Asset store grievances

[Alienchild]

Before I go on I would like to commend you for the idea and effort, Having the asset store is very valuable to the community. Having said that, in my short time with Unity I have already come to expect nothing but the best. Your main product is streamlined through countless iterations, expanded upon and made simply fantastic. This is why it is so hard to understand why the asset store is designed in such a catastrophically bad way.

1) The asset store is nothing but a website integrated into a web-loader interface within Unity. Unity is a terrible browser, in fact about the worst you can find. That alone is a fantastically bad design decision, almost akin to putting wooden wheel on a car.

2) The asset store is not available outside of Unity. Although this point is slightly related to the first point, it is a decision that I extremely hard to understand. When we design retail systems at my workplace (Unity is just a hobby) we cannot tell our clients that we cannot make their website available on the web, but that they would have to start up Microsoft Word and look for their online store using an inferior browser, accessible from the About box in the File Menu. I am sorry if this is offending you, but this is the only way I think I can drive the point home. Why can't I use my lunch break at work checking out the asset store content? I would have to install Unity at work in order to do that... so no thanks.

3) Your category sections needs a revision, especially the art packages section. Textures, sound effects, music, 3d models - these should all get their own category. 3d models should even be split up further into characters, props and misc, or something to that effect.

4) When you view a product and use the back button to go to the previous page, the page location is not remembered. This is terribly frustrating.

5) The asset store is very, very slow.

6) Pricing information is not available in all product previews, and many times I am left searching for the price of a product. Look at the front page, for instance; There is no price information except in the "Most popular" list.

Like I said, even though I have only been using Unity for about 6 months I have come to expect the best. Heck, I bought my Pro license after only 3 months! Please take the great idea that the asset store is and fix it - make it right, the way you -know- it should be.

[brendang]

Amen...

[legend411]

2) The asset store is not available outside of Unity. Although this point is slightly related to the first point, it is a decision that I extremely hard to understand. When we design retail systems at my workplace (Unity is just a hobby) we cannot tell our clients that we cannot make their website available on the web, but that they would have to start up Microsoft Word and look for their online store using an inferior browser, accessible from the About box in the File Menu. I am sorry if this is offending you, but this is the only way I think I can drive the point home. Why can't I use my lunch break at work checking out the asset store content? I would have to install Unity at work in order to do that... so no thanks.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but your comparison is a little off. In the asset store's case, the software from which you access the store is the software required to use anything you can purchase from said store. A more accurate comparison would be if Microsoft Word had an in-application-only store to buy document templates or something.

[Josh_Amsterdam]

The store only being accessible from inside Unity would be fine, in my opinion, if it actually ran smoothly. But, as you say, it´s slow, inefficiently designed and buggy. I was also surprised with it, it seems everything about Unity is made to work perfectly, but they just forgot about the asset store. You even only get payed out as a developer every three months, I believe.. ridiculous.

[Demostenes]

4) When you view a product and use the back button to go to the previous page, the page location is not remembered. This is terribly frustrating.
....

Agree, especially with this. Asset store design is terrible and it is amazing, that it didnt improve after so many months.

[I am da Bawss]

Yeh, I totally agree with your points.
The asset store is really REALLY SLOW !!
When I buy something from asset store sometimes it will even TIME OUT! For example when I tried to buy the "PlayMaker" it took 3 TRIES to finally get the order through, because each time it just time out or I wasn't even sure I got my order through. And updating is real pain too because it is so slow with the same time out issue as well. EDIT: Actually, when I update the PlayMaker I get a script error I think when it time out - and the version number stayed the same as the old one and I was left wondering if it was updated properly.

And not able to browse the asset store outside of Unity is a really big minus too. I have Unity installed on my Macbook but when I am out or at work, I sometimes would like to check out asset store to see if they have some plugins or art asset for the ideas I have to put together. While I can access the web almost anywhere with iPhone, I CANNOT browse the asset store on iPhone or from any web terminals. I think Asset store should be at least viewable from the web (maybe not be able to buy stuff would be fine for me as long as I can view it, and decide to purchase it later when I get home).

[dreamora]

I agree, you should be able to fully browse the asset store from web and see prices but you should NOT be able to buy anyhting there, only inside of Unity.

That the browser is slow is pretty strange anyway, cause its WebKit ... Its even slow here on my higher end boxes and I always ask myself through what pipe its forced into that window to be that slow actually, there must be something extremely terrible going on, like something is mutex locking it all the time, does not let it run parallel in itself, is killing its line or whatever

[Alienchild]

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but your comparison is a little off. In the asset store's case, the software from which you access the store is the software required to use anything you can purchase from said store. A more accurate comparison would be if Microsoft Word had an in-application-only store to buy document templates or something.

That is a fair comment, and since my original post was written in frustration my wording and analogy could have been better. However, when I purchase art assets - be that music, models, sound effects etc. I also intend to use that within my own game engine. The Unity store is of course made for Unity so I understand the need to integrate it into the engine itself. It add nice features such as Unity actually storing a backup of what we buy so we don't have to, as well as easy import/install. I agree with dreamora with that you should only be able to purchase from inside Unity, but I should be able to check out the new stuff available while at work without having to install Unity, or browse the store on my iPad in bed or sitting on my porch. I find myself browsing on devices other then my PC more and more, and when I do actually get some time on my computer I spend it making my games.

[Caitlyn]

Hey guys,

Thanks for the honest opinions and valid grievances-- we definitely hear you.

We are aware of many of these shortcomings and are hard at work ironing them out, to bring the Asset Store experience up to the high quality everyone expects of Unity products. Because it's young, the store is something of a living product-- there's room for it to flex and adapt, and definitely things are not set in stone as they are. Our team is hard at work and many of these improvements are already well underway.

And in the very near future, look forward to deeper categories (amen!) and speed optimizations.

Cheers

Caitlyn

[Alienchild]

That's great to hear Caitlyn. I personally think the Asset Store inside Unity should be the means of purchasing the product, while viewing it is best done in a full-fledged browser (instead of re-inventing the wheel).

[legend411]

I do find it silly that you can access individual product pages through the web if you know the exact URL (Those u3d.com/whatever things), but there's no way to browse them

[hippocoder]

Would very much prefer if unity just:

a) make the whole thing online with purchase and download of zips
b) make the integrated unity version just open a web canvas of that, and unzip to my project (same thing)

Seriously, integrated stores pee me off, I hate them. As a result whenever a developer offers the opportunity to purchase online or asset store I always purchase online. You can't tell me I'm wrong because it's my money and if I prefer shopping thus, so it will be.

[ilanbps]

It's my first post and I would like to say:

I LOVE UNITY ENGINE BUT:

I HATE assetstore, it is unproductive and price policy for the European Union borders is...
I prefer to pay authors directly via paypal or credit card.

Developer, thank you for putting your package other than on the assetstore

Unity guys, please create real web shop !

[anomalous_underdog]

I'd like to reiterate my past comments on this, but I'll just link to it instead: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/805...nt-suggestions

[CrazySi]

Yeah Asset store is rubbish and a control freak causes me nothing but ballache frequently forgets I already brought an asset, and I have no way of copying assets to other projects on other computers easily.

[DaveyJJ]

I'd personally like to see stuff sold in the Asset Store come down as packages, not get unzipped into a current project. Make it easier to import/export for later projects.

[dreamora]

I'd personally like to see stuff sold in the Asset Store come down as packages, not get unzipped into a current project. Make it easier to import/export for later projects.

possible without a problem. Click the down arrow and select download instead of download and import

[Alienchild]

It has now been three and a half months since I posted this. This is how I experience the Asset Store now:

1) The asset menu has been improved a lot. You have done a very good job here, so thank you for addressing that.

2) The rest is just as bad as it was before, with an exception: speed has gotten worse. Often Unity isn't able to connect to the Asset Store. Often it hangs for almost 1 minute before it starts loading the front page. General browsing is slooooow. Now I have a 60mbit/60mbit internet connection. My computer is fairly adequate (quadcore 2.4ghz), I run everything through cabled network (no wifi), oh and I get this on both my laptop and my workstation. One running WinXP 32bit and the other Win7 64bit. The WinXP installation is less then 2 months.

Right now I wanted to import an asset I bought. Tried to open up the asset store and after 15-20 second of nothing happening a loading bar popped up. Lasted for about 30 seconds more. Then failed. So I tried again. Was a lot faster this time (maybe 20 sec in total?). Success, but it got me frustrated and angry. In fact, each time I have to open up the F'n asset store I get extremely frustrated! The solution is still as bad as it was those months ago and whomever is in charge now who haven't fixed it should get fired. I have spent several hundred dollars in the store and I expect you to keep the damn thing in a working condition. It would also help if I could import what I have bought and downloaded from Assets -> Import Packages. Then I wouldn't have to open the damn store again.

[Yusuf AKDAG]

Please go back old version of my stuff page...
Current version is unbelievable slow.. We dont need that dropdowns at right side. Old 3 buttons was working good.

You've to solve update notification problem too. I have to check package page for updated content.

Sorry Unity guyz but you failed with latest update..

[Spk]

I have to agree with most comments above, especially the asset store being slow, buggy and not completely browsable from a regular web-browser. I just don't understand the reason behind going through all this pain of using a built-in webkit browser when you can just let people buy and download packages from a web page using their favorite web browser...

Oh and ironically I just tried to access the asset store, and it's failing to load with "TypeError: Result of expression 'b.id' [undefined] is not an object.". Been trying to access it since yesterday but am still getting the same error.

However, I'm also very grateful for having an asset store in the first place, and I understand it's a growing, evolving system. It's just that Unity has gotten us used to such a higher quality standard that the asset store pales in comparison to the rest at the moment.