Unity Blog

I have been using Unity since 2008 version 2 before the Unity iPhone even and I have to agree. It is a mess.

There has never been a time in Unity where systems aren't changing.

APIs should be simple facades to ugly systems underneath, abstracting away the pain, but Unity puts it right in your face. Their editor is pushed over code first solutions.

I thought when they went subscription that it would calm down, as before that it was a mad rush to justify you upgrading to the next version. It has only gotten worse. From the dual particle systems (which Shuriken wasn't even code accessible for a time), killing off simple legacy animation APIs, the UI years and years of delay and still not really as good as NGUI in terms of simplicity and mobile performance, the multiplayer systems have never been great they should have just kept RakNet/enet based reliable UDP and been done with it only Photon is worth it, the bulky editor first solutions that really should be code first and then editors that use that and on and on.

Compare that with Unreal that is wonderful in terms of networking/replication, solid platform that is C++ first, decent platform support, Unity has more but lots of issues.

Unity is what we develop most games on but Unreal starting to become more regular. Unity is caught in a pickle. Unreal is winning high end, Unity wants to be them, but they are leaving their smaller developers that do mobile/2D/simple 3D and making everything overly complex, while Godot is…

Flash is dead. Adobe proved they weren't serious about flash when they announced licensing restrictions, 9% "revenue sharing" and hoops you have to jump through in order to use the "premium" 3d stuff. They eventually changed their mind about the 9% revenue tax after developers revolted, but the damage was done now that everyone knows they'd even think of doing something like that. And they drove the nail in the coffin (which Steve Jobs supplied), when they gave up on Flash for mobile.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/11/09/adobe-to-stop-work-on-flash-for-mobile-browsers/

"Flash Player 11.1 is the last release of the Flash Player plug-in for mobile browsers. Adobe will not add support for new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.). Adobe will continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations through September 2013, and will also allow our source-code licensees to continue working on and releasing their own implementations." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadmap.html

There is no future for Flash. Adobe's all about HTML5 now, they don't give a shit about Flash any more, and neither should you.

Unity3D went to great efforts to support Flash, and now they're sunsetting it, for good reason:

Unity wrote on their blog: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/04/23/sunsetting-flash/

We don’t see Adobe being firmly committed to the future development of Flash. This is evidenced by…

I don't really see a problem with this. From the Unity3D blog [1].

Adobe announced a brand new licensing structure for Flash games
You should definitely read the details as Adobe explains them here: www.adobe.com/go/fpl and here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/premium-features-licensing-faq.html The short version is that Adobe is introducing a new revenue share licensing model where they will take a revenue share from some content publishers.
Adobe will charge publishers 9% of only the revenues directly caused by the game which exceed $50K.
If revenue is not directly caused by the game you pay nothing. i.e. An online teaser level for a iOS / Android game, a car company having a realtime 3d demo of their newest model which you can inspect and drive around, a 3d walkthrough for a library, etc, all would not pay the revenue share.
We see this as Flash positioning itself alongside other well known distribution channels: make money through the App Store, Apple takes a share. Make money through the Android Market place, Google takes a share. Make money through Flash, Adobe takes a share.
It’s also worth noting that the new Adobe license will prohibit scenarios where you’d have the first level of a game in the Flash Player, and the full experience inside the Unity Web Player. Alas, this is something you’ll need to be aware of if you were considering such a route.

You see, Flash is not web technology.Neither is iOS, or Android. Flash was web tech, a long,long…

I've been researching JSON serialization/deserialization libraries for Unity, and I'm writing a spreadsheet comparing the different alternatives.

Unity JSON Libraries: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NoIYASJR9uUT-kZxjb54zWX2Lr3EXp8F7t7N62yo7J8/edit?usp=sharing

Unity is limited by the fact that it uses an older version of .NET 2.0, or even preferably a .NET 2.0 subset. It can also be optimized by disabling exceptions. And most importantly on AOT-compiled platforms like iOS and consoles, it doesn't support dynamic JIT compilation and interfaces like Reflection.Emit, which some of the high performance JSON serialization libraries use for optimization.

So the question of "Why is reflection so slow?" is very interesting to me as a Unity iOS developer, since I'm forced to use it without all the fancy optimizations (or figure out how to avoid using it).

Some of the big fancy luxurious all dancing all singing JSON libraries intended for less restricted CLR platforms like Windows do all kinds of amazing tricks to reduce and optimize their use of reflection. Some of those have been stripped down and ported to Unity, but others haven't.

JSON.Net is one of the most advanced feature-rich C# JSON libraries, and it is free, but it is not the fastest. The free version doesn't run on Unity out of the box, but there is a striped down simplified version that runs on Unity available on the Unity Asset Store for $25.

JSON.NET home page: http://www.newtonsoft.com/json

JSON.Net…

From what I know their TOS applies to everything which is posted to the Appstore. As hundreds of people already pointed out by the wording of the TOS, both Unity3d and Flash are in violation of it. It doesn't matter if Unity is a pre-processor or cross-compiler or whatever, the apps are not _originally_ written in objective-c, c++ or c.

This is the official response regarding their contact with apple:

"We haven’t heard anything from Apple about this affecting us, and we believe that with hundreds of titles (or probably over a thousand by now), including a significant proportion of the best selling ones, we’re adding so much value to the iPhone ecosystem that Apple can’t possibly want to shut that down.

Our current best guess is that we’ll be fine. But it would obviously be irresponsible to guarantee that. What I can guarantee is that we’ll continue to do everything in our power to make this work, and that we will be here to inform you when we know more – as soon as we know more."

source: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/10/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0/

For historical reasons, every language that wanted one built their own SIMD API instead of building a language-independent API first: C++, C#, Dart, OpenCL, and so on, and it's not easy to go back and change that. However, there is a lot of commonality between the SIMD APIs in those languages, so we are following de-facto standards here.

And, we certainly do have real-world use cases in mind. See [0] for one example. We're also interested in using SIMD for video codec development which can't always be done on GPUs.

[0] http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/07/benchmarking-unity-performance-in-webgl/

And if, in the future, Apple can show that auto-vectorization in this domain is more successful than their attempts so far have shown it to be, then JS engines can always just go back to implementing SIMD.js via a simple polyfill which the engine can auto-vectorize, leaving very little baggage in the language or implementations.