I'd argue that 2022.3 is still the best option if you don't want any drama from your tools. Using "old" versions of game engines is generally much safer than the latest. Let someone else figure out if the new model of parachute is any good before you try it.
If the tools are dominating your thinking during development, you've perhaps chosen the wrong ones for the job. There is no shame in using older tools to build games. This isn't like a banking web app. No AAA studio is going to give you extra consideration because you have unity 6 experience vs something slightly older. Valve certainly doesn't seem to give a shit. There's not much reason to chase a higher game engine version number.
If you are a solo/indie studio and you are using a newer version of a tool because it appears to enable something in your game, you are probably not going to do well. The engine does not make the game. It supports the game. Concerns like the "Unity look" are a consequence of the developers and artists doing a poor job, not old or subpar tooling. Environment lighting settings have their own hot key. Breaking out of the aesthetic mold is trivial if you make any attempt to do so.
I was in the audience when DOTS was announced, and a decade later Cities Skylines II showed how ill equipped for prime time it remains (not that the developers were blameless).
Superhot (2016), outer wilds (2020), and limbo (2011) received patches last year. How do the developers of these successful games manage that?
See Satisfactory for how much of a pain it can be to actually go through major versions, and how long it can take a more complex game.
Although, I will say that newer versions have made it a lot less annoying to keep up to date.
Exactly. It's common in game dev industry to keep using the same version of Unity for a project. Sometimes a minor version is updated, and I do mean sometimes, because large projects break for the smalles changes (despite semver).
For big projects you'd first spend time (and possibly money) trying to fix whatever is broken before updating Unity which would break more things.
- do you really need a game engine for making a 3D counter strike game?
- arent there libraries in c++ like raylib, jolt for physics etc?
- if you had to make a CS type game, what libraries do you think would be needed to get it done without touching unity, unreal, godot etc?
For 2D, yeah, making the engine yourself is fast and easy. Can go without a big engine.
Grab SDL or Qt (underrated; gets you a nice menu and HUD layer) for windowing/input, basic event loop, etc.
Write a renderer, e.g. on top of wgpu or bgfx depending on how much scaffolding you want to have to write yourself.
OpenAL Soft for audio.
Jolt or Bullet for physics.
A good scene/world model as the backbone, and ways to efficiently mutate and propagate state. You can pick up an ECS lib for this, or just go custom and hand-wring your data structures, mutation journals, caches, what have you. Your scene model feeds into (and interacts with) collision/physics, audio (listener/sound sources), your renderer for viz, etc..
For gameplay a nice approach is some fundamentals in native code (e.g. triggers and actions) and then a scripting bridge.
The problem is basically that doing a good job requires a substantial amount of experience on several levels of being a dev: Good architectural knowledge (incl. state of the art, historical examples, trade offs), lots of domain-specific techniques (rendering, stepping, etc.), solid systems engineering (good platform/shell abstraction, OS/platform integration bits, debugging/logging/tracing infra), being handg with algorithmic work, performance/optimization-minded work, and so on and so forth. It takes probably at least a solid decade before you can knock this out without tripping up or needing a lot of endurance.
Oh, and on top of all of that don't forget to design an actually fun game.
- I am assuming c++ would be one of the most recommended ways to start
- What is this bit about rendering? and good scene model / world model. Could you kindly elaborate on that a bit?
- For things that require the most amount of knowledge / effort in making a counter strike type game, what do you think would be the top 3 most effort oriented steps / milestones in doing so
It is however built in rust, not c++, don't know if that's a deal breaker?
- basically i am already not familiar with gamedev.
- on top of that i am not familiar with rust
- on top of that it is a new library meaning when I run into issues and I will run into all sorts of issues, I ll have to rely on a small bunch of maintainers with no mainstream support from stackoverflow or AI
- I made this mistake once in my life by choosing nuxt to build a website when I was new to web development instead of making a simple html css js website that I was familiar with
- Never again
There's just so much you don't know until you do, and there's a reason even all those "render engine" libraries have fallen kinda defunct (Ogre, Irlicht, etc). It's hard and distracts from the real goal.
Just grab an engine and get started on the game day 1 with a tool that can guarantee any game can be made with studio-quality tooling and compatibility.
It's the same reason you grab a date time library. It sure seems totally doable to "just handle times" right up until you try.
If making an engine was really that easy, studios wouldn't pay tens of millions to avoid doing it. Godot 3D would be solved by now.
- i was under the opinion that we may have enough libraries in c++ for just about everything from load assets to handling physics to handling graphics , networking, rendering etc
- isn't that the case given 20+ yrs of development on C++
Light theme might have a readability edge in daytime / well lit offices. But I'd bet most people using Unity are hobbyists doing it at home in their evening hours, when you want to dial down your blue light for the sake of sleep.
With high quality displays that have good contrast and backlight controls that go "really far down", I prefer light mode UIs nowadays.
But, only a few of my displays can dim enough to make it work in dark(er) rooms. CRTs were great at this, with the brightness control for the raster. LCDs generally aren't, though the fancy "FALD" backlight in my macbook pro does get dark enough to make light mode work well in dim spaces.
I suspect that changes in ambient lighting over time are what drive most people to max out their backlight and use dark mode. It generally works in all conditions.
So I use dark reader on web and get creative with apps that think dark mode is dumb.