The Unity 2018 update looked like a good move forward to me, but apparently I am one of the few that thinks so.

Talking to colleagues today I learned that a lot of them are considering abandoning Unity because it is dropping the light Monodevelop for the heavy Visual Studio Community. Many of them are, like me, hobby developers and apparently just aren't willing to struggle with visual studio.

At first I didn't understand the complaints, then it was pointed out to me that visual studio is around 1.5GB to download. Making it as big as the whole Unity engine, when most of these small developers just want it to make small scripts.

Of course I mentioned VS Code, however it was easily countered because VS Code isn't really supported by Unity.

What do the developers of GameDev think about Unity's move to Visual Studio?

I'm only a hobbyist game dev, though I'm a software dev for my day job. I was never a big fan of Monodevelop, for whatever odd reason, though I really do like the Unity engine itself. I preferred using Sublime text editor, and I guess this change means that's what I'll primarily be using from here on out if and when I do game dev related stuff.

I guess there is a convenience factor with Monodevelop? I'm not sure if there was much I liked about Monodevelop besides that.

My $.02 though.

34 minutes ago, deltaKshatriya said:

I guess there is a convenience factor with Monodevelop? I'm not sure if there was much I liked about Monodevelop besides that.

Looking around the web, this does indeed appear to be a convenience factor. The largest complaint seems to be that there is no small editor that can just be downloaded with Unity and used without setting it up to work with Unity first.

Most programmers had no problem with the switch because they where either already using visual studio or something else.

Some suggestions (conspiracies) on the web is pointing out that because Unity is so code dependant engine, this could be a move to rise the standard of Unity users.

A gate of inconvenience to push away developers that was hoping for a magic one button game generator.

1 hour ago, Scouting Ninja said:

Some suggestions (conspiracies) on the web is pointing out that because Unity is so code dependant engine, this could be a move to rise the standard of Unity users. 

That sounds pretty weird. My guess is, that it's simply not economic to continue the support for monodevelop.

Because 1.5GB is a large download these days?  A game I play just did a 1.4GB update, and had done a 2GB update about a month ago.  No one complains about that.  Also, Visual Studio is heavy?  *shrugs* guess I'm used to using it.  You can use a plain text editor if you really want from what I've read with Unity.  Sounds like people looking to whine honestly.

I didn't realize Visual Studio was considered "heavy".  And do people really care that VS is 1.5 Gig to download? I mean a 3D game is often 30 Gig or more.

11 minutes ago, Gnollrunner said:

I didn't realize Visual Studio was considered "heavy".  And do people really care that VS is 1.5 Gig to download? I mean a 3D game is often 30 Gig more more.

Im sure half the people complaining don't even know how to un check half the crap they'll never use but wait for it to download because "Oh I may use that sometime next year when I learn it". People don't wanna wait to be wrong they wanna say they were right and wait for the extra 14Gigs of stuff theyll never even touch in their lifetime. 

1 hour ago, LifeIsGood said:

My guess is, that it's simply not economic to continue the support for monodevelop.

Get away with your logic!  Yea, chances are it just isn't worth the effort; although why now?

1 hour ago, CrazyCdn said:

Because 1.5GB is a large download these days?

Well when working on remote teams like hobby projects, then this can be a real problem. Lots of team member could be working from locations with less than ideal internet or working on old computers.

I've been on a few teams where arrangements had to be made on behalf of a member who didn't have a computer setup, for making games.

Older computers tend to only have 160GB hard drives.

Probably more of a problem when working on a old computer. I just checked and Unity with Visual studio takes  32.48GB without the Unity presets and starter content; although Android and IOS SDK's, JDKs etc. included.

Where compared to Unreal  53.7 GB with all SDKs,JDKs etc. included. I mean Unreal gives me a lot more and is almost the same size.

One of Unity's biggest appeals was that it was a small powerful engine, now it is turning into a large engine that doesn't quite have the power of Unreal or CryEngine to validate the size.

46 minutes ago, Gnollrunner said:

I didn't realize Visual Studio was considered "heavy"

I think it is meant as heavy to use. Monodevelop was a simple script editor, no fuss and you didn't need to be a programmer to feel at home. Visual studio has a lot of settings that most small developers would never use, making it feel "heavier" than it needs to be.

37 minutes ago, Bradley Latreille said:

m sure half the people complaining don't even know how to un check half the crap

My exact thoughts, so I of course went to the Unity page and ran the downloader to see what Visual Studio Community's real size is. It is 15GB but because the Unity downloader is forcing it.

I had a small heart attack when I clicked the Unity downloader and it rushed the Visual Installer. For one brief moment I thought it was installing VS community over VS Professional. It literally didn't give me any chance to select a location or any choice in Workloads. It DID try to re-install Net 4.7 and C# with Visual Basic; even when I already had the components.

If a person used just the VS installer on it's own, What you need for Unity is 5.14GB.

It looks like the problem is the Unity installer, installing VS, and it is exactly what everyone who just uses Unity for small-time development is going to use to install it.

Every commercial game programming job that I've had, has used Visual Studio. The Nintendo, Sony and (of course) Microsoft SDKs are always built around Visual Studio. It's the standard tool, here. It makes sense for unity to support it. Doing deep integration with a whole bunch of other niche IDEs does seem like a waste of resources that could be used to actually work on other parts of the engine... 

7 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:

Get away with your logic!  Yea, chances are it just isn't worth the effort; although why now?

Because 2018.x marks the start of the big push to upgrade the .Net/Mono implementation used by the engine all the way up to the most recent standards for C# and .Net Standard - maintaining the Monodevelop plugin going forward was considered not to be worth the outlay when existing tools already have you covered for the new stuff.

As for a couple of other comments;

Unity hasn't been a 'small' engine for some time and as for a lack of power; the C# job system and ECS say "hi..." and then proceed to run rings around pretty much everything else in terms of performance.