Dear Lane Fox

As you have banned me from replying to the thread I started all I can do is start anew.
I expect to be banned altogether any minute but I am that cross at Unity right now I am prepared to throw it all away.

You clearly haven't been looking my recent forum posts where help was actually received because there haven't been any for some time now. Some mocking, but no help.

OK there was one that pointed out I'd missed a capital in a code, but apart from that.

I do not see why Unity, when in receipt of payment, should expect their clients to provide support to their other clients.


It is also very hard to get help when one is banned from replying to threads by your good self.


I say again. I have paid thousands of pounds in good faith to Unity over the past few years, which I am sure you can verify with your bent for research, and I am not at all happy about the total lack of any support unless one can pay HUGE HUGE amounts for "Premium" support of unverified quality.

 

I don't work for Unity, and looking at your other posts, I suppose I am setting myself up for a beatdown. But you say you are not a programmer, and then go on to post programming questions. I would suggest that if you want to program, that you learn how to program. It's really hard and frustrating to everyone involved when you have to debug issues from someone, and they don't understand what is going on, and you have to teach them programming piecemeal. Surely you feel the frustration too?

Learn C#. Once you do, you'll be able to understand the issues you are seeing. Like, why it's a bad idea to mix JS and C#. And why collisions work and don't work. And how animations work. And why you shouldn't use "Animation.Play" anymore (you should be using an AnimationController). etc.

I see that people have suggested it to you before. It's really good advice. If you don't want to follow it, I suggest getting something like PlayMaker, and sticking to what it allows you to do.

But learning C# will really open up the system for you. Start here: https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials

 

I didn't ban you, the mod's locked your thread because you were getting out of hand like you are doing again right now.

 

Hi,

Thank you.
When I committed to Unity it did not use C#.

"Learn C#".
Yes, that is what I have been trying to do.

It does not happen just by wishing or being repeatedly told. A course of some kind might be useful. I can't find any sensible ones.
Codeacademy is pretty good. It doesn't do C#.
I have asked them to consider it.

I have been battling through the Unity tutorials you have blithely linked to with, dare I say, the confidence of one who has NOT recently tried to plough through them, and doesn't notice the gaping holes because you can already program.
I have been spending a lot of time going through those tutorials and here we are.
It's a nightmare for the beginner. Unity's interface constantly changes and the tutorials are very bitty.

Please do not say "There are lots on Youtube and the web".
I've been battling with those too and you know what? they don't really work all that well in Unity no matter how carefully I follow them and finding ones that relate to whatever version of Unity you currently use is tough anywhere, even on Unity's site.
(It's not just me, I learn a lot from the BTL comments where other people are having the same problems too and are kind enough to post the workarounds. I do too if I know one)

It does not help that Unity changes it's interface faster than some people change their socks and, for example, anything to do with the UI went through 3 changes between version 3 and version 5, and even Unity's docs aren't up to date, and which is a nightmare for the non programmer.

If you have any links to proper C# courses I would be very grateful.

I'm still going to look at alternatives to Unity for what I'm trying to do professionally but I would still like to learn to program properly.
I don't think this is going to happen from Unity tutorials though.

Thank you very much indeed for all your help and for taking the time to reply.

 

Out of hand?
You were telling me to ask for help on the forums but when I do I'm "out of hand"?

Sorry Lane Fox, I did not realise it wasn't you.

 

Nobody banned you from posting in that thread, the thread was closed because it does not follow the spirit of the forum. This is a community that comes together to help solve each other's more difficult problems.

You were complaining about the Unity service, and you still are lashing out at other who actually are trying to help you.

Believe it or not, threads like this distract people from meaningful work, as it did for me.

 

I am not meaning to lash out at anyone but expecting forum members to provide support is no longer realistic on Unity's part and it is very hard to contact them.
They re not interested.

Ah. Meaningful work.

The reason I am this frustrated is all the weeks and months of meaningful work that is yet again down the drain.

I used to be in the spirit of the forum but 5 years later, and repeated projects trashed because of another Unity update with no coherent documentation that breaks a lot of stuff that worked fine before and another two or three months work bites the dust..

Unless you buy another upgrade...or pay for premium help..

Unity was sold a while back as a reasonable solution for people who weren't great coders and back then you could produce stuff even with very wonky javascript and I did.
I have recommended it ti people and specced project s that used it though I did not build the code myself.

But now it's a nightmare and a whole project I AM trying to build myself, and several that ride on it, is going west because of constant changes to the interface that are not efficiently documented in the support notes.

And lo, I see an advert for version 5.5! Yay! Another load of broken code I didn't understand that well to start with looms on the horizon.

I'm sorry, but you have no idea of the amount of time I've wasted and the good work and money that is lost.
Frustration isn't in it.

Thank you for your time though.
See how you feel in five years though.

 

It might be easier to take a general C# class online, and then go back to the Unity tutorials.

I've purchased some courses on Udemy, and the ones I used were good. I can't vouch for this particular course, as I haven't taken it, but it may bear some looking into:

https://www.udemy.com/programming-for-complete-beginners-in-csharp/

This one is highly rated, and free, but older:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C-Sharp-Fundamentals-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners

In both cases, you'll be using C# with Visual Studio, not with Unity. I apologize that I can't get you a beginner course with C# that I have personally used - I've been programming for 30 years.

 

Thank you very much for taking the time to post that information.
Its very kind of you.
I shall have a look.

 

To be clear, Unity has used C# since version 1.0. That's the only language it had originally; Unityscript wasn't added until sometime later. You probably don't want to hear this, but if you're not comfortable with relatively rapid change, this is not a good field to be in. Indeed Unity of all things has been criticized for not changing fast enough (dated terrain engine from the 2.x days and so on), and is far more backward-compatible than normal; e.g. Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 4 is essentially a different engine, and that's typical (all the Quake engines are basically rewrites from scratch for each version).

--Eric

 

Hi Eric
Weird. I bought unity pro 2 and could swear it didn't use C# until a version or two later.

I think you are quite right and my persevering with Unity in my business any further is not a good use of my resources.
Thank you.

 

Hey, I understand it's frustrating and a lot to take in when learning a new language. I would suggest having a look at codefights.com, then I've heard good things about the courses over at Lynda.com

We all started somewhere, hope you can find something that fits you and helps you move forward.

 

Unless there is some specific feature you need in a new version, there is often little reason to upgrade in the middle of a project. In fact it's often a bad idea to upgrade in the middle of a project.