Official: How Can We Serve You Better?

Thanks Martin for taking the time to reply and give some insight, its much appreciated as is the acknowledgement that there are aspects that can and should be fleshed out. I look forward to these deficiencies being resolved in the near future.

One point I would like to make is that I feel that there is not a construcitve feedback mechansim for users to express these defiencies or for Unity to acknowledge them. Sure we have feedback, but I've said many times that this feels far too 'big ticket' focused, that is its the big ideas or features that get the most attention and indeed is simply not a practical method for someone like myself to add a bunch of small little items too as you simply can't assign enough initial votes to them. However i'm unsure what the answer to this issue is, as what might seem to be a simple small 'low hanging fruit' request (e.g. adding a dropdown to the editor interface to quickly access the Project settings) might not be so simple to implement.

 

stepping in the AA reunion.
Hello, Rui from Portugal, I´m an hobbyist, architect by trade.

I´v always looked at game engines as "freeroom" application makers, not necessarily games.

When I start architecture we still used ink pens to draft the blueprints, 3D was not a word, you build a scale model out of something. Digital came in, CAD and 3D software as matured. And are now accessible to get and to use. Game engines are just starting to get there.

The single thing that's holding them is programming. The need to program or script using awkward symbols...XX century says hello!
Visual scripting to the rescue. For me it was Playmaker it made unity something I could use.
Unreal got the memo and introduced blueprints. Unity should get on track

As for commercial model;
Subscription fees are a Big no no, unless done like U4, you stop paying you keep using your version, and can resume anytime. Don't know whats the best model for unity but anything that drops the division free + pro is a better model.
I do think Epics model is brilliant, but if royalty's are a no no for unity maybe making Pro free one point behind, like with Ut5 release make Ut4 Pro the free version.

Inspiration:
I´m still waiting for something like what sketchup is for 3d that can be made in the Game engine space.
With sketchup you just build stuff visually, you make a box color red turn shadows and boom it already looks great and ready to export. You can refine-it with external renders, change line textures etc, but you already have a prototype in a fraction of time that would take Max Blender etc, and all with tools you can learn in a day.
If some visual scripting logic tool was ever made for sketchup it would probably be enough for most of my game/ app needs 2d /2.5/ and 3D alike.

 

Firstly, to all the Unity Devs who've started replying to this thread, thank you! It is genuinely awesome to hear from the guys and gals in the trenches, seriously, I'm slightly choked up here

@Jakob@Unity The dynamic generation thing I think is pretty straight forward conceptually: Allow devs to call a function that (a)synchronously starts calculating a nav mesh, joins them, calculate starting from a point of interest, etc. Hell! Allowing us to bake navmesh data into a GameObject would be surreally awesome, then we can instantiate and stitch them together... Like a BAWS. This may or may not be a simple thing, but it would make our lives so much easier.

The multiple meshes thing is slightly different. I had a case (long since shipped and solved in other horrible ways ) where I needed to have agents of different sizes that needed to navigate the same space, small guys were supposed to be able to go through small and big doors, big guys could only go through big doors. A single navMesh with a single agent size to calculate said mesh cannot accommodate that scenario, you'd either have small guys being unable to pass through small doors, or big guys that could squeeze through small doors. You can fake things with Off Mesh Links, but that is painful to setup and not something that can be automated.

A nice-to-have would be a navmesh that could be created that would take wall climbing into consideration, but that may be out of scope for Recast/Detour.

These are all things that have materially affected production, there were workarounds, but none of them actually involved using Unity's Navigation, that last point only came up when Navigation was introduced to Unity for the first time, so we can let it slide

 

Technical overviews are great and the ones that are already in the docs are very useful, the main problems tend to stem from, as you say, the "internal" detail.

I think I should have clarified that I'm mostly talking about the scripting reference side of the documentation.
I guess it being "gotchas" could be a lot of it, in that it's difficult to know what Unity may be doing on the other side of it's API call.

An example might be accessing a .collider (I realise these are being removed in future, but this can apply to most doc entries), the documentation states
"The Collider attached to this GameObject (null if there is none attached).". Simple enough, and a logical description, but doesn't actually say or show what this is doing. It's generally understood that .GetComponent<Collider>() is used internally (correct me if I'm wrong), which would be more useful to know than having to assume anything about the internals.

That's a basic example but I hope it communicates the sticking point.

The reasons for a change are twofold:
1. It took me personally a good while to learn these little ins-and-outs of the engine that cost or save performance, or throw errors etc, having more verbose documentation could have avoided a lot of that learning time. Several of my co-workers have discussed the same thing previously. Mostly the benefit is it's faster to write good, solid code, and easier to see the best way to use the API.
2. More bare-metal documentation of API functions would allow us to assess if such a call is necessary, or if we could avoid unnecessary calculations and create our own calls for similar purposes.

I realise that essentially to get these points across properly you are going down the 'showing the source' route, which may not be viable as I know Unity does license out it's source. But any way of indicating the information needed to know what the API is doing would, in my opinion, be of great help to new and long-time Unity users.

Something else to consider with documentation which my co-workers have expressed before is a set of context-relative examples similar to those in the MSDN Documentation. I think this would be very helpful to those learning Unity.

Thank you for listening, it's great to see such a positive response from Unity Staff on the forums.

 

This is great news

While at it, what bugs me since years is Unity feedback. I am still stuck with zero votes but a felt thousand good suggestions left. Which was a good way to stop me from being active there, not to force me to give feedback really. Are there any plans to change that one?

And what about the voting for your favourite bug? It's active since a pretty while. So how did that one turned out? Is it really useful to vote your favourite bug to get it fixed?

 

Not sure what has been said before, the thread is already 5 pages long, and the topic is *very* broad.

- I am a programmer in a small company creating architectural visualizations, interactive (mostly touchscreen) experiences, and little games for our customers. I've been using unity since 1.x times.

- I'm OK with the current Pro pricing, I almost opted for a subscription for personal use too, but reading that, even after a year loyalty, you can't keep the last Pro version after the subscription runs out stopped me from doing so. Either have loyalty and let the user keep a version or do away with it.

- New features; I *really* hope the new GUI system will make it into Unity soon now for real. I mention this, since it seems to have been "coming soon" since forever (maybe 2.x?). But forget the GUI system, what I really mean is that communicating what's in the roadmap is very important, with ETA if possible.

- Who is "bibbinator", or "Andeeeee"? Lurking around long enough I've seen your names, and I can place you; also the unity logo under the username is cool and all (if you notice it), but a real name would evoke much more trust and authority. I guess it's a PR thing, can't explain, it's more of a feeling. In general having Unity dev presence in the forums is definitely important, but I also understand that there's a LOT of it to go through

- I follow a fair few Unity people on twitter, it's my favorite way of staying up to date. It's cool to read about what parts of the engine people are working on, tricks they come up with, etc...

There would be a lot more, but I have to go back to work (with unity ), but before, this:

http://arges-systems.com/blog/2014/05/12/unreal-engine-4-vs-unity/

I think this is a great article and I agree with most everything written in it.

 

I will go back and read all the responses so far but the top things you could do for me are...

#1) Far far better docs with lots of examples.

Not just game stuff. For example I spent several days trying to make a dynamic mesh plugin. I just wanted a sphere with MxN subdivisions. But I mostly seemed to just have to guess how to make it work. Things I searched for came up with hints but nothing said "this is the way you do it". Same with for example drawing to make gizmos work. When to use OnDrawGizmo vs OnDrawGizmoSelected, what the best practices are for tracking state across those since it seems they both get called when something is selected therefore it appears you basically want OnDrawGizmo to be a no-op if things are selected. If that's wrong that's exactly the point. NO DOCS

#2) Access to good customer support.

Personally I'd prefer if you had a public forum that your devs actively answered questions in because there's no way you can answer every question and besides the answer might already exist. anwsers.unity3d.com is fine as a forum but I don't think I've ever seen any official answers or if I have they've been few are far between. Just lots of clueless developers like myself guessing at what the right answer is.

I get that public support might not be possible because of costs? Fine, give me a paid forum as long as you guys are responsive and it's easy to find the existing answers and then ask new questions. If you already have this great. I'm a Unity noob so I don't know all the resources.

One other idea, maybe have editors that try to separate "noob" questions from real ones? I don't like the idea of some editor deciding my question is a "noob" question but was someone who answers lots of questions on Stack Overflow it's really annoying when you get noob questions. For Example where clearly the user doesn't know how to program and you clearly can't given them a 1000pg answer on how to program. Or another example where the question is super broad like "How do I make an FPS game?" or "I want to make an game that does XYZ, how do I do it?"

 

Respawned 8 and 16 bit hobbyist developer from Northern Ireland here, looking to get back into game development on desktop and mobiles and make it more than a hobby. I have a game nearing completion in an iOS-only 2D engine, but I'm looking at easy cross platform for subsequent efforts. I haven't used Unity yet (though it's pretty much the only thing any local developers are using) but perhaps my perspective as an "outsider" might be interesting?

My information is all from forum lurking and blog trawling so far, so I apologise in advance if I've got it wrong.

I'm looking primarily at 2D games as that's what I have the resources (time, money) to make. From what I've seen, Unity tooling offers great productivity for this and that's what I need to get games out the door. I like that it's garbage collected (yes, Mono 2.6, I know), the Entity-Component programming model and that I can easily(?) add 2.5D/3D, lighting, shaders etc. to make the games stand out. I also hate UI programming so I like that Unity will have a UI system by the time I come to use it in anger.

Things that put me off Unity:
- the cost of mobile Pro. Do I need Pro? I don't know, maybe, but in any case 3x the cost for iOS/Android gives me pause. I'll see how far I can get with Free.
- FUD around buggy features, general bugs, and slow fix times. I'd prefer a stable platform with fewer features.
- roadmap and features-in-development visibility. The tech blogs are very interesting.

Is there space for a midrange license cheaper than full Pro?
- dark theme (but seriously, make this free!)
- static batches
- render to texture
- profiling
- asset pipeline access
- native code access
For $500? For what it offers, $1500 for Pro is good value and just on the edge of affordable for me, but I don't think I'll need or use all of its features. I could get by just fine with totally free Cocos2DX or HaxePunk, or Loom $10/mo, which do all of the above, but I'd pay UT for productivity.

Licensing: subs are not for me. Aside from the concept of not owning the software, as a hobbyist there are periods where I can't work on my games (e.g.: all of 2013) and the sub money is wasted. A fixed one-off cost is much easier to deal with too: let me put it on my Visa and run my own payment schedule! Or a UE4 style super cheap + royalty model might be palatable too.

 

2D is the youngest feature of Unity and we're continuously working on it. As with all tools it takes a few iterations to get things perfect and start building on top.

There's many use cases we're aware off which aren't included in the main product such as a simple sprite animation system (you can surely do anything 2D Toolkit does using the built in animation system, yet it's not as easy), tiling and hd/sd asset switching. If you have any specific examples of how external tools help you do your work better than Unity, I'd like to hear about them. Send me a message anytime!

 

Thank you for opening direct communication with us, it's been getting so furstrating, especially recently, that I converted from a silence lurker to a pretty vocal one. Fair warning, it'll be very hard to shut me up now

I am a mostly sole developer, I have developed and published through my company (Grafos like my user name!!!) a couple of games, initially targetting niche educational markets, but recently casual games too. I am developing full time but also have another part time job to feed the family and cover expenses.

Are you sure this is the case? The mobile app stores (and even Steam recently) are floodied with games, free, freemium etc. After many years, effort and completed games, I am nowhere near relying solely on my games to make a living or justifying the cost of Unity Pro + addons yet.

Interested.

My plan is to start with simplier 2d games and make more complex games as I progress. That means I can realistically expect to finish my projects each time, and be more experienced when moving to something more complex. Also, it potentially means a bigger budget on bigger games (originally thinking Unity Pro, Unreal Engine 4 more recently, waiting-to-see UT's response however).

This is a tricky one. Everyone wants you guys to pick up the development pace, so that dinosaurs like terrain, GUI, Input manager, cloth, mono, etc.,do not occur again. At the same time, we all have been feeling betrayed by the lack of communication. We do need both. Finding the balance might be tricky, but I can't choose one over the other.

Subscriptions seem to force developers to produce stuff more frequently, so that's a good thing for us users. Now, UE's subscription is ideal for someone like me. It's low cost and until I am succesful enough, I do not have to worry about royalties. When/if I am succesful enough, 5% is not going to make me unsuccesful.

I do like frequent updates but I'm sure I won't be able to offer a single line of code on Unity's source. Hence the open/closed source question is one I should not answer. I will say this however. I believe that Unity should be a complete package that does not rely on the Asset Store to overcome its shortcomings. The asset store should be more about stuff like 3d models, music, sfx, various graphics and the occasional exotic feature the engine does not cover. Replacing functionality though, just because the native one sucks... well, that's less than ideal. Stuff like GUI, 2D (oh, the pre 4.3 days), advanced physics/particle systems should be part of the main engine in the best possible form, so that they are always updated with it.

I got sick of waiting for something official and bought a mobile plugin that handles IAP, ads, social stuff etc. Apart from that, Unity has been great with tutorials and documention, so two thumbs ups to you guys on that front. I don't know if it's possible to do something for us in the marketing side of things, lets not get too spoiled (though I think you've been hinting stuff recently)


About the UE engine, many have mentioned the cost of learning a new engine. Maybe it's an issue with big teams, but personally as one of the little guys, it does not put me off. I did not start game development in Unity. 3 years ago I was new to it and only wanted to go back to Blitzmax/Blitz3D. As I get more experienced, I learn new stuff faster and faster. By the time my initial excitement wears down, I will probably be very comfortable with UE. I haven't tried it yet. I'm holding off until I finish my current Unity project then evaluate. UE4 paper2d, or whatever is called, should be out by then and hopefully UT response to UE4 pricing. I do not want to go, but my decision to stay has to make sense financially. I am not going to make another game using Unity Free, that's for sure. UE4 is at a price range I can afford, I hope Unity Pro will be able to offer something as appealing.

There are many ways you could go about it. I liked some suggestions (Adobe style, after many months being a subscriber you get to keep the current version of software) and disliked some (watermarks??? I'm sooooo gone!). I'll add another one. Have an initial subscription fee, like I dunno $100, and a low subscription, $30 per month. Every time you resubscribe, you have to pay the initial subscription fee again. You could also offer lock-in contracts with cheaper subscriptions (eg 1 year - $25 p.m., 2 years $20 p.m., 100 years - just kiddin').

Hope these help, thanks once again for talking with us!

 

Thanks for the info Andy, it's good to know you're working on these things - I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out. Will there be a similar link between the different docs, i.e. what is at the moment Component Reference Scripting Reference?

I think there's always been a lot of interest in deeper technical information, but it tends to end up in the forums as general questions and discussions. I suppose not many people figured it might be useful to have it somewhere in plain sight, and (crucially) up to date.

It's always useful to know how features work Under the Hood.

 

Fantastic! That would really make my day!

 

Hello,

First wanted to say thanks for all the great work you're doing! Really pleased to learn that you're really ramping up on the delivery of bug-fix updates at a higher pace (congrats to all the teams involved as I guess it's really tricky to do this the right way).

While I'm really pleased with Unity and pre-ordered Unity 5 after investigating UE4, I'm also keeping my UE4 subscription for 1 major reason: they are releasing very cool demo projects which give invaluable insight into how things are done (or can be done). Over the years, Unity has shown some really cool tech demos for the releases of major updates but we only got to look into very few of them (source access).

I'm not talking about "Learn" section demo projects which are indeed great but serve the purpose of demonstrating specific features of Unity. It's more about "small part of a game/level" demo projects where you can see how issues are tackled, what tricks are used, ...

Obviously I guess these things take time and cost money that you'd rather allocate to making the engine better but do you have any plans regarding demo projects? As an example, the spaceship demo that was shown to demonstrate Enlighten looked cool and it seemed to have quite a few tricks (there is a GDC video discussing it but it doesn't go into great details), so I'd be great if it were released alongside Unity 5 (if still relevant and working obviously).

Thanks for taking the time to discuss with your community!

 

ShadowGames: UK based, working on a large single player RPG with some networking additions we are aiming for the same sector as Bioware and CD Projekt Red. I have a team of 15 not including HR etc. We also assist in MMO's / FPS games and are licensed by Sony with UE4.

This will be my final write up on the subject I've relayed information too many times.

What we would like / need:

- A patching service for our customers.
- 64 Bit editor should of come years ago, priorities on core engine functionality should come before anything else.
- A terrain system refresh (Better tools e.g world browser UE4 equivalent, tiled async etc.) and less bugs.
- Physx 3.3 should remove issues with cloth sim and general physx bugs (Hopefully)
- Material editor for our artists
- Mono upgrades
- Sequencer / Matinee equivalent for cut scenes. I've seen a base option from HippoCoder but fully featured in engine cut scenes are defacto standard in most 3D games.
- Generally better post like AA, most post is simple to make our selves and we will tweak but whatever saves time.
- Some equivalent to UE4's cascade particle system, it requires little effort as a base setup and looks great.
- Enlighten should take care of lighting

What killed our project was lack of 64-Bit editor and several terrain issues. We couldn't export our terrain to Beast, Umbra often crashed if it worked correctly anyway and the editor would crash if you selected more than one object in the hierarchy which made working slow. It was a struggle to become part of the Beta to get access to updates in a timely manor. We ended up replacing all the above tools in the end, Mecanim at the time had too many bugs so we used legacy.

If you believe Unity is capable of AAA 3D / PC / Console games, please show us. Some tech demos, the best Unity can do wouldn't go a miss. UE4 has this nailed down and there is no room for discussion on capabilities.

If you are not willing to allow source code access, find a way to streamline the engine so support is quick and effective. If we can't fix it ourselves and we are completely capable of doing so, then give us a good reason to pick up a support contract.

We are a minority (I gather) and we have money to invest, this may not be a direction you would like to follow. But give us feedback, I'd like to know where we stand after quite a fair amount of time spent with Unity.

The most important is finishing off your base products with an efficient methodology and keep feedback going.

 

Newbie Indie Dev rom USA. Writing small games

Unity is awesome for the game building side.

I really want a system that does Ads, Achievements, Scores, IAP, Social and possibly Multiplayer For small games, writing this type of code is a deal breaker. It takes more time to write than the game itself.

If a system like this already exists in the Asset store, I'm missing it. I'm willing to pay for it, but haven't found a system yet.

 

Thanks for starting this thread!

What I'm really missing is the concept of a public beta or preview release that can be downloaded a few weeks before new releases finally ship. This would give everyone (and especially AssetStore publishers) the opportunity to test and start adapting their packages. Could be a timebombed release and perhaps with disabled Bug reporting if you're concerned about too much beta input, doesn't matter.

Talking about the AssetStore: Allow publishers to know about their customers (some basic stats, like UT version&platform, Country etc.) and give us a way to communicate with them (a simple web form to send a mass-mail (or mass-forum PM) would be sufficient).

Cheers,
Jake

 

I am currently doing my Phd in computer engineering and have a very small company (just me) in Turkey developing mainly web applications and various custom applications for my customers. I have 5 years of C# and 3 years of Unity experience. I have been mainly training myself in Unity, C#, 3d modeling, animation and other various game development subjects by making small non-commercial games/academic applications(AI related projects mostly) till now and I started my very first commercial game project a few months ago. I am mainly interested in developing for PCs. I don’t have any plans for mobiles.

I currently use Unity Free since my current project hasn’t reached to the polishing stage yet and currently I do not have the necessary finances for a big purchase like Unity Pro (big for me anyways). But the idea of adding advanced features such as image effects beforehand and see how they look before making the decision to add them would be awesome. So I liked the “free Unity Pro with watermark idea till you release your game” very much. If that doesn’t fit, UE4’s subscription model is great too. I generally dislike subscription models for software but if we get to keep using the software even after cancelling (like UE4) then I am fine with that even with royalities.

And thank you for this thread!

 

I tried reading the books of text before, so here's my random post reply. I feel like this thread is already getting overwhelming, with tons of different opinions and a lot of the general "this is what I want because it suits me best" mentality.

Trying to be brief:
Unity Free is awesome. It doesn't have to be free. It is so nice.
As someone else mentioned, paying for Unity Pro and iOS Pro and Android Pro = $4500 = Insane. Put mobile pro in Unity Pro license.
Subscriptions are great. Back to previous point... put all pro licenses together for subs.
Everyone complains.
I dislike having to buy Unity Pro to use batchmode, or headless linux build. That it isn't documented as such makes it more of a dislike.

Free Unity Pro with watermark, even huge ugly watermark that you could toggle off in editor but when publishing it'd be so horrid... is one of the best ideas I've seen.

Keep it closed source.

I guess that's about it. Just keep in mind that the people on the forums like to scream the loudest.

 

Hi all
When it comes to Unity I'm also a hobbyist. I went through DirectX6+, XNA, MOgre (Managed Ogre3D) and ended up with Unity. Loving the easiness of adding assets into game and see everything working together. As a professional C# developer in work I would love to stick with C# in my spare time as well, so Unity is the best option so far.
As hobbyist, I would probably not go for subscription as I pick up Unity only when I want to prototype something I find interesting or there is fun hacking weekend ahead (Ludum dare, ..).
So far I love working with Unity although there are some 'WTF' moments during my hacking when google has to help (no exposed sorting layer for particle system to be used in 2D, no easy sprite tiling and cutting, ...). As mentioned already in thread there are so many low hanging fruits for Unity.
Ideally I would love to work with Pro features for free. Of course only for freeware.
I think having Unity Pro as free for all would even benefit Unity (keeping either transparent logos or Unity splash screens):
- games would look better (nicer shadows, render to texture effects, ...) and will promote Unity
- more people using more feature means more people will report bugs and give feedback to improve and be better than other engines
- no more 'hacks' to bring Pro features into Free using workarounds
When I will start making money using Unity, I have no problem paying some share or buying commercial license.
Also I think Unity has great thing going with Asset Store and should even integrate it more, like:
- report bug to author from within asset store
- review outstanding items, buy them out, adjust and make part of Unity
- or even use it for pushing some minor fixes into Unity (mentioned low hanging fruits, ...)
People here already mentioned need for improved documentation (and user comments would be really amazing), documentation examples (code snippets) are really most useful part on MSDN and make C# easy to use and learn.
Another thing is limitation of current features (NavMesh, Mecanim, Shuriken, ...) - if those features would have some straightforward API exposed from code, people could come up with at least nice workaround until next release hits. Ideally you want code API first and then you will wrap it into some nice graphical editor, but Unity for some reason does it other way around.
Regarding having Unity open source. Well I see it being useful for large companies and projects where access to source code is kind of safety net, if company goes under. But having multiple branches (contributions) over some Unity features could really kill the whole integrity of editor in far future.

 

I am a frenchy living in china and work as freelance on a multiplayer FPS, I did some projects by myself but lack of time recently, spent 3 years on unity.
I have to say the engine is really popular here more than the 2 actual concurrent, probably because of all the ressources that have been translated by the chinese indie community and because of the assets store. Its probably obvious that they wont sell much licence here because the culture tend to push people to find "workaround" but many people in china spent lot of money in the asset store if they can, the problem is 99% of people use Union pay instead of VISA mastercard and Alipay instead of paypal and that would pay unity people lot of holidays if these banking system were available through unity to China.

I use unity free a really wish i could switch to unity pro, but the licence system just make me want to wait unity "wake up". It was an engine easy to access financially when UE4 and Cry engine was only for big budget companies. but now unity pricing is the less "indie" of the market.
I would be ok to buy it for 1500$ (or maybe a little less!) but not without all the add ons.

I have nothing else around unity to complain, its a great engine, maybe the asset store need some rules for developers. when you import few assets its quickly make your project hard to manage because there is tons of folder everywhere. I would like more rules to import assets in One folder only, and name your classes using a prefix same as Ultimate FPS by vision punk (VP_Camera..).

 

I feel this thread is really great and something that was missing in the last weeks. It also smelts the cold feeling UT emitted.

I'm a student who played with Unity for quite some time and finally managed to start developing his ninja game last year in his free time.

As a free user the biggest problem I encountered are performance drops and I don't know how they occur. Access to the profiler would probably help to polish my game. But as a student 1500$ is too steep for me. The currently subscription method is also very bad. After 2 years I don't even own the programm.

I like Epic's subscription method very much, as it allows people with lesser money to access the full feature list. Besides that I don't mind paying 5% royalties. If I manage to make 2.000.000$ (haha) with my game I wouldn't mind to pay 100.000$ to Epic. I was allowed to use thier engine and I want to give something back, so it would be fair. (Furthermore wasn't the rumors for the price of the UE3-engine at +300.000$?)

Also I think when Unity ships a new feature it should be rock solid (when mecanim was released I was wondering why there were no events or triggers). The update cycle for bug releases it truely not very fast.

What I also wanted to mention is that Unity should look out that the software is present at the universities and should encourage to use thier software in classes. I think it would be a great benefit for the future.

Thank you at the Unity staff to listen to the community.

 

Thanks for the continuing feedback, everyone. (BTW, @attilam: In real life, I am Andy Stark, formerly involved with community support on the forum but now a member of the documentation team.)

We're aware that the separation between the script reference and the manual is a bit artificial; this has more to do with the ways that the information was originally edited and generated than with any logical split between the two. It isn't the top task on our list just yet but we are planning to consolidate all the information into a single body of docs in the near future. For example, there is no real advantage in having the component reference pages separate from the API classes they correspond to - making all the information available in a single, well-organised page would seem to be much clearer.

Now, this is one of our top priorities

There are quite a few aspects of Unity where simply understanding the components and API don't give you anywhere near enough information to do anything useful. The Mesh API is a case in point - just knowing that there are vertex and triangle arrays doesn't tell you how to generate a parametric sphere.

Up to now, we have had a bit of information like that in the manual but we feel there is scope for much more and we are already working on producing it. In particular, we aim to have a good "how-to" section of explained examples for all open-ended systems like mesh, physics, particles, etc. Hopefully, this will reduce the amount of searching you need to do to gain useful pieces of wisdom from the community and third-party sites.

 

Either fix or replace Monodevelop and the debugger.

I spend almost all day, every day in Monodevelop, and it's a buggy, crashy, frustrating mess and has been for YEARS. The debugger has worked better in the past than it does now (currently unusable), but it never has worked anything like reliably.

Pointing me at an alternate editor isn't a solution. Distributing this pile of crap with Unity gives the product a huge black eye.

Thus endeth my quarterly Monodevelop rant. See you all next quarter!

 

Hi, i'm a one man studio right now (hopefully not forever) and have released a couple games for mobile since 2011. The games grossed barely enough enough to force me into Pro of all licenses ($100k annual). That is fine. I think Pro pricing is just OK. Because of Unity and mobile platform (huge market) there is a ton of competing games out there today. Buying Pro for most people starting out is now a big gamble, even for a small studio launching. Even though I only got into game design and switched careers because of Unity Free in 2010 , I think things have changed too much for the Free/Pro model to be best anymore. Adobe nailed it! Lower the subscription costs to something like $30/mo each license, drop Unity Free, absolutley no royalties, Epic will be hating managing royalties for 10000 games in a couple years (they will morph into the IRS or something ). Just do like Adobe and offer both, one time lincense and subscription model. Also do not lock us in to an annual subscription. Let us turn it on turn it off at will. I know it is a gamble, but you will win and keep us forever! Actually Mecanim is the main reason I won't bother with UE4 (yet), so keep the new tech coming! Thanks for listening

 

What I would like to see in the docs even if pretentious, are some examplesof how builtin structs and class are made.

Just an example of the use I would make out of it, I'm doing a custom Rect struct with ints and would really like to take a look at your implecementation of Rect.Containsm I surely can do it one myself, but seeing the most optimized way would help. This can help for amny cases.

Another thing is the Input manager, would be good to have it exposed to be able to rebind controls and build system for different type of inputs. I know it can be done already as I already did for keyboard and mouse, but is a real pain in the butt going all around the system to have keybindings at runtime and is still a pain for different types of controllers especially to set up custom axis that can be changed.

 

You could give me a refund for 4.x.x pro. It has been 2 years and you have not delivered what you promised. I have gone to UE4 and it is infinitely better than Unity. You have perpetuated at fraud on your customers. $1500 wasted.

 

I want to use steamworks by valve free networking for my game but its in c++. I cant use a C# wrapper . do anything

 

Said everything. The current Free/Pro model is not good anymore.
One single Pro license for something like $50 (all addons included) and a 1500$ full license (all addons included) without upgrades would be really nice. I'd switch to Pro in a second!

 

A few things I would like to see in Unity 5

* Improve the terrain engine, dammit! Already been mentioned in this thread ofc, but one of the things I found unbearably slow about the terrain engine was culling - any time the camera moved things slowed to a crawl. Made streaming terrain just about impossible for my use case. Also adding support for loading terrain data on another thread would be super useful.
* I'd like to see the new MRT deferred rendering pipeline in Unity5 be completely open to modification. I should be able to download the shader source for just about every part of the pipeline and modify it (for instance, plug screen-space SSS right into the deferred renderer)
* PLEASE fix dynamic font rendering in Unity 5 - they're so buggy and just generally unpleasant to use for self-rolled text rendering. Not only that, but please document dynamic fonts in Unity 5. The current docs are not very clear on what things actually mean.
* I find it difficult to wrap my head around Mecanim. Maybe more examples for a variety of use-cases - adventure games, fighting games, shooters, etc.

 

What did they promise actually?

 

On pricing - I will never sign up for a subscription option, for the same reason I don't subscribe to any other software or play subscription MMOs - I can't guarantee that I'll get that much continuous use out of the software every single month. Maybe for a studio it makes sense for this to be an ongoing amortised cost, because they are guaranteed to be using the software daily. I am not and can't justify locking myself into that sort of contract. I would love to own Photoshop but I can't justify the price they charge. So I'm usually stuck asking others to do Photoshop work for me (which may well end up being done using pirated copies, who knows).

Oh, and an ad-supported editor would be a shockingly bad idea. If you really need to get some extra revenue from Free users, just make more of your content available via the Asset Store rather than rolling it into the free edition.

Communication - the only major problem I've had was being fobbed off regarding the GUI. You have had several attempts at a GUI system, all poor, and the new attempt has taken much longer than promised. This isn't really about communication but about you understanding the problem and delivering on it. Nobody minds if something slips by a minor version or two. They mind if you promise a fix for a major problem one year and it's still not there 2 years later, but stuff you never promised is popping up. I know developers are not strictly interchangeable and you can't take an audio programmer to work on GUI frameworks but on the other hand none of this is rocket science. I don't have access to your source code so I rely on you to fix the problems within the engine or the API within a reasonable time-scale. If you can't do that then there are certain types of game I cannot effectively make with Unity and I have to drop the engine.

For whatever it's worth, I have used Unity within an organisation, and as a solo developer.

 

Please do NOT do this. While I understand that some people prefer the subscription model, and even support that you do it, do not make it exclusively so. I do not personally want a subscription. I don't get them for anything, whether it be software, training or what have you (I have more than enough monthly bills already, thanks! hehe). I try to keep my monthly expenses to the bare minimum.

I'm the kind of person that will invest $1,500 in an engine if it's a one time cost and a I know I get to use that software in perpetuity thereafter. And yeah, I'll buy the upgrades as they come out. But if that were to change to a monthly fee (even if, in the long run that model ends up being cheaper for me), then yeah, I'm out.

So, in summary, keep the subscription model for those that want it. I have no problem with that. Make it mandatory, and I'll be off to the next engine.

 

I'm an artist that has always been interested in code. Never got into Flash, just seemed strange, but have created installation work in Processing ans Max/MSP. Unity allows me to create what I want, and I have become a decent C# programmer in the process. I much prefer investing time in a 'standard' language such as C# to the other pre-made type of tools out there. I've always had Pro, both Android and IOS licenses. Made a few games, mostly experimental and not profitable.

I teach at a University and we use Unity for some projects. We are not a game program, but interactive design. We just purchased licenses 37 days before the v 5 announcement and the UE4 announcement. I have advised our school that we will likely be switching to UE4 because of the cost, as you know, Universities are not allowed to use the free version of Unity. I like C# a lot, but wouldn't mind learning C++ so that I could also get into OpenFrameworks or Cinter.

So, for me, Unity has been great for my art and research, allowing me to stay updated in my skills that I can bring into teaching. The education cost is quite high, and makes little sense when students can use a free version on their own. I make games, and if one made money, I don't think Unity is expensive. But, the cost to upgrade all 3 licenses, for my purposes and with a viable alternative, seems high and I am undecided if I will.

General advice -- that snippet of game advice could save that family hours or days of dev time. Why aren't there more game logic, best practices types of information readily available? Like the OP, I would have assumed this is what Occlusion culling is meant for.

There are probably a dozen topics that are constantly talked about, asked for, and used in most games. Why not an explanation or ready made solution for these things? Along with, an explanation of why a pro studio would do it this way. For example, object pooling for a GTA type game versus an infinite 2D scroller. Door triggers (do you think a game could use that?). Sure, there are a ton of approaches, but what's a best practice and why? Inventory system, basic start game GUI. There are many things that are completely predictable and having a Unity supplied solution to build off of would be very helpful and a time saver.

The Sample Assets are a great step in this direction - finally some out of the box great character controllers. Again, since many games need a character and many complain about bad controllers, this should be made much simpler to implement to avoid frustration amongst beginner developers.

My next game is going to be 2D. A group of us all have extensive 3D experience, but we are more confident a 2D game will turn out visually like we want. I can render great 3D animation, but those same models just look bad when brought into a game engine ( not just Unity ). It takes a tremendous amount of work to get everything in 3D looking 'right'. Even for the 3d games I've done, I use sprites to provide high quality renders often times. PBR and a shader editor might help this a lot.

 

1. Proper debugging. MonoDevelop keeps crashing. Since Unity 3.xx request. This is bad

2. New GUI. When...?

3. Poor quality asset server. Keeps crashing. Why should I buy the Team license when I only use 33% of the features (Cache server) ?

4. Long time to bake occlusion culling. More than 45 mins on average.

5. Real time shadow's don't work properly on Android and iOS, on basic iPad 2 and ICS.

6. Update the mono to latest version, on parity with Xamarin.

 

Is this maybe why the console licenses are (or were) "ask sales"-priced? I believe that's the kind of thing where developers and UT have to work together very closely. After all, if there's bugs that prevent a console submission to go through, isn't that something that would affect other people developing for that same console as well? And wouldn't that be something that would have to be fixed for the next version of the middleware as well?

So, maybe UT needs some resources dedicated specifically for the purpose of submissions to go through (I remember a few times, when there were issues that also prevented Apple App Store submissions to go through - and IIRC, UT usually delivered a fix "as quickly as possible").

 

Hi - I'm a small indie coder. I do freelance for larger companies and also make my own small games on the side. I've been in the industry for 20+ years, starting back on the MegaDrive 8).

My biggest gripe with Unity is how the iOS and Android Pro licenses are split off from the main Pro license, and are relatively highly priced. It wouldn't be so bad if the iOS version had C# interfaces to all the iOS libraries for things like IAP and GameCenter, but we still need to either code up our own native libs or spend yet more money buying solutions from folks like Prime31.

I know you guys don't want to fragment the core API's too much, but if you're asking premium price for iOS and Android pro licenses it's not too much to ask for ready-made API's for core OS functionality is it ? Pro-only is fine, but to have to rely on multiple third party add-ons feels like iOS devs are being overcharged for what we get.

Second gripe is the fragility of debugging. The Unity Editor locks up a lot while you're debugging - especially if the code drills into a native lib which crashes. I have no idea what the problem is... I just know it's pretty much the most fragile platform I've ever used to debug with.

Apart from those two gripes I utterly love Unity and how you guys do business. I've been coding game engines literally for decades and the productivity and quality gains provided by Unity is simply immense - keep up the good work guys !

 

I'm hammering this out quickly before work. I'm a single indie developer (mostly a visual artist) just having fun making mobile games. I always thought that adding these features would really enhance Unity (for me at least):

- Better Tag/Layer Panel: Sortable (A-Z), Arrangable.
- Burn Button: For making changes during gameplay. You don't know how many times I've made slight adjustments during gameplay in the editor and wished there was a burn tool to make it permanent. This would make fine tuning very dynamic.
- Yes, putting Mobile and Pro into the Unity Pro license would change my mind about purchasing the Pro model. At least allow us to remove the splash screen from Unity Free. Makes it harder to strive for that professional look You could make a FREE/ INDIE/PRO versions, the INDIE version not having the splash screen and maybe a few other extras. Could be an affordable price. I'd pay right now.

 

Hi,

I'm a freelance dev, working on assets + two games (PC FPS's) at the moment.

The best thing about Unity, by far, without question, is the Asset Store. Once you know how to 'use' the Asset Store, it essentially revolutionises game development. Like Mike Bithell (Thomas Was Alone) has said, it is going to be looked back on as one of the most important, defining features of game development (particularly indie/small team dev) in our generation. The Asset Store is why Unity needs to maintain a free version, simple as that.

Regarding open source, I think switching to open source is a bad idea, again tying into the Asset Store - if you have a problem with Unity, most of the time, the Asset Store has a solution, or an update is on its way. I think that more dev posts on the forums in response to specific issues that arise from not having access to the source could help.

Finally, UE4 has done a fantastic job marketing their engine, but I've never been more confident in Unity as a development platform as I am now. We may not have the flashy tech-demos or ridiculous motion blur, or TXAA super-duper cinematic antialiasing, but that doesn't matter. We've got a fantastic, active community, great documentation and the Asset Store. Unity is for making games, it does that damn well, and recent titles like The Forest have even shown how a Unity game can be mistaken for CryEngine in terms of graphical fidelity.

Keep on doing what you're doing, Unity.

 

Hi, i'm a single indie developer and have been with unity since 3.x.
It's great to see this thread and this step towards the community!

What i have noticed is that unity was sometimes holding back on new available stuff.
To give the examples i experienced.

Deferred rendering on mobile, when i asked for it the reply was it's currently too slow for practical use. Yet it would have been possible to add and game development, depending on the project, will take some time. So by the time the project might be finished the devices to utilize it might be available. I know it's available now and that's great.
Giving the current example of UE4 using Nvidias Tegra K1 to showcase their mobile examples. I'm not sure but has the K1 already been publicly released yet?

OpenGL 4.x.
the reply was

If i'm not mistaken and got it right from the original thread OS X 10.6 isn't even supported by Apple anymore. Also i fell like there was i time where OpenGL 1.x and 2.0 were available at the same time. Am i wrong or isn't this the same regarding two backends?

And the last thing i was wondering about is that since Unity now comes with DX11 support why wasn't the included particle system upgraded to utilize it. So that i would have to get an extra particle system for $100-$300 from the asset store for this.

I'm buying unity to reduce my workload (and it does drastically, of course), but on other ends it either let's me spend even more money to get features that are basically included in the engine, just not very up to date [also hint at the terrain engine] or if i don't want to spend more money i'd have to code that stuff by myself what would be taking even more time.


The pricing.
For now i have been quite fine with pay once and have fun with the version cycle.
The only thing i think hits a little hard are extra licenses that require the standard pro version so that you'd have to pay twice.
Great would be if you could, for example get mobile pro without requireing the normal pro version. Or if feasible half the price for extra addons as you basically already paid for the pro features and just want another export option.


Roadmaps etc.
Yeah i'd really love to see those. Especially as i already have preordered U5 and seemingly buy a pig in a poke. Not completely as some major features have been announced, but i've also read a post by some unity team member that there are some unannounced features, too.
The roadmap could be a little bit like the bugtracker with marks on features that say "finished" "under review" "in development" "rejected" or something like this so that not every listed feature would automatically be taken for granted by every user.


So thanks UT for this great engine and i'm curious to see what you'll be coming up next with!

 

Also, I'd like to congratulate the UT for such a good thread. We needed this since the UE4 announcement.

Thanks.

 

Bibbinator is Brett Bibby, our Product Manager.

Andeeee is Andy Stark, one of our Documentors.

We have a small-startup mentality that says Unity peeps can use whatever online personality they want. When I first joined Unity I was dendrophile. Exactly as you said, over time I thought it was more important to present myself in a more official capacity.

 

Since my post got buried pretty fast:

Hi, ma name is Travis and I like beer.

What I would like to see in the docs even if pretentious, are some examplesof how builtin structs and class are made.

Just an example of the use I would make out of it, I'm doing a custom Rect struct with ints and would really like to take a look at your implecementation of Rect.Containsm I surely can do it one myself, but seeing the most optimized way would help. This can help for amny cases.

Another thing is the Input manager, would be good to have it exposed to be able to rebind controls and build system for different type of inputs. I know it can be done already as I already did for keyboard and mouse, but is a real pain in the butt going all around the system to have keybindings at runtime and is still a pain for different types of controllers especially to set up custom axis that can be changed.

 

It’s great to see such an open and direct thread from the developers - I can already see a lot of valuable feedback being discussed here, so kudos for making it!

I've been using Unity for a number of years, released several games, and after a hiatus from development, I’m currently working on some Asset Store content.

In general, one of the biggest concerns I see people talking about is the quality (read: visual quality) of what Unity produces out-of-the-box, and while this has never been a concern of mine, its nice to see Unity 5 taking a big step to tackle this - kudos again. From a personal point of view, my only real concerns with Unity stem from minor bugs and annoyances, the ‘low hanging fruit’ that others have mentioned, and small features becoming dated because they've ‘been finished’ or are less used. That’s already been addressed a bit in this thread, and its nice to hear about dot dot releases and improvements to long standing requests - a 1000 small things will add up to a lot, and making even the smallest features more robust can only be a good thing. Also, even when the Asset Store does something, Unity shouldn't be afraid to tread on a few toes and add a their implementation of features that everybody would use (Visual shader editor is a prime example of this).

One of the biggest pluses I've seen discussed in this thread is communication. This could definitely use some improvement, and its nice to see that you guys see that too. Kudos++. Letting the community know about and development direction, discussing planned features, known bugs and coming fixes, new platforms etc. would be a massive boon, and this would just open up more 2way communication for feedback about Unity. The community doesn't, and shouldn't, be the final word on anything, but once in a while someone will have a good idea that you guys can take away and discuss further. I think the community team already does a great job of collecting, collating and organising feedback on a lot of things for Unity, but a bit more give and take would only serve to improve that dialog. The mentioned improvements to the documentation are very welcome change too.

Since the mac only days, Unity has grown a lot, and you’d have to be naive to think that the free version didn’t play a huge part in this. Unity definitely needs to have a free version, but in what sense remains to be clear (this is probably one of the main reasons for making this thread). Subscriptions and single purchase fees both have their place, but it does feel like the free/pro separation model could use some work - features like the profiler are so key to good development that it seems counterproductive to have them locked away. There have already been a few suggestions regarding watermarked versions, and I think this could be a big step forward for Unity - moving to a single feature complete product, but with multiple license options: A free non-commercial version with watermark, a subscription version and a single purchase version. Price the paid options around no royalties - as someone already said, Epic are going to have great fun chasing up 1000’s of dev’s for their share, and its a just a pain for everyone involved.

You don't just want to keep up with the competition, you want to step ahead of them. This sort of model would allow you to make money off people who are making money with Unity, but keep it accessible to a wide audience for a strong and healthy user base - getting people to upgrade to a paying license will be much easier than getting them to swap from another engine. It also gives paying customers a choice in how they pay for Unity, and you could even allow the total amount of subscription someone has paid work towards a discount on the single purchase version should they choose to switch.

It’s possible that Something could also be done to try and bring the mobile pro versions into one version too, but I’m not sure of a good way to do this, and aware that some people would see it as paying for platforms they don’t use/care about, so it’s not an easy problem to solve.

This is a great community, and again, its great to see a thread like this appearing, and great to see so many Unity staff taking part in it - something you should encourage them to do more often (posting related pay scheme??? ). Whether it’s posting in the help sections, or commenting on stuff in WIP, taking part in the forums makes this feel much more like a community, and not a collection of customers. Don’t be afraid, we don’t all bite, but we do all have weird accents

PS: I’d like to request that popped-collared shirts should be added to the apparel store and become the official company uniform for all Unity employees!