I love packages; I hate the Asset Store/package manager

Packages are awesome. Anyone programming in Unity is a fool if they're not first checking to see if some pre-existing assets exist that they can leverage and use. (Not just Unity, of course, every platform offers bundles, packages, etc. and should be used)

But the Unity Package Manager is difficult for a few reasons.

First, it's effectively closed. The license agreement to even use the package manager say you can only see packages through the web interface. That might be okay, but it's a fairly large ecosystem (Over 11,000 5-star assets!") with a substandard interface. The "Quick Look" is okay, but it doesn't tell you enough important details. The detailed look is so SLOOOOOW. And still requires a click to add it to "My Assets", then another click to say, no, I don't want to open this in Unity, because that doesn't even work, I want to get back to browsing available packages.

Disclosure: I live in rural Virginia (USA), and have 3mps DSL. And I'm lucky, because some of my neighbors have nothing. No internet. Yeah, hard to believe. But 3mps is painfully slow, and I don't think anyone from Unity has ever suffered through slow internet. Which brings me to my second point.

The Asset Manager within Unity is HORRIBLE on a slow connection. Because it's internet first, when I open the package manager, it waits for about 45 seconds before showing me anything. No caching, no checking what I already have installed (I literally have to drive to a somewhere with a faster internet in order to download any packages bigger than 20M, so I'd like Unity to check those first!) Yeah, I'm sure this is a great, always-current design if you have fast internet, but it's insufferable if you don't. And it's so unnecessary to cause that pain. Simply checking the local directory of packages, then updating the UI after would be a huge help. That is, if I've download a package already, when I create a new project, I want to get to it and install it ASAP, without the internet. I'm hacking manifest.json just to avoid this pain right now.

But I LOVE packages! I want to research everything that's out there (especially the free ones) before trying to roll my own. Since searching via the web is so slow, I started to set up a scraping tool that would simply download the descriptions of all the packages, so I could create my own local search. Not the package source code, not trying to steal packages I haven't bought, just the publicly available information ABOUT the packages -- what they do, what version they supports, how big they are, etc. But license agreement to use the asset store explicitly excludes scraping! So because I'm a rule-follower, I stopped doing that.

I'm flummoxed. I love Unity, I want to use more packages, but I basically can't because I have a slow connection and there's no great way to be a Unity developer without always having fast internet.

Questions for Unity folks or fans: Why does the license agreement exclude scraping? Wouldn't ANYTHING that promotes a package be beneficial for the publisher? Doesn't the current system discourage people from going through the work of publishing a package? I have to think that most packages are never even seen by developers, let alone purchased.

End of rant.

I really like Unity, I think the Package Manager/Asset Store has tremendous potential. I'm not able to fully utilize it, and would like to. My rant is borne of frustration, not lack of affection.

Thanks for reading.

Tac

 

I wholeheartedly agree with Tac. The package manager ui is no match for the old asset store. It works decently for known/purchased packages as long as you don't have too many, which I do (and apparently have decent internet). But as a marketplace/browser/inspiration tool it's horrible.

 

Here are some easy things that could be done to speed up the asset store:

https://developers.google.com/speed...url=https://assetstore.unity.com/&tab=desktop

Just re-compressing the images would save 5 full seconds loading the home page. And because I'm on such a slow connection, the savings would be even greater.

For example, this image is 500kb: https://cfactory-img.s3.amazonaws.com/UTY/1.12/cv-2-11-img-two.png It has no cache policy. These are some simple website configuration changes that could dramatically improve the experience.

 

Thanks for the feedback here and sorry for the delay. This has been passed to the team so I'll await feedback before I can update you.

 

Hi again,

The team have thanked me for passing the feedback. They're working on making the experience better which hits on several of the points you've made. We'll be sure to share updates when this has been done

 

Thanks! Now that I've had more experience, at the top of the wish list would be moving the remote version checks of packages to an asynchronous process independent of local package load. It seems like that would be so easy -- if I want to see the Packages In Project, that should be lighting fast! Then if there's an update, it can show up when the background thread is done. Ditto for the rest of the packages -- show me what's local first (that is, my local/downloaded assets), then DON'T FREEZE THE UI while the thread to check if everything's up to date. Your auth server fails somewhat frequently, so this really is madding -- if your auth server is down, I can't see what packages I have loaded on my local machine without a loooooong delay.

There are other suggestions I have, but this one request is so important that I'll hold back on those.