Unity migration tool

[bobobo]

Unigine is awesome but there's actually one missing detail - a large community and a lot of ready-to-use components. 

This is what makes Unity one of the most (if not the most) popular game engine. Though we all know that it has some serious issues with performance, graphics quality, etc.

I know you guys have recently been into building the community, marketplace, etc. Which is great. But lets admit, your engine, even being absolutely amazing in many aspects, still can't beat Unity and even Unreal in few very - I want to stress! - VERY important features: ready-to-use prefabs, assets, code samples, tutorials, video guides, etc. This scares away both beginners and advanced developers (and studios), because beginners want way more tutorials, and advanced users tend to re-use their existing assets, or just buy something from the others. 

So to the point. I know that there's some differencies between Unity and Unigine. But C# code looks pretty similar. And FBX support, and some base concepts, look pretty similar. So why not create a tool to convert an existing Unity project into an Unigine project? Maybe even semi-manually. Trust me, you'd get thousands of new users just in a few months if you do so. I would be one for sure. And the code migration (or layer?) tool would also be extremely helpful. Because I don't see any - literally, any - cons in being able to re-use existing Unity libraries. I have my own collection of effects, controllers etc. but I just don't see any point in rewriting them. A layer that would allow "writing unity" in unigine, providing interface and transferring the calls into Unigine counterparts? A tool that would rewrite the code instead? Up to you.

I know there's some questions to solve, like legal issues, but unless you're re-using Unity assets, I don't think there will be any issues.

If you do at least a semi-automated tool, the community will create a lot of open-source things then. The alternative path would take years, and lets be honest, we are not sure if it even happens. Cryengine has their marketplace too, and it's just a joke - it feels empty and useless. Which really scares people away. Because making games is more about bulding things using existing assets (yours and 3rd-party) rather then creating everything from scratch.

As a developer, I'd be happy to participate. Feel free to drop me a message.

Hope you'lll see that and reply. 

Thanks!

[werner.poetzelberger]

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Edited June 26, 2020 by werner.poetzelberger

[demostenes]

On 6/26/2020 at 3:56 PM, bobobo said:

This scares away both beginners and advanced developers (and studios), because beginners want way more tutorials, and advanced users tend to re-use their existing assets, or just buy something from the others. 

Not true. No advanced user or studio will ever use some 3rd party code from asset store (or vast majority of graphical assets). Dependency on some unknown third party one man show product is fast way to hell. There are always some issues with it and it is only matter of time, when author disappears, because he finds our, that he spends hundreds of hours with support and  he has zero income from it (poor Quantum theory and his custom shaders for Rome pack, he learned the hard way...). Also you really cant make anything serious by buying variouos pieces of code from various people and combining it all together, it will never work. If you think so, good luck. To be honest we tried cca 10 years ago and we failed. It was really good lesson.

Unity asset store is trap for children and newbie developers, 99,99% of content there is TRASH. From tens od thousands of content providers there, I know cca 3-4 who are on proffesional level, rest is junk (from various reasons, for example visual quality does not mean technical quality, thus usability). Reason why it exists is only one, it makes really nice income for Unity team. People there are selling workarounds for things which should work by default (proper terrain engine...), or some sometimes nice, but mostly unusable assets.

So code is out of question, what about graphical assets? We bought everything worthy from Unity asset store long time ago and lately we switched to Unreal store, because community there is MUCH more mature and so quality of assets there. But even thou, really usable assets are VERY rare and produced only by several people. Fantastically looking asset on the 10x postprocessed picture is very often unusable in reality, because its technical quality is very, very bad (super heavy piggy shaders, too much polygons, messy geometry, piggy UV mapping, piggy working with normals, normal maps generated from diffuse, etc......). Also you usually cant combine assets of several authors, beause of style, colors space, etc..., so there is lots of manual tuning needed. So yes, you can use something, but it is not that simple and you will discard 9/10 of purchased assets and spent serious time by fixing issues.

So having no/empty asset store is no show stopper. Actaully it does not matter at all, because If you want some graphic assets, you can buy on Unity/UE store and import into Unigine, it is matter of minutes if you know what are you doing.

And regarding migration tool, it would never work. I really doubt, that something like this is possible and even in case it would be (some limited cases), it would consume tremendous resources to create and upkeep, so it makes no sense at all. Professional developers will probably never migrate half done project to other engine, because they have to pay for rent, so they must keep deadlines. They will switch only with a new project. So who is next? Kid wanabe developers? Who wants them? They never ever buy anything, only spaming forums with nonsenses.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 27, 2020 by demostenes

[bobobo]

@demostenes my proposal was for the Unigine team (this forum is called "Feedback for the Unigine team"). I guess they are the only people to make the decision as we both just have subjective opinions. I'd like to see decisions made and things going. Looking forward for the reply from the Unigine team @admin

[davide445]

On 6/27/2020 at 11:30 PM, demostenes said:

No advanced user or studio will ever use some 3rd party code from asset store (or vast majority of graphical assets). Dependency on some unknown third party one man show product is fast way to hell

Without reading the rest of the post, I want just to fully agree on this part, even without considering myself an advanced user. 

This was exactly the (final) reason why I abandoned Unity some years ago. Invested time and money on third party assets that was filling a void in native features (realtime GI and cinematic editor) to find just weeks later they was no more developed nor supported. 

I prefer a solid and well developed engine rich of native, well maintained functions and other assets. 

Edited June 29, 2020 by davide445

[tieyi.wang]

Many Unity games are stylized or 2D games with customize scripts exclusively for Unity and its shading system

Swapping to Unigine is totally unnecessary, maybe impossible