What's with the Unity engine?

[Zkuq]

EpicRandy said:

It's absolutely possible for unity games to have stunning visual.
The problem, like others pointed at, is that it is more used with Indie than AAA.
From my experience 3 main issue come to mind as to why that is. (this maybe a little dated mind you)
1) Unity have frequent update which add/update/remove feature which does not help for stability. So if you develop an AAA stability of the engine is important.
2) The way unity save scenes is not trivial to use with source control and merge tool for code sharing.
3) Unity use C# (which is awesome) but the vast majority of AAA dev still use C++/Unreal. Even tough C# is way more user friendly and readable than C++/unreal dev teams skills and experience would have to completely be renewed which would be both costly and time consumming.

1. The updates are not mandatory, so not sure what the issue is.
2. This might indeed be somewhat problematic. I don't know how other engines handle it though, so can't say whether other engines have it better, but this certainly seems like it could be better.
3. I'm not sure how much of a problem this really is. Lots of devs hate C++ because of how bloated the language has become, although I'm sure sure how widespread this hate exactly is among game devs. That said, picking up a language such as C# shouldn't be much of a hindrance for anyone who knows C++, so it's hard to imagine the cost of picking up a new language being a major factor here. That said, C# might have one issue for performance-critical software such as many games: the garbage collector and the pauses it causes. I would expect the garbage collector to be more of an issue compared to the time it takes to learn a new programming language such as C#.

I'm not sure how much experience you have with these things of course (you were a bit vague), so if I'm wrong, I'd certainly like to hear about it.