8 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:

9 hours 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.

And 20 GB difference between Unreal and Unity you say it's almost the same size?

7 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:

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.

I use 5 years old laptop with 120gb SDD. Small size of hardware is important for me, but not as important as comfortable work. MonoDevelop is very oldish and doesn't really help you programming as VS does. VS speeds up workflow a lot.
20GB more on Unreal is a big difference for me. I wouldn't say it's almost the same size. However Unreal is like 1000% more heavy than Unity since you can't work on it on (not even much) older computer.
However I just checked, Unity takes 4 GB(with SDK's, JDK's etc.), VS doesn't even take 2 GB (most of it I have on another drive). Unreal is 45 GB, So it's even bigger difference ~40 GB

MonoDevelop in Unity was used by a really small group of people, it's not a shame to switch to modern IDE and discontinue the old one.

There are some alternatives to outdated MonoDevelop, you can try VSCode which is lightweight and fast and IS SUPPORTED by Unity pretty well. Also, I've heard that someone uses Sublime Text with Unity autocomplete plugin.

It just seems to me that anyone spending days/months/years developing a computer game should be able to invest in a reasonably modern computer. 

4 hours ago, Prastiwar said:

And 20 GB difference between Unreal and Unity you say it's almost the same size?

Yes, I forgot to look at it as a small time developer. Good point.

4 hours ago, Prastiwar said:

However I just checked, Unity takes 4 GB(with SDK's, JDK's etc.), VS doesn't even take 2 GB (most of it I have on another drive). Unreal is 45 GB, So it's even bigger difference ~40 GB

I agree, Unity can still be small if you know what you are doing. Unity 2018 editor is 4.22GB and VS Community is 743 MB to run Making it a <5GB engine if you know what you are doing. The Unity installer, it downloads a version of VS Community that is 15GB.

(Of course by the same standards Unreal is 19.6GB + 568MB launcher+ VS Community is 743 MB Making it a <23GB engine; yes Unreal is also small if you download only the core engine )

Here is the problem:

The Unreal downloader allows you to get everything you need for +/- 25GB.

The Unity downloader will give me Unity and what I need for +/-20GB.

Looking at this, then considering that the front page of Unreal constantly shows AAA games made with Unreal, while Unity rushed games fill steam and Unity has become known for it's poorly made games. As a new developer I would pick Unreal over Unity.

Now if Unity was say +/- 5GB as it should be, then yes maybe I would try it first or get both.

4 hours ago, Prastiwar said:

VSCode which is lightweight and fast and IS SUPPORTED

Then it brings up why it isn't used to replace Monodevelop or any lightweight editor that isn't scary for inexperienced programmers.

3 hours ago, Gnollrunner said:

years developing a computer game should be able to invest in a reasonably modern computer. 

The problem with this idea is that not everyone wants to dedicate tons of money to a hobby, or towards trying something new.

There is also the The Curb Cut Effect to consider here, having a easy to download small Unity version could help with modding games and make it easier on clients etc.

8 hours ago, Hodgman said:

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... 

The last time I worked with Nintendo's platform, I used CodeWarrior... I'm getting old now I guess  (that was Nintendo DS era).

Anyway, MonoDevelop is essentially ... dead ... I guess. The thing is MonoDevelop got rebranded as Visual Studio for Mac after Xamarin was purchased by Microsoft years ago. Regarding MonoDevelop for Windows, I think there's no reason for Microsoft to maintain 2 different products to do the same thing. 

Well, I wished Unity might consider Visual Studio Code as an alternative. I can't think of any advantage of Visual Studio over the Code in the Unity situation.

BTW, I had both Unity and Visual Studio 2018 Community on my Surface Pro 3 (with 64GB SSD, believe it or not). It feels almost like I can't install anything else on my machine. I've just retired it from the development duty and move on to Lenovo Yoga with 256GB of SSD (which is still fell cramped, but much better).

37 minutes ago, Scouting Ninja said:

The problem with this idea is that not everyone wants to dedicate tons of money to a hobby, or towards trying something new.

There is also the The Curb Cut Effect to consider here, having a easy to download small Unity version could help with modding games and make it easier on clients etc.

I don't think it takes tons of money. I mean my 10 year old son has a computer that is easily powerful enough to do development on.  My own computer is older than his. I mean really we are just talking a bit if disk space here. A couple of terabytes is dirt cheap these days. Sure you can always claim it should be cheaper but I mean again, if you are spending so much time working on something, the money is the least of your investment and presumably most people who want to write games, play games also so they already have a computer that's good enough.

37 minutes ago, Scouting Ninja said:

I agree, Unity can still be small if you know what you are doing. Unity 2018 editor is 4.22GB and VS Community is 743 MB to run Making it a <5GB engine if you know what you are doing. The Unity installer, it downloads a version of VS Community that is 15GB.

(Of course by the same standards Unreal is 19.6GB + 568MB launcher+ VS Community is 743 MB Making it a <23GB engine; yes Unreal is also small if you download only the core engine )

Here is the problem:
The Unreal downloader allows you to get everything you need for +/- 25GB.
The Unity downloader will give me Unity and what I need for +/-20GB.

Wait, installing VS with unreal is 4.20 feature, you need to install it outside Unreal's downloader before 4.20

My comparison where Target Platform is just Android (all sizes are from downloaders)
VS install outside downloader to be fair since it doesn't come with Unreal. before 4.20 (and it's "cheaper")

Unity 2018.1.5f1:
Core = ~2 GB
Android Support = ~1 GB
VS Unity Tools = ~3 GB
Unity HUB(preview) = ~200 MB
VS Community = ~1 GB
Project size scalability: wow, is small complete project 100 MB?
Total: ~7 GB
Ease of use: Big advantage, fast prototyping, Indie as main target.
Lowest price LAPTOP to work with engine comfortable*: 700$
Game Quality Scalability: Yeah, that's big con of this engine (from 2018 graphics is priority for next year)

Unreal 4.19.2: 
Core = ~9 GB
Editor symbols for debugging = ~17 GB
Android Support = ~5 GB
Windows 10 SDK needed = ~3 GB
Epic Launcher = ~500 MB
VS Community = ~1 GB
Project size scalability: well, I've not worked with Unreal much, because of my laptop (or unreal optimization?) so can only say 200 MB is not even starting.
Total: ~35 GB
Ease of use: Big disadvantage, main target game is AAA.
Lowest price LAPTOP to work with engine comfortable*: +1200$
Game Quality Scalability: Yeah, that's a big advantage of this engine (most beautiful)

* Saying comfortable I mean 30fps is the lowest possible fps

2 minutes ago, Gnollrunner said:

I mean really we are just talking a bit if disk space here. A couple of terabytes is dirt cheap these days.

Yeah, HDD's are really cheap, but I think we are talking about SSD's, which are not cheap at all. I can't imagine working on the engine that is installed on HDD.

1 hour ago, Scouting Ninja said:

 

5 hours ago, Prastiwar said:

VSCode which is lightweight and fast and IS SUPPORTED

Then it brings up why it isn't used to replace Monodevelop or any lightweight editor that isn't scary for inexperienced programmers.

Unity has ambitions to be bigger and target higher and higher. VS is the main target with the highest support since it's the most powerful IDE, but it doesn't mean others are not supported at all, however, I'd like to see editor alternatives included in downloaders, it'd be nice.

I've never understood this impression of heaviness, VS and MonoDevelop UI are almost the same for me. In fact, VS loads ~5 sec longer than MonoDevelop, but I don't find it a big difference.
When I started programming I chose VS because it was much more friendly for me. My first editor I've tried was MonoDevelop (tried for a week), but autocompletion, navigation etc. was so bad then I switched to VS and said "wow this IDE reads from my mind"

27 minutes ago, Prastiwar said:

Yeah, HDD's are really cheap, but I think we are talking about SSD's, which are not cheap at all. I can't imagine working on the engine that is installed on HDD.

LOL! I do... but then I used to compile to 5 1/4 " floppy disks.

I'm an indie dev developing with Unity. I prefer to use Linux for my workstation so I had no choice but to use monodevelop because visual studio is Windows only.

One day, monodevelop would always just crash on start so I stepped away for development for a few months, sadly assuming that my Unity days were over.

After a while, I heard that vscode was pretty good and was based on Electron which worked on Linux. So I tried it out and it was amazing! I was pleasantly shocked that everything worked perfectly, including inline error annotations, click to show references, intellisense, refactoring and the debugger. And vscode was so good that I made it my main editor for non-Unity projects after being a sublime user for many years.

tl;dr vscode is a superior replacement to monodevelop, and if it works fine for an indie Linux user then it's gonna work fine for everyone else.

1 hour ago, Prastiwar said:

My comparison where Target Platform is just Android

Wasn't arguing your size, yeas Unreal is a monster the more you include. My own Unreal is 92GB because I also have all the AR and VR content added over everything else.

Just indicating that any first time user could misjudge the engines, especially if you consider that Unreal has blueprints that could be used for a long time before the user needs to move to VS. Unity needs a code editor to make games; it doesn't have a build in one like Unreal. Making the code editor a important part of the size of the engine.

I want to point out that none of my colleagues even bothered to check what the actual size of VS Community is. All of them complained about the extra 15GB and talked about abandoning Unity. This is a common consumer mindset, this move will inevitably loose Unity users.

1 hour ago, Prastiwar said:

I've never understood this impression of heaviness,

Having looked around the web I see these points made: Apparently with monodevelop if you make a small change you can just save and Unity will pick it up; with VS the project needs to be build. Monodevelop can be edited while the editor is running, where VS freezes editing. VS Community autocomplete is slower and some of them can't get it to work; in fact a huge amount of them struggle with IntelliSense. VS studio also re-creates scripts when the name is changed while VS is running...(all minor things)

Some can't even get VS running because the installer freezes or the Unity workshop doesn't work.

So I get where the complaints is coming from. Lots of these developers are forced to move away from Monodevelop that was working perfectly for them, to a new editor that feels slower because it has a bigger library and more buttons and complex features. Then the editor acts in unexpected ways or even refuses to work.

It must feel like someone forcing you to replace your computer with a new high-tech one, pay three times the price for it; but you can't use it because you don't know where the on switch is. You would have been happier with the old computer, it was working fine.

58 minutes ago, Carlo Cabanilla said:

One day, monodevelop would always just crash on start so I stepped away for development for a few months, sadly assuming that my Unity days were over.

 There is a lot of people who agree with you that VS is better, all of these seem to have similar stories of monodevelop failing. Maybe Unity should have left it in, but not supported it; that way people would have moved on naturally as monodevelop broke apart.