Unity Issues

Well, I'm sure some people have experienced that. But I think the reasons given still seem like conjecture.

Are you working for Unity Technologies?
I mean, the engine carries so many problems for a long time, they seem unable to fix any of it even in recent iterations.
This is not the first nor the only game with all the same problems.

A solution is to go c++ instead of c# or something else? Cmon, that is not a solution but a workaround.

Here's hope Owlcat will ditch'em when they start making the next game.
And license the similar engine used for DOS1/2 and BG3.

No, I don't work for Unity. I suppose it's just a pet peeve of mine - myths that are really based on claims on forums from people that don't really know what they're talking about, passing these things around like gospel.

Unity might not be perfect, but it seems its affordable and easy to use, otherwise why would so many (especially small) developers use it. But from technical point I have no clue ...

Ripper said:

TBH, if it's a problem with save bloat, that's really a problem with the way the game's coded, that would apply no matter what language or engine is used - they're just trying to hold on to too much data, and need to come up with some better routines for pruning what's not essential.

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There's a good part of that. The saved files are compressed zips of JSON files, that are not very efficiently compressed to start with (I do better in Python with a very low compression factor).

Each save files contains the history log of all entities created and destroyed since the beginning of the game. I mean the first time the player started the campaign.

It also contains the list of all entities in each area visited by the players, because those entities - loot mainly, are persistent. Which means that the players have a list of all the loot presented to them each time they leave an area.

It seems to have a fog file for each area as well…

And there are two small files that contain the interesting information - progression of each party member, state of the game, and so on. In chapter 2 those files are ~15% of the whole mess.

Not sure if there's any memory leak, I never watched it. I think people are using that term pretty loosely.

As for Unity… Don't buy a 3080, keep your old card! Because Unity has been handling RTX very badly for a few months, or at least most overheat reports I've seen were on RTX. When I'm looking at the main game menu, doing nothing, it uses more than 50% of my 3070. I had to tune most of the graphics options down in order to play without melting my case. Same problem as Solasta (except it's not possible to tune it down in Solasta, which makes it unplayable for a bunch of people).

It's simple, when I see that a game runs on Unity now, I'm hesitating to buy it. (EDIT: Dark Crystal managed to optimize Encased pretty well though, or they're not using the lighting features that make the GPU go crazy).

Right, but the first part, of ineffecient save files, is not down to Unity. Unity doesn't dictate save behaviour - it provides a couple of basic methods, or there's several third party solutions, or you can write your own routines. So, as far as I can tell, the idea that Unity causes issues with save bloat just doesn't seem to make sense - the dev decides what values are to be saved, and exactly how to save them.

With regard to overheating problems, is that a known issue with Unity itself? It might be sensible to avoid Unity games if several of them have such problems, but that doesn't answer the question of whether Unity itself is the problem. It could easily be lower budget developer error, some third party plugins, and so on.

Ripper said:

Right, but the first part, of ineffecient save files, is not down to Unity.

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No, the first part is just a need of optimization and clean-up. If someone uses C++ and leaves out the -g when compiling, the result isn't optimal either.

Difficult to tell about Unity. In Solasta, the problem appeared with a new version of Unity, AFAIK there was no change in the features. It appears in very specific conditions and is alleviated if shadows are disabled entirely, so it seems related to the lighting. Performances are going down in some spots too, maybe related to reflection on water, not sure. That's on all cards so it's different, looks like poor use of the engine. Shame the devs have chosen to ignore the problem.

In Pathfinder, the increase (which isn't as bad) appeared when they started to use lighting features more intensively (but I'm not talking about ray tracing or anything breathtaking). And when they put this candle in the main menu. I haven't had serious performance problems so far but some levels are more demanding, maybe the usual cluttered design.

Yes, the devs created and could solve the saving behaviour - that part is down to them. My suspicion is that the reason we often see save-bloat problems with lower budget RPGs is simply that it's a difficult problem to solve when a game is large and complex, and other problems are more pressing.

With regard to overheating problems, Unity bugs are a possibility (all the engines have known bug lists as long as your arm), but I'd also be suspicious of devs doing something inefficient. I've been puzzled by reports in recent times of games "killing" GPUs (New World was one). This puzzles me too - I don't see how software can kill hardware in that way. Surely it's either inadequate cooling, or some fault in the hardware/firmware that should prevent runaway temps. The software should be able to push as hard as it likes. If we're running games on lower end hardware or consoles, they're running pretty much flat out all the time. If the higher end stuff is dying when its pushed, even by inefficient software, something is wrong with it.

For god's sakes.

Buy the game, play it.
Choose another unity game, buy, play.
Two examples are never enough, grab two more unity games and then tell us how brilliantly optimized each of them is.

We who played several unity games are not imagining things.
When the country sucks, it's the king who needs to step down, not his underlings.

You do realise that optimisation is done by the devs, once they've built the game, and understand what they're optimising?

I understand that Diablo 2 remake (or remaster, whatever) is deleting people's progress yet you're on a crusade against small studios who can't afford developing an inhouse engine but are forced to license a 3rd party one.

Christ...

About as reasonable as your other beliefs, Joxer.

Every single unity game I have played have huge performance problems, even if the graphics looks 10 years old, they'll freeze up and load slowly. There is also another bug which causes the graphics card to overheat and turn off the PC ( if you change to borderless window, this bug will not occure in most Unity games so just do that )

The nature of the other issues are typically C# related behavior, sudden random freeze for no apparent reason ( garbage collection ), slow load times C# takes forever to process strings for example…… so I am also in the camp that are sure it is related to Unity in itself, I don't think all Unity developers would make exactly the same mistakes.

However I have not tried Rimworld, if they have ditched the C# there and it does not have those issues……… no surprise there….

Well, the questions about C# and how to use it efficiently in the context of games we've discussed earlier in the thread. I personally have no problem believing that many lower budget games use Unity, and also suffer from poor and unoptimized code due to time and budget issues.

But I'm curious about this idea of a bug that causes the GPU to overheat. How does it do that? Surely all software can do is fully utilise the GPU, which it must be designed to handle. If someone is running AAA games at 4K, for example, full utilisation is probably what you want, and if that causes overheating and shutdowns, that's a hardware issue.

I can understand people saying that the GPU seems to be over-utilised (in the sense that it's working very hard when there doesn't seem to be a good reason), but I don't understand how any software can be blamed for causing overheating.

Ripper said:

With regard to overheating problems, Unity bugs are a possibility (all the engines have known bug lists as long as your arm), but I'd also be suspicious of devs doing something inefficient. I've been puzzled by reports in recent times of games "killing" GPUs (New World was one). This puzzles me too - I don't see how software can kill hardware in that way. Surely it's either inadequate cooling, or some fault in the hardware/firmware that should prevent runaway temps. The software should be able to push as hard as it likes. If we're running games on lower end hardware or consoles, they're running pretty much flat out all the time. If the higher end stuff is dying when its pushed, even by inefficient software, something is wrong with it.

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I should have said "overstress". It's really the GPU utilization and not the temperature, or the fan getting mad.

There has been a fan controller recently on an isolated card model (EVGA 3090), which made the fan run full speed. But what others and I observed (on other cards) is the GPU usage climbing at 95% and more with an almost empty scene to render. I've done several tests with each of the options turned down separately or together, and provided them (Tactical Adventures, not Unity of course) with the GPU graph, at two different framerate.

It would be interesting to make a very basic project in Unity to reproduce the problem and narrow it down, but I'm not sure it would lead anywhere (and it's not my job nor my specialty). Perhaps they're aware of that at Unity and it will be solved one day.

EDIT: might be a virus, when it detects a simple scene to render, it uses the GPU for cryptomining

Ripper said:

Well, the questions about C# and how to use it efficiently in the context of games we've discussed earlier in the thread. I personally have no problem believing that many lower budget games use Unity, and also suffer from poor and unoptimized code due to time and budget issues.

But I'm curious about this idea of a bug that causes the GPU to overheat. How does it do that? Surely all software can do is fully utilise the GPU, which it must be designed to handle. If someone is running AAA games at 4K, for example, full utilisation is probably what you want, and if that causes overheating and shutdowns, that's a hardware issue.

I can understand people saying that the GPU seems to be over-utilised (in the sense that it's working very hard when there doesn't seem to be a good reason), but I don't understand how any software can be blamed for causing overheating.

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You can google unity overheating bug gpu, if you want, there is a lot to read on the subject. But basically, there are several levels of GPU control, software based and hardware based, hardware based will trigger only when a certain "overheating" temprature is reached, at this point the GPU might be close to taking damage. When the software runs in dedicated fullscreen mode that programs get higher priority than everything else, causing the software to not function optimally in controlling the GPU which never gets any rest.

Even if the games try to utilize the GPU at near 100%, there'll be times in a correctly coded games/engines where it'll not constantly be stressed beyond it's max.

It is the same thing with a CPU, try writing a fork bomb while( complicated float calculation ) for each thread, which maxes all parts to 100% of the CPU computation, it'll most probably overheat and use the hardware shutdown as well.

Well, I did google the issue earlier, to see if there was anything that would answer the question. TBH, there were a lot of people explaining why that doesn't happen (and that it's blaming software for hardware problems), and the ones claiming that it did weren't hugely convincing. Do you have any links to credible sources discussing the issue - explaining what Unity is doing that overheats a GPU?

EDIT: Just clarify - I'm not even saying that these things aren't true. The thing is, I've asked professional devs about this, and their view is that most of these things that Unity gets blamed for are just rumours that become received wisdom, and that there's no reason Unity should cause problems more than any other engine if you know how to use it.

And when people claim these things, and I ask them to support those claims, it's usually pretty thin, and swiftly moves to dismiss instead, as we've seen here (I'm being academic, I'm impossible to talk to, I'm a shill, etc, etc.) If these are real problems with Unity that create these inescapable issues in games, I'd be glad to know that.

Ripper said:

Well, I did google the issue earlier, to see if there was anything that would answer the question. TBH, there were a lot of people explaining why that doesn't happen (and that it's blaming software for hardware problems), and the ones claiming that it did weren't hugely convincing. Do you have any links to credible sources discussing the issue - explaining what Unity is doing that overheats a GPU?

EDIT: Just clarify - I'm not even saying that these things aren't true. The thing is, I've asked professional devs about this, and their view is that most of these things that Unity gets blamed for are just rumours that become received wisdom, and that there's no reason Unity should cause problems more than any other engine if you know how to use it.

And when people claim these things, and I ask them to support those claims, it's usually pretty thin, and swiftly moves to dismiss instead, as we've seen here (I'm being academic, I'm impossible to talk to, I'm a shill, etc, etc.) If these are real problems with Unity that create these inescapable issues in games, I'd be glad to know that.

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Well, I did a little bit of investigation, I don't dare to try more, after my computer refused to turn on for a couple of minutes after shutting down from overheating. But here is what I suspect, no proof as of yet:

Fullscreen mode, cause:
1. Game is not CPU limited in any way.
2. Vsync is not working properly in dedicated fullscreen mode sometime in unity.
3. 100% GPU constant usage in fullscreen mode. ( For example if I run cyberpunk 2077 in high resolution, I don't get any issues, but it does not constantly put 100% load on my GPU )
4. Partial reason Fans/case not optimal ( might be some dust etc, and rig is a bit old ) otherwise yes it could run 100% for longer periods of time, here after a certain period of constant 100% gpu load it start to overheat.

Running same graphics settings in borderless window:
1. No issues, low load on GPU / CPU, no shutdowns.