didn't deprecate the 'built in' render pipeline, and said they don't plan to until the new one has feature parity. They have odd marketing for their new features - where they want developers to use them so they call them production ready - but they do that so they can get feedback and continue to fix them

I've tried to customize their open source HDRP to add a shader feature and the whole pipeline was astonishingly messy and super convoluted. I'm really not optimistic on their chances of shipping a decent production ready pipeline before the end of 2021.

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