@ Siew Yi Lang I felt compelled to respond to your review of Unity because of certain inaccuracies and/or misconceptions. I hope that you do not feel slighted as this is not a personal attack at all.
Although my day job now deals with commercial/film/vfx, I have worked on several AAA game titles in the past and I am currently wrapping up an indie game with two other people that we made in Unity. I'll admit that I agree with some of what you have stated but not nearly as strongly or vehemently. One point I will agree in is that while they have added a bunch of new features they do need to fix what is broken. That can be said of many software packages...I'm biting maya tongue right now to stay on topic and not to go off on a certain package. *Shaders:* I agree that ShaderForge makes shader creation much easier and it is worth the added expense. Shaderforge <https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14147> has enabled us to develop some very specialized and unusual non-photo real shaders that could have been a stretch for us otherwise. That being said, we are friends with a programmer who codes his own non-node based shaders for multiple platforms in Unity without a problem and he has helped us with such shaders for other projects. *Mechanim: *I'm going to mostly disagree with you here and my experience is nearly opposite of yours with Mechanim. We definitely did not use legacy. We were able to, without scripting, make our own avatar. You do not need to use the built in avater, just don't use it. Additionally, Unity did not retarget it to two bones for us. Unity Mechanim dealt just fine with our custom skeleton setup. Animation and hierarchical blending also worked just fine OOTB for us with our custom shadow rig skeleton. After glancing at how Unity wanted the shadow rig to be organized, our animations came in without a hitch from Softimage. I did not have to do anything with ROMs. I mean no disrespect, and no hard feelings are intended, it's just that I know firsthand that it works. *Shuriken: *I am not going to argue with you on this one. Unity's built in particle system is, in a word, weak. Fortunately, an asset called Particle Playground <https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13325> comes to the rescue and, as I understand it, its code is exposed if you need to tweak it. *Pipeline:* I'll agree that the hundreds and thousands of pieces of metadata was a bit cumbersome on the check in/checkout. But this is a technical industry, the artists are working with technology and it is not unreasonable to expect them to have a modicrum of technical knowhow. The artists at Element X were sat down and launched with instructions on the use of SVN. After a few days, they were shown that how they had misunderstood/cut corners were doing things with SVN were causing problems and shown the procedure once more. After that, we didn't have any issues. Its a partial matter of training the artists what to do and the consequences of not following procedure, and it is another matter of making certain that they are not going to be lazy about following those directions. For teams of more than a few people, custom created pipeline tools can help the artist make certain that they are not making mistakes. *On a side note:* I think that Never Alone <http://neveralonegame.com/> is a beautiful game on many levels. *Congratulations Siew Yi Lang!* I'm very much looking forward to playing it on Steam <http://store.steampowered.com/app/295790/> once I clear off my plate a bit. Any large production is quite an ordeal, but I hope that you can feel proud to have worked on it. Cheers, -=Eric -- -=T=-
