I've been using unity for almost a decade now and enjoying it despite the many caveats and idiosyncrasies I come across.
The bottom line is, I definitely don't want to throw away the decade of experience I have using Unity if I can help it. Ultimately I want them to learn from their mistakes and move forward. While Unity has had a fair share of missteps ultimately it's the devil I know.
I'd like to ask (only out of genuine curiosity): Do you also build your own engines or are you fully entrenched and dependent on Unity? I would feel very disappointed if I spent a decade on something only to depend exactly on that one thing and not be able to create it myself, especially when it's such a tractable problem in a sub-year time frame even with learning happening. The fit you could have with your own engine with a bigger up front investment of time and energy seems like it would easily pay off vs. just using Unity for years and years.
Not only sunken costs, but building an engine is no easy task. It’s easier to write a game than to write an engine (most of the time).
I do think this is the right approach. This is the approach I took. I was dependent on an engine for a long time until I realized it was just a facade and that I already possessed the knowledge to do it myself. So when XNA died, and MonoGame wasn’t mature yet, I had no choice but to write my own. Some of that effort went into MonoGame’s early days, most of it didn’t (I respect keeping the API the same but we, devs, could have done better to improve it).
Unity made it easy to build games without having to know the underlying proponents that do what they do. Instead, it’s presented through a massively opaque interface called a MonoBehavior. Because of this opaque abstraction, it’s almost impossible for a Unity game developer to know exactly what’s going on under the hood.
My first game engine took me 3 years to get to a point where I could ship something. My second was 1 year. My latest was 3 months.
Eventually, it becomes just adding another interface to your GPU abstraction to support wgpu or DX14, or Vulkan2, or Metal, any graphics api becomes just a Buffer, a Queue, and a sync lock.
The biggest issue in the US is the will to change things. As you've mentioned, during the pandemic, we've seen how rapidly things can change when everyone is aligned in one direction. Whether you agree with those changes or not the fact is many cities had al fresco dining , and portions of streets reclaimed for it in as little as a year.
Another interesting observation I've had about the US is that commercial space for rent always tends to look way larger than it needs to be! Instead of subdividing a space and cutting the rent potentially in half many commercial units are huge and I can only imagine the rent is so high that only the big chains can afford to rent them.
Of course this also means that things tend to be a little less quaint and walkable, because instead of having 2/3 small businesses you have a massive chain in it's space.
I live in a fairly walkable area in Los Angeles (go figure right?) and I can't tell you the amount of giant open commercial / retail spaces I see that have been dormant for quite a while. I can't help but think I'd they were to slice up the space they would be filled in no time.
Preach! Been a self employed game developer for almost 10 years now. I think a lot of people fail to realize how incredibly hard it is to make a product (even a great one) and make a reasonable profit from it.
It takes a lot of patience, learning and failure. Even after 10 years I still feel like there's so much more to learn to get to where I want to go.
Sticking to what you want to understand - for example, when reading a paper, you don't necessarily need to read the methodology, especially if it's out of your field. Read the abstract and the conclusion, identify any part of it that you are suprised by and would like further explanation, and go see that part of the paper.
A lot of the paper is talking to peer and people wanting to verify the validity of the paper - by it being peer reviewed, you can mostly assume that the paper is valid, and stick to what the paper is saying instead of it's methodology.
While this is valid, this shouldn't make us paranoid of all papers. If it's a paper out of your expertise, it's unlikely that you would be able to catch problems with it that the peer review process wouldn't have caught.
So in practice, it doesn't really change the way you interact with papers - it should change the way people write them and how the peer review process works.
You would at least skim over the whole thing without being distracted by snippets or phrases you don't understand. That's the whole point: you need the ability to have temporary placeholders for concepts you don't know and continue learning. You cannot expect that everything you learn will be arranged in a fashion such that every new concept only mentions already known concepts.
Completely agree. ChatGPT can be an incredible tool for getting a lay of the land on a subject or topic you don't know much about.
On that note, search in that regard always reminded me of those times where you ask a teacher how to spell a word and they say to look it up in the dictionary.
Just picked one of these up during the sale as well! Primarily because I can see that the steam deck is picking up steam...no pun intended and I thought it would be an awsome opportunity for my game.
I'm an indie developer and I've always had plans to port my game from mobile to steam but seeing the steam deck gain so much traction really got me excited!
My game is very much a pickup and play type of game and I'm seeing small indie games like that excel on the steam deck. Vampire Survivors and Brotato to name a few.
I received my steam deck yesterday and played for a few hours last night. I can't tell you all how excited am to get my game ported over and verified for this thing. It really is an incredible piece of gaming tech and it's got me super excited as an indie game developer!
For anyone interested my game is called Command Center Earth. I'm set to launch a huge update next week (2.0.0)!
I get the feeling though that the scales are starting to tip in their favor where we are going to be needing them more then they are going to be needing us soon haha.
Kudos to valve though, it feels like they have been driving toward this dream for a while and they're finally starting to hit the sweet spot with the steamdeck.
I've been using unity for almost a decade now and enjoying it despite the many caveats and idiosyncrasies I come across.
The bottom line is, I definitely don't want to throw away the decade of experience I have using Unity if I can help it. Ultimately I want them to learn from their mistakes and move forward. While Unity has had a fair share of missteps ultimately it's the devil I know.