Error messages lacking information - where to ask

Unity has a tendency to spit out errors that doesn't really help at all. A lot of these are assertion failures that could be a bunch of help if they just had a bit more information in them.

An example is if you mess up when building a skinned mesh renderer, and get a different count of bones and bone weights. This causes the renderer to not show, and Unity starts spewing this into the console on every (editor) frame:

This (probably) means there's an assertion somewhere that checks a BoneWeight against the total number of bones in the bones array, and finds that one of the four indices is outside the array.

This means that this information could have been included in the error message:

Or Something like that. That'd help a lot with knowing where you went wrong - in particular if there's an off-by-one error. There's no reason not to add this information to the error.

There's a lot of these little errors that could be improved. My question is; where do I suggest improvements? Should I post this as a bug? it's not really a bug. Should I post in this subforum? It's not really a documentation issue per se. You could ask me to post this as a suggestion, but these kinds of issues are so minor that they'll never get any votes*.

You (the documentation team) has been talking a lot about increasing the documentation effort. Would error message improvements fall under that, or is it outside the scope of what you're doing?



* This is why the suggestion voting system is near-useless; with only ten votes, people are going to spend it on huge things (linux editor, polymorphic serialization, etc.), so things that are both helpful and small enough to be viable will inevitably be ignored.

How many users didn't put all of their votes into the linux editor, and then never look at the suggestions section for years? Probably quite a few.

 

This has also bugged me when I was trying to wrap my head around bindPoses a few months ago (see this). Especially agree on your note about the voting system, couldn't have explained it any better that it's basically useless

 

A lot of things, you can't find unless you break things. I specifically don't do 3d animation, for now, so like, I'll never hit the "bones not matching" errors. Honestly this is a relatively giant task for QA, to always have test-cases ready where various components are supposed to fail, just to check the errors. I suppose this is where they rely on the community. Yet, simply between patches, things will break for no visible reason, whereas they work p2 but not p4.
I am beginning to think I need to dig into game engine architecture just to understand Unity's flow, on a deeper level, which would help these errors make meaningful sense. But, you can always remember to only make a couple changes at a time, at most, before rebuilding, or using your SVN.