Do you think Unity was the best choice for PP, or would you have liked to see it developed under some other engine such as unreal? I know that developers of other games have had a hard time optimizing games made under Unity. There again there has been quite a few Unity engine updates.
Anyway, what’s your view on the choice of engine for PP?
Difficult to say. As a dumb consumer I am wary of purchasing games running on Unity - I run into some issues in most Unity games. Unlike other titles with either run or not I found Unity games to be most inconsistent.
However, is it a Unity issue, or is it that most tight budget titles use Unity? I need new rig anyway.
Up to now it doesn’t seem to be effecting the game for the worst, which I’m happy about. I have seen many unity games that run and look darn awful. The future’s development of PP is going to be interesting to say the least.
Chaos Reborn had Unity for engine, which means the devs had knowledge about that.
Switching to a different engine is not trivial, and I can’t know how much would it cost them to actually change (both in time and in money, which a crowdfunded-project usually lacks), but I’m not sure if the benefits are really there from a player-perspective (different from the dev’s).
I mean it’s a round-based, single-player game, I doubt most player will care if the performance is not the best possible with any engine (compared to a twitchy multiplayer shooter for example) as long as they can find a decent compromise by changing settings (which is personal preference to a degree anyway).
Just look at Batteltech, the “insanely long loading times” are supposedly so horrible the game is not worth to buy [according to some], while others have 16k hours in it… Okay, the guy has 1k hours of BT videos on YT, so different scale to your average player, but you get the point…
Great gameplay > performance, until the performance ruins the gameplay “too much”… which is the personal preference.
And then you have the Crysis-style games, you have to buy a new PC to even play… which is somehow frowned upon nowadays, eveyone expects to play the new games on mega-ultra settings with over 9000 FPS on their 5-8-16 years old PC… okay, started to rant about this again, grrrr…
There are quite a lot of “good” games which use the Unity engine. The issue here is that Unity has a marketing problem. The free version of Unity used by every bedroom/basement developer for their Steam asset flip is forced to carry the Unity logo. Everyone who plays them sees an awful game and associates it with Unity.
At the same time, the big players who use paid versions of Unity don’t have to (and choose not to) include the logo. This is why many people don’t realise that games like Cuphead, Hearthstone and Cities Skylines are made in Unity.
We carry the Unity logo on Phoenix Point because we work closely with Unity. We’re part of the Unity showcase. Also, one of our programmers, Dean, actually worked on developing Unity.
That’s … not very smart 
Just out of curiosity, and if you can actually talk about it, WHY would they do such a thing?
Displaying the Unity logo is part of the agreement for being in the Unity Spotlight program. It basically means that we work closer with Unity (they will help us with specific problems and features). They help us to make the game as good as it can be and in return that reflects well on the engine.
That part makes sense, a lot of sense actually.
The part about forcing their display on free versions, that you would expect to be of “varying qualities” (to be mild) while letting paid professional versions remove it is the one that baffled me.
Off-topic:
I can understand it as “it’s free, I can accept to show the logo” and “I paid for this, I don’t want to show the logo”, but harder as “it’s free, you must show our logo even if the game is crap”… oh well, they should know better how marketing works (and if they even care about/target the players, the dev-decision-makers are the ones who will buy their engine after all).
Jim Sterling, unsurprisingly, has talked about this. Unity is suffering from the “While your hot, you can do no wrong; when your not, you can do no right” problem.
I was refering purely to a more premium Unity games. While there have been some that run alright, I do tend to run into issues more often with Unity. The most recent game in my mind in Obsidian’s wonderful Deadfire, which has some really inconsistant performance and I hear people with really decent rigs have the same problem.
I won’t claim it’s Unity issue - I fully understand that even the premium Unity games I played are usualy Indies and logic: “I can run Witcher3, so why I have issues with this” might not make as much sense from developers perspective as it might from consumers, due to the difference in resources for AAA and budget projects.
Image problem is certainly there, and here is me hoping PP won’t be contributing to it:-)
I have to disagree so much. While low FPS won’t make a turn based game impossible to play/enjoy there is just too much competition to force myself to play game below 60FPS. It’s just not worth it. XCOM2 was a miserable experience until they boosted performance. While many players might not point it out as a problem it will have negative impact on their enjoyment.
Unity has a couple of endemic problems. The most notable is their heavy use of serialization, which can lead to sluggish load times and scene transitions. (They also seem to struggle with smooth scrolling in some situations – run around the map in Wasteland 2 to see what I mean. Note that inXile switched to UE for later games.)
Unity excels for cross-platform games, so if you want to run on Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS/Plan9 it can save you a lot of time. It also has a very beginner-friendly ecosystem – lots of tutorials, sample code, purchasable assets, etc. Last I looked at Unreal Engine, their tutorial was essentially, “here’s a sample scene, go nuts”.
At the end of the day, it’s easier to suffer through long load times than long development times, so if Unity is what works best for the developers than I’m happy to let them use it. 
Well, PP is being released for the Xbox, so I suppose that could be one benefit of going with Unity 
Afaik the deal with MS was after the Fig-campaign, and by then the decision of which engine to use should have been made (and I doubt they would have time to change anyway), so while it might helped MS to consider the game (MS is the one doing the “porting”, right? I remember it this way), I don’t think we should consider that as a reason…
Unless UV says the opposite of course
the decision to use Unity would have been made with the thoughts that it was going to be a Windows, Mac and Linux game from the start.
Decision. What it really is? Do we have free choice or the universe is choosing instead of us, giving us the illusion of free will… Maybe decision to use Unity is the karma of the past or the future? And what God would say about that?
wrong section of the forum for philosophy @Yokes. I’d put it in Bug Reporting, even if it is “working as intended”
Couldn’t care less about 60 fps on a turn based game. What I want though, is a stable frame rate, no freezing, no tearing, no input lag or scrolling issue, no weird staggered asset loading leaving your guys bald for 20 seconds while hair textures load …
To put it simply, I’d rather have a smooth 30 fps experience than a messy 60 fps one.
However, nobody said that a smooth 60fps experience wasn’t on the table which means, the better it is, the happier I’ll get 
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against Unity. 
For me it works fine enough.
I played X2 when it launched and had zero problems playing it. It had (and still has) some transition and initial rendering problems but the FPS was in no way an issue. I’ve also raided in WoW with FPS as low as 18 and it didn’t really bother me (though when it would get to 10-15 it would become choppy and almost unplayable).
FPS for many things is overrated. As long as it’s smooth 20-30 FPS is plenty fine when things get hot and heavy as you’re generally too busy to notice things like motion blur. The bigger thing is that when things get hot and heavy there’s more potential for the game to snag and it’s those snags that can really mess with the experience for me.