C# in Unity 2026: Features Most Developers Still Don't Use
darkounity.com48 points by hacker_13 3 days ago
48 points by hacker_13 3 days ago
A lot of game devs are terrible programmers. A friend of mine 10 years ago asked me for help with his Unity project. He is not a tech savvy person but we both took programming in high school, enough for him to make small games with a lot of tutorials and stack overflow.
His codebase was horrible, a lot of logic that I would have already though of abstracting away. For example saving dialogs on json files and the conditions for that dialog to trigger for that NPC as some sort of finite state machine that can be represented with a series of sequential flags. He had a single file that was about 15k lines full of `if (condition && condition) || (condition && condition)` statements. He didn't seem to see the issue, it just worked.
That's when I understood some people just care about game development and doing cool stuff and don't care at all about programming, good practices or structured code. And that's perfectly fine.
FWIW sometimes when making games it helps to have everything in one place, even though later you may want to split things up for later projects :-P so sometimes you get big balls of mud with lots of checks everywhere for the actions you want.
As an example, most of the gameplay logic for Post Apocalyptic Petra[0] (a 3D platformer/adventure/riddle solving game i made for an MSDOS game jam a few years ago) is in the entity class for the player character[1] - including things like collisions, etc :-P. It is a bit hacky, but it works.
Though if i ever made that sequel i wanted to where i want to have an extra character following you around, i'd need to move a bunch of things to other more generic places so that they can be shared by both the player character and the AI.
[0] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra
[1] https://codeberg.org/badsector/PetraEngine/src/tag/pap-0.99o...
To be a bit more charitable: I'd say that generally games involve a lot more special-casing than most code, and more planned out scripts (in the movie sense) of things happening, which tend to be antithetical to good coding practice, and encourage spaghetti, which begets more. In my experience, games that are procedural tend to be much cleaner code-wise, because they tend to fit the model of cleaner code better.
I think game engine tooling tends to encourage bad code too, lots of game engine make it hard to do everything in code, rather things are special cased through UIs or magic in the engine, which means you often can't use all the normal language features, and have to do things in awkward ways to fit the tooling.
Of course, this varies a lot by engine.
I think as a solo developer there's actually a good argument for increasing code density and coupling (things which in large multi developer projects are seen as spaghetti), as it can help you keep a lot of that code in mental and visual context at one time.
It loses flexibility and readability for others, but you don't usually have enough time to concern yourself with such flexibility if you're working on a project by yourself, and you're not concerned about onboarding other developers and having them understand your code. The upshot is then that as a single person "bad code" is often highly effective code, and "clean code" is expensive code that buys you a lot of stuff you don't need or want.
I say this as a boring enterprise developer who at work is highly concerned with appropriate abstractions etc. imo there's no universally good approach, what is optimal is context dependent. Although there are some core features of code like consistency and strong conventions which are fairly universally helpful, this represents a small fraction of best practices.
This is pretty anti-thetical to most good practices but the older and more experienced I get the more(13 years as a C# dev) I think copy & pasting sections of code is wayyyyyy more appropriate than extracting into a method/class/library or other forms of abstraction.
Everything starts out with good intentions when someone comes along and says “hey you could make that an abstraction” and I just clench my jaw because I’ve seen that happen so much and then that simple clean abstraction eventually ends up being a horrible 1000 line monster that barely anyone understands and no one wants to change.
I agree with everything except for it being anti-thetical to good practice. I have noticed a lot of experienced devs agree with that sentiment.
It has been a pretty common trend for the last few years of people breaking out of the “OOP style programming” and practices they were taught at university. I am not saying avoiding things like over abstraction is new, but I do think there is a newer generation of programmers who have been taught and warned about drawbacks from practices like that.
Similarly, my anecdotal experience tells me more newer game devs are aware of basic memory practices being better than overly complex OOP code. Think flat arrays and simple cache alignment over something abstract and over engineered
Gamedev at a high level is similar in spirit to distributed systems or compilers in that it's intensely multi-disciplinary with hard constraints. In gamedev you have a main thread that you're always sweating about submilliseconds, especially with worker threads interfering with it. Processor, memory, bus characteristics, GPUs, cooling, etc. all matter.
This leads to e.g., everyday AoS vs. SoA, pooling and burst compile, to the classic fast inverse square root because of hardware at the time. Relentless optimization of hot paths produces code that's about performance, not abstraction. Then there's shaders, which are effectively a different programming model targeting different hardware entirely. Now add support for multiple operating systems, consoles, whatever. The list goes on.
Now, all of that doesn't obviate the value of design and craft, so I don't agree that it's "perfectly fine". There are plenty of programmers weak on these two axes in most any domain, but it's worth noting gamedev is a special case that significantly distorts what good code, or at least good-enough code, looks like.
Games start as little experiments and end up as Frankensteins. This is their nature; you're more sculpting a thing by building it and experiencing it rather than designing it a priori with systemic elegance in mind.
And that first bit only really matters if you're making a fast-paced game with sophisticated graphics. Most indie games can get away with horribly inefficient code.
Something I've noticed about software dev vs game design: software is better (easier to read, understand, maintain, etc) when you have clean, separated modules. Game design is better (more fun) when everything is connected (eg in an fps, everything relates to gunplay, damage systems, environmental destruction, in a building game, everything relates to building, the building ui, inventory, resources etc). I think this mismatch shows up in game code.
Combine that with actual hard performance constraints, and if you're a "normal" software dev casually browsing some game code, it can be shocking (eg Celeste movement code: https://github.com/NoelFB/Celeste/blob/master/Source/Player/...).
This goes for devs in all industries, it's not a problem unique to games.
If anything, the most competent developers in terms of getting the most performance out of hardware are game developers.
If you’re a solo developer, if it works.
I’ve seen worse in enterprise shops and then I’ve gotten into nasty arguments with people who don’t care about programming. They can’t be wrong.
C# is a high level language that can handle a degree of sloppy programming.
I was working on a small tool yesterday. It was easier to vibe code it from scratch in C# than to modify an existing Rust project.
The only weird part is VS Code Copilot couldn’t figure out how to build it via the dotnet cli and I had to install VS Studio. After that everything was fine.
I would say that C# is "less colored" than Rust. Handling a moved argument, a borrowed argument, a copied argument is different in Rust, you have to think upfront about memory lifetimes. If you are wrong the first time, changing the ownership is not a simple localized refactoring.
To be 100% fair, it’s much easier for llms to start new projects and Rust is simply a more difficult language.
I have what I need working in C#, and as a C# developer I actually understand what’s going on.
The only downside is now instead of having a portable Rust project, I have something which heavily leans into Windows APIs.
I assume with high level languages some smart people figured out all the memory stuff.
Since it's a multi-discipline craft it's hard to get good at every aspect for indie development, focusing most of the effort on one or two aspects. I think the programming aspect for indie games typically matters very little unless it hurts performance or causes bugs, and the things the user interacts with end up mattering a lot more.
Every web developer I've met has specialised in one area or another, even if they claim the title of "Full Stack".
Problem is that this kind of code often is brittle, full of bugs and unhandled edge cases, and evolution and maintenance is horror. But if it’s all you know you might never question it.
Often but not always, and if they're a solo developer then maintenance might not be too bad as they might be able to keep all the logic in their head. I'm not advocating for that kind of approach, but if it lets people focus on things that the player will actually notice like the gameplay, graphics, sound, story or art then hey, what's a little shortcut?
A game is finished at some point. You might not need to evolve the code any further. Why optimize for a use-case that rarely applies to indie-games?
I don’t see the issue. Real software problems are when the logical model is insufficient for the given problem.
The other day a professional gamedev was arguing with me that's Transform.GetChild to get a reference to a component was not a bad practice. His argument is that it's what every other firms in his area is also doing. I do hope that was not the truth and he was just trying to win the argument.
For solo hobby dev it is a lot more acceptable. After all they're also terrible 3d modeler, concept artist, musician, writer, marketeer, community manager,...
Most indie game dev projects start as some small weekend project just to feel things out. Then it starts to become fun so we work on it another week. Then after a couple months we start to think that maybe the game has potential. Then we're 5 years into a project and have no clue how we got there. It becomes a giant jenga tower where moving any one block can completely collapse the whole project, so we learn the hard way that nobody should ever refactor. Pretty much the only people who do refactor end up restarting their project from scratch, getting frustrated because they can't capture their original feel of the game, then ultimately abandon the project entirely.
And for professional game dev projects, it's all built on a foundation of some scrappy little indie project from decades ago.
Some industries are all about making their code public and making it super clean and polished as a point of pride. Games, like movies and sausage, are disgusting to see behind the scenes. They're just piles of scraps and weird tricks that look great unless you get down and examine it too closely. And most people aren't looking that closely, so wasting that time and effort is pointless.
It's an indication that programming languages are the wrong abstraction for creative work
Doesn't hn clean article titles? This is a classic click baity one. Most of these are just basic features. Some are unused for good reason.
- Property: the inspector doesn't call your getter or setter. I do use them still because i like to centralize my validation logic. But need custom machinery to make them behave consistently.
- Tuple: well-known. Good but only in moderation.
- Linq: people avoid it due to allocations, not runtime. While it is possible to avoid dynamic alloc, it is not obvious and best avoided. Also the point about the linq syntax being "cleaner" is debatable.
- Record: good. Lesser known as it's the newest in the article. No footguns like the other.
While it is nice that this is human written, the seo format is nearly as annoying as those ai articles.
Fans of LINQ may enjoy ZLinq[0], which is a less versatile but much more performant way to write LINQ-like queries. I certainly use a lot of (Z)Linq in my code; the performance tradeoff is just fine for one-off initialization, UI code, editor tooling, etc.
Zero allocation impl? very cool! Arguably, the original runtime should have done this in the first place given the limitations/tradeoffs aren't so bad, but I guess that ship sailed 20 years ago (man that hurts)
Unity's C# has always felt like C#'s mentally challenged cousin. C-not-so-sharp. The custom == convinced me that allowing operator overloading on built-in operators is one big mistake.
Many tools can be misused. Object.Member can throw a NRE, is it a big mistake to have the dot operator?
It's such a weird question.
Yes, "dot operator can throw a NRE" is of course a big mistake. A billion-dollar mistake, you can even say.
No, I'm not asking if "dot operator can throw a NRE" is a mistake; I'm asking if the dot operator, the ability to access members at all, is a mistake.
I am not a game developer (I've made a few in the past but didn't use any frameworks besides direct libsdl calls), but if this article rings true for anyone in that field I'm a bit surprised things as basic as properties, structs and tuples are "not used" by unity devs, this is some basic stuff that has been supported even by Mono for decades. Just basic syntactic sugar though, so not a big deal either way. Just surprising to me at least.
c# 14 added field backed properties where you dont need that `_health` in the first place you just write `public int Health { get => field; set => field = Mathf.Clamp(value, 0, 100)`. that way you never accidentally use the internal field without the checks. problem is unity still stuck on c# 9.0 so it might be years before you can actually use this in a game
I'm a very experienced Unity C# programmer, and I certainly don't equate "good" with using all the new fancy features of a language.
Fancy features are less maintainable imo. Less programmers will know about them and they're less likely to have equivalents in other languages.
Making something more exotic / confusing / hard to parse is defo not worth saving a few lines of code.. I'd much rather see a longer function using absolute bog standard elements of the language (and thus being clear, easy to comprehend for everyone, easy to modify at any point) rather than a super short, super "elegant", super "clever" solution.
Languages that seem to indefinitely grow more features over time (like c++, c#, rust, etc) evitably become bucketed by epochs unless the consuming application code also operate across the same time scales. Feature deprecations tend to go hand in hand with newer features, leaving you with basically "multiple sublanguages" in a supposed single language, exacerbating fragmentation of the community. I don't want to have the mental load of contextually understanding "which" sublanguages I need to care about depending on the year a consuming application was written. This is why I tend not to reach for new fangled features and stay with the core runtime stuff in evergreen langs.
Looking forward to when Unity will migrate to CoreCLR. Soon!
That soon is like a decade in the making.
And with many folks going into alternatives like Godot, it means C# ends up losing the mindshare it got.
Yes, you can use C# with Godot, but most folks end up with GDScript, or GDextension.
Iirc Godot is taking the approach from both sides however and also working on a libgodot which will allow a "bring your own runtime" which I'm much more interested in than the integrated "environments" that are Unity and Godot today. I'm likely in the minority though as they only started making a library export after the all in one environment was stable enough...
idk, maybe the youtube algorithm just gets people to click on the video, what do they care why a video is clicked on as long as it generates revenue. so when they talk about videos being useful, take that to the bank.
What C# version does Unity currently support? 2024 I chose Godot over Unity due to its better C# support and I can’t say that I came to regret my decision.
C# 9, but with some hacks you can bump it up to C# 10 - actually works and surprisingly stable. Can't wait for them to finally migrate to CoreCLR, though.
I got out of doing Unity development 7 years ago because I was tired of waiting for them to migrate to CoreCLR (among many other reasons).
Unfortunately the way they managed to stick with MonoRuntime and Burst, kind of made more harm than good, regarding C# adoption on the games industry.
Many issues people associate with C#, are actually only relevant in Unity, because of this.
Iirc the lineage of their c# came from Mono, then diverged a bit over time. Hopefully they can leave that baggage behind and just use the newer .net core, if they're not already that is... Disclaimer: I haven't looked in half a decade
Game developers are not paid to be good developers. They're paid to be young, naive, and easily brow-beat into working unpaid overtime.
I think one of my biggest problems with Unity is that it enabled a massive market of me-too "business men" who "employ" unpaid and underpaid interns to hack together asset-store-ware they then dump on the app stores. When a gem game stutters, people blame their crappy phones rather than the company who probably stiffed its developers.
I've seen a lot of my friends do this constant churn of signing up for the next game shop that will hire them. Places that throw many, many red flags the second you even walk in the door. They work hard to get a game done on a budget 1/10th what it should be, the game ends up being a flop, and they never get a chance to grow their portfolio or skills to eventually get a better job.
This isn't something you can lay at the feet of Unity Technologies, but I do think it is a reason to avoid Unity: the job ecosystem is just awful.
> The Unity engine has evolved a lot in modern days, but I noticed a trend where Unity developers are still using "outdated" techniques when writing their C# code.
Some years ago I tried to get into C# + Mono. Eventually I opted for Java instead, for many reasons; I'll skip that here.
C# is very strange to me. In a way I feel that C# belongs like Java in the same "post C++" family; C kind of paved the way, C++ was messy and powerful, so Java and C# would be more "managable". But I never got into C#. Java is not a pretty language, it is also quite boring, but modern Java is somewhat acceptable - you get the job done. And it is not an extremely difficult language either for the most part, just with an addiction on pointless verbosity. C# is ... strange though. TIOBE has it ranked #5 right below Java, so there must be many C# users, but I don't get to see them really in the Linux ecosystem. So where are these people all? Using Windows only? When the question is "most developers don't use feature xyz", do all of them actually KNOW these features? You can still find many java tutorial where people use archaic ways to, for instance, iterate over a collection. Perhaps it is similar to the C# ecosystem, people are slow to adopt. Or, and this may also be a reason, people could have moved to other languages. This may not be a huge percentage, but you see that some languages suddenly struggle with old devs and failing to get new devs (ruby is in this problem right now; it may overcome it but right now it is sinking hard, even though I would reason that the language is, for the most part, better than it was in, say, 2010).
C# has had the reputation of not being viable for Linux for a long time. Therefore, the people already on Linux didn't have a reason to use it or even try it. If you're already doing stuff in other languages it's hardly worth it to switch to C#.
I personally use it quite a lot - but I came as a windows user writing all my utilities in C#. Also, afaik C# is mostly used in corporate environments that don't open-source their projects. You're unlikely to hear from it unless you're working on it for this very reason.
Mono was in a usable state on Linux for literal decades before becoming official and integrated into what is core today, that is unless you needed windows forms, which much like MSFT UI frameworks today had multiple failed attempts spanning those same decades...
C# has a unique powerful position in the video game space. In almost every other niche, there are better (or just trendier) solutions, but C# is the only major language that actually gives you a combination of features that are important in video games:
- Dynamic runtime with loose coupling and hot reload of code - extremely useful during development.
- Value types. You don't want every Vector4 to be heap allocated when you're doing 3D graphics, because that's going to be absolutely unusable.
- Access to a relatively low-level substrate for basically-native performance when needed - extremely useful when you're trying to actually ship something that runs well.
Taken in isolation, C# isn't best in class for any of them, but no other language offers all three, especially not if you also want things like a really good debugger and great IDE tools.
To my knowledge, Java has none of these features (yet), and they aren't really important in a lot of the areas where Java is popular. But this is why C# in particular is very strong in the video games niche.