A rare show of vulnerability on hackernews. I commend you and echo the sentiment!
I really appreciate you sharing your story. Know that it does not define you and you are absolutely loved and are worthy of love, especially from yourself.
As a game developer who's primary tool I utilize is Unity I always find outside sentiment about it funny.
There's no doubt that Unity has put its users through the ringer over the last few years or so.
That said I still for the most part enjoy working with it. I think Unity had the right idea in regards to a lot of the toolset but unfortunately it's suffered in regards to stability.
With Unity 6+ though it really feels like we're starting to see the fruits of Unity labor. UI Toolkit, input system, rendering pipeline the package manger and more are finally starting to feel stable.
Additionally the engine itself feels far more rock solid then it had in years.
A rather large piece for me also really just enjoys programming in C#.
I'm actually super pumped that we have a great open source game engine to keep Unity on the straight and narrow. I'm also pumped that we have an amazing tool like Unreal for things more AAA in nature (although that's certainly not all). I personally think Unity is perfectly sandwiched in the middle of those options.
With the right ideas and execution I think it's going to be really exciting to see where it ends up.
I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's focused on people and companies creating new things, people here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea.
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.
I really appreciate you sharing your story. Know that it does not define you and you are absolutely loved and are worthy of love, especially from yourself.
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