Official: How Can We Serve You Better?

I think one of the misconceptions is that everybody who makes a game with Unity has to make enough money with it to be able to buy it. No question, when you do game development for money then the Unity price, while not the best anymore, is still payable and a good offer.

But what about the hobbyists like me? I make freeware games since 15 years. I don't earn money with my games, and i don't see this ever change. Means Unity will not pay itself for me. And the full price is simply too high for me. It is a too big hurdle. You cut off quite a few potential customers with the current business model. Which is all or nothing. Full version for full price, which means professional developer regarding the price. Or free version with cut down featureset, which means hobbyist. There's nothing in the middle.

The free version was and is a gods gift for us hobbyists, no question. And this move to the free Unity version has really changed game development dramatically worldwide. But now there is a even better offer around. 19 dollars for the full feature set when you know what i mean.

That said, what about a non commercial version with all features? It can even cost some money and can have a non commercial logo. Hobbyists would have the choice then if they go with the free version or the non commercial version. And when you have a proper upgrade path, then the non commercial version may even reduce the hurdle up to the commercial version. Which would be win win for all participants.

Another good move could óf course be the move to the monthly subscription, with full feature set.

 

If the current subscription price stands I'd like to see at least some perks introduced into it. At the current price level it feels like a pretty bad deal compared to just buying a license for each version. Discounts or rent to own options would help.

Alternatively to bring the price down maybe the licenses should be broken into even smaller compile pieces. Something like $20 for the Pro editor and $X for each of the Pro compile options dx9, dx11, mac, etc. I think at that point you are going to see very few people working in the Free editor which benefits everyone.

I would also really like to see smaller releases. I'm not expecting source access any time soon but offering more beta and hot fixes would really help when bugs leave people in the lurch. I'm happy to see the greater communication as hopefully we'll start to know better when/if fixes are coming so at least we can plan on which bugs we need to develop our own fixes for or if we can just try to work around it while a fix is incoming.

 

Performance: I don't get the feeling you test Unity internally with large, taxing projects. There are many things that are super-slow once your project grows a bit, and when I've mentioned the slowness to Unity-folks it's almost as if they don't believe me. We have made 20+ projects in Unity, three of which have lasted over 1 year in production time, and it's been the same in 2.x, 3.x and 4.x.

Pricing: We're currently holding off on deciding weather to to use Unity for coming projects or not, waiting for the response (if any) to other engines new pricing. It was mentioned before, and I agree that when you get Pro you should get it for all platforms, and not have to pay for Pro for each platform. Also, console pricing IS SO RIDICULOUSLY OVER-PRICED I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT. It's like you assumed that those that go for console have a publisher backing you or that the studio is AAA. No, it's of course indies that use Unity, even for consoles (or would, if they could), and to fork up that kind of money for it is simply just insane. What were you thinking??

Bugs and tweaks: I wish you spent more time on this than on new features. I wish that you refocused the entire team from land-grabbing to stabilizing. As it is right now, it feels like the higher you build this house of cards, the more unsteady it gets.

Edit: I also wish the forums supported unicode in the user name ^^

 

This sounds like a major step forward and hopefully something that will address the concerns expressed over the sometimes apparently slow updates to bug fixes. I look forward to reading about it.

 

/Warning Half asleep person typing ahead/

A Non-Commercial version with the full feature set. Would be interesting

 

Hi,

since we're at it, here we go:

I'm the boss of a small company based in Belgium. While we have been doing custom software development outside the gaming industry, I actually have almost 18 years of game development experience. I'm with Unity since 2.x (you know, when you had to pay for the .5 updates) and have mostly done prototyping and small games with Unity.

Last year, with Oculus Rift's appearance, things started to get more serious with using Unity. We're currently 4 people (3 programmers + 1 graphic artist (who actually is an Architect + graphic artist with specialization in 3D game graphics). We started working on architectural visualization in combination with the Oculus Rift. We managed to get a booth at the biggest Belgian construction expo and had nationwide media coverage (online, print, radio + TV). Up to now, I spend money on Unity Pro versions and my team used the Oculus Rift 140 days Unity Pro versions.

Working on this architectural visualization project also means the creation of my company. I'm thus considered being a self funded start-up company. We already have customers with small projects, which merely pay the salary of my graphic artist. So, I'm currently investing a lot of my private money to make this happen. Which leads me to the costs of Unity and its add-ons. Currently, a complete developer seat (Pro + Android Pro + iOS Pro; we publish on tablets) costs $4500. This means, that I have to put $13500 on the table in order to provide tools to my developers to properly work with Unity.

Features like Occlusion Culling, static + dynamic batching, removal of the Unity splash screen, render to texture, etc are necessary to us. The upfront costs are incredibly high. Unless the EULA has changed, I cannot mix different types of Unity versions. So, if I use Unity Pro + Android Pro, I cannot let my employees work with Unity Pro + Android Basic. Or even with Unity Free...

I'd like to have a subscription based version of Unity, but even there the costs per month and it's corner points like 12 month lock, high price per platform and the non-convertibility to stand-alone pro are turning me off. The subscription price is much higher than the one time purchase + upgrades if you look at it on a 2 year cycle. A drastic reduction of the subscription price has been asked by Unity users since day 1 of the announcement of the subscription.

The invoices would also be much less painful if you'd not to pay for each single platform. Unity preaches the democratization of game development. Yet, you put a price barrier for that democratization. It would already be a good step forward if the Unity Pro pricing would combine the current Pro + Android Pro + iOS Pro (add them like you added Windows Phone Pro,...). Developers who want to publish on Android and/or iOS have to pay "double" to "triple" the price of Unity Pro because the "basic" Unity Pro is a requirement for Android Pro + iOS Pro. This is quite the contrary of democratization.

Other things that need improvements is your turn around cycles for minor releases. It's actually a PITA to wait for 6-12 month for a simple bug to get fixed. Quite often we can see comment like "it has been fixed but not yet been released". That is the very reason why we, as professional software developers, like to have access to the source code. This enables us to implement temporary fixes (which could even be submitted to you and thus help you to improve the product quality both in terms of stability and feature completeness).

I think that there has been a discussion about quicker minor release cycles which has not been pushed to final implementation. Quite often, this is a result of a lack of modularity in a software development. This is also mirrored in the fact that the demo delivered with a Unity installation is not yet decoupled from Unity itself. Whenever I request to reduce the download size of the Unity installation, I get the answer that this is physically not possible. So, you should ask yourself why this is not possible and try to modularize more the Unity software itself. This would then enable Unity to actually deploy quick-fixes and minor releases with shorter turn-around times. Also, this would help you to concentrate on specific aspects of the software which (through well defined interfaces) have less impact on the software development as a whole. Shorter turn around cycles would hugely increase your customer satisfaction and imho reduce the desire to actually have access to the source code.

Which brings me to the topic of "open source or not"... short answer: no...

long answer: Making Unity open source (even if I like open source) would mean that you'd have to strip parts of the software that rely on non-open-source elements. As an example, (I don't know which navmesh solution you use) any current navigation mesh generation would have to be replaced by an open source one (like Recast by Mikko Mononen), any lighting solution has to be replaced, the Speedtree integration would have to be removed, etc, etc... that is a bad idea because you'd have to either implement your own solution or (as it is now with the lack of Editor features) rely on your customers to solve the problem for you. This binds your working force which (again) is a bad idea... there is so much more to do on Unity to bring it up to par with i.e. *cough*UE4*cough* (sorry... I tried to avoid this but couldn't)...

To finish this lengthy post, I'd say, one of the main problems with the development of a game engine (and I know what I'm talking about, I've been there) is the lack of house internal actual use of that engine. How can you see where your customer's problems lie if you aren't forced to actually develop a game with your own engine? It's impossible. You don't see the problems. You hear of it, you rely on your customers to "inform" you about the problems they encounter, but in the end, the only way to "force" yourself to improve the problems is to encounter them yourself. You're not bugged by the problems... we are... unless you are bugged by a problem or by a lack of workflow solution, your priority is the implementation of obvious bug fixes and new features...

So, please, do yourself a favor... hire 10-20 people to actually produce a (small) game and make some real life experience with your own product... currently it doesn't look like you have it... history has proven it with the problems you encountered when implementing new features that require another 1 1/2 years before they were in a usable state...

 

'Owning' software is an archaic business model. In 2-3 years the software will be outdated an no longer supported so you will likely need to upgrade anyway. A subscription is a valid solution to this problem.

 

I agree and that's a great comparison. I'm not sure who NavMesh is aimed at but I can't imagine a need it meets terribly well. I'd really like to know if any published games actually use it. We get such little access to its internals that even a simple game seems better off rolling their own solution or going with A* and forget anything complex which is going to need better debug tools if nothing else.

 

Hello,
I am a german hobbyist developer with a strong urge to try and make a huge open world 3d game all by myself without any prior knowledge about c#.

I won't do anything in mobile, but I think the overall cost of mobile plugins are out of all proportion to a normal pro licence (because you need a pro anyway)

Your documentation is mostly great, personally I don't need many developers on the forums. But I think sometimes it would help to have insight. Communicating roadmaps and technical details for the future is important and a part of "getting in touch with your customers", your current path to open up is very welcomed.

I like owning software. I know I paid 18xx dollar for the pre-order and thats all I need until 5.9. I can plan with that, other hobbies cost money, too. However, I don't know how long I would need the pro subscription. If I can finish the game, I have to support it later, that means "maybe more subscription".

I don't need source, I like to focus on my game. You have developers with knowledge of 3d optimizations. Do your thing, I do mine. However, open sourcing your engine has a huge impact on bugfixes, so I won't be against it.

At the moment I am waiting for nested prefabs before I can do the real stuff (I'll do other things until then)
I think the problem with people not finishing depends on the people, not on unity. They have no idea how much work they need,
they start something without any thinking...

 

Hi there, great idea, so here come my answers!

I'm a softwareengineer (mainly C++) by profession but using Unity part time for my 3d game Silent Depth.

I think the pricing for mobile development is way too high. I'd vote for a royalty scheme but I understand that this could be tricky for you as this can't be optional I think. Currently I use Unity Free. What bugs me most is the splash screen. I'd love to see an option to "buy this away", so staying with the free features but remove that splash for a fee.

I'm from Germany and mainly do 2d games, but NOT with Unity. My 3d sub game is the first I do with Unity. Personally I think Unity is still overkill for 2d games. I mean an empty APK package is just about 8MB, where the other solution I use for 2d games just creates packages of 60kb (empty). I think there's a lot of room for improvement for 2d games. Maybe even a "real" 2d mode without 3d stuff in it would be nice.

I'm not a fan of subscriptions. If they are quite low (like the $19 for UE4) it's ok, but $75 per platform(!) for Unity is just way off.

I don't care about open source. It's actually not that important as many think it is. I mean how often do you change stuff in the engine by yourself? I don't want to change the engine, I want to create games.

 

@Regularry, Chariots, NoPiece, Tiles, Fuzzy_Slippers

Thanks for your posts, noted on the comments.

@JoelNyström

Can we have one of your projects? We're always on the lookout for badly performaing projects we can see.

Consoles can be free and is accessed from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo developer sites. For approved titles the licesne can be given, but without approval even if you paid it couldn't be published. There might be some cases that fit in-between this, but I encourage you to talk to the console maker and clarify if they want to charge you money or not.

 

Bibb, your corporate post is very long-winded dude

WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO GET AT ?

Can you summarise?

If you're talking about the answers site, it's become S***.

Me and many of the other top ten contributors don't bother any more.

But you probably know that.

(This has been discussed for literally years, in every possible way, on the meta posts there, if you want to fix it, fix it, take some action and try some things.)

What is it you want here?

Yes, we just made a huge "non-game app" (business app) for a client using U. (It turned out crap because we couldn't find a good way to handle dozens of sliding flat images.)

 

Hello Unity devs!

1. I've seen David interview, and in my opinion, him and you guys are making a mistake in taking the right decision.

Is more that one month since UE4 storm. Of course you guys don't see a change in users base because, most probable there are Unity projects under development already and is probable to late to switch. So, basically, after what I've seen, I understand that you guys are ready to make some licensing changes when users will start to leave Unity. This is wrong. Epic did not come out with the new license model because they are using users. If you want to keep the users and community you must do something fast and make a viable offer vs UE4. Basically UE4 is free now, if you make less that 3k per quarter and 5% after. What Epic is doing right now is basically building a very strong users base and community, and in a long term they will get 5% from a huge users base and this can mean a lot. They made a very smart move and offer a win/win for everybody.

Again, in my opinion, to make a contra-offer for UE4 I would consolidate Unity in one version (Pro) and give it free, and fallowing the UE4 licensing model, put the same 5% after 3k per quarter. This will make a real contra-offer. Will offer exactly what Unity free is now, and even more give you a change to get money from peoples who actually get any money making games. Even more, you can also offer the 1500 euro license for Pro in advance and no 5% after. So, everybody will pay how would like. This is just an idea.

Lets assume both Unity and UE4 are free, how the users you think will split? C++ go UE4, C# goes Unity? Again, wrong. This can change, and you can't count only on C# users only and abuse them with price. Peoples always say grass on the other side is always greener. They will try it too. And they will stay with option what's comfortable for them in that moment.

Do I need to put, that we have to pay for every Unity major version the upgrade price? Not 1500 but 750?

2. In the past few years, I've payed for different Unity licenses, (basic, iPhone, Android, not counting assets store purchases), and almost every time, after a while, they become free. I never written on this forums a complain that I payed for a product and come free after a month or two, and never attack a free user because he did not payed same price as me.

I would like to have Unity Pro right now, for the current project what I develop, but I am unsure what to do, if I should pay for it in that situation.

For the next project I will use for sure UE4, because, I will lose nothing.

Think how many peoples are in my situation.

3. Look at UE4 forums how many developers comes and answer and keep a permanent contact with what happen. And they are very receptive to everything. We asked a lot of times to don't ship Unity demo project in the same update. And still we have the demo project inside. This is just an example.

Thanks for reading this!

 

Is this meant to be a voting/feedback page on subscription V. purchase?

If so we vote "purchase only"

As far as I can see, "subscription" is hated in the industry.

You'll end up as loathed, hated, as Adobe

Opinions seem to differs - perhaps just continue to offer both

It's sort of a bizarre question - **obviously, Unity will do what makes Unity more money**

It's kind of disingenuous when big companies say "gee users, how should we charge you ?!"

Again it's difficult to know what Unity is "getting at" on this page. It's a lot of soft corporate blether so far.

It's also kind of confusing -- **if you have a specific question for your paying customers, send a survey email**

You harvest emails from free users too right? If you have some specific actual question for users, survey them by email.

Nobody's impressed by corporate blather on a web page, it's not 1980.

------------

BTW regarding subscription bizarre pricing. I just glanced at the current upgrade price for one of our license sets, 1800. I glanced at the "subscription price" .. 120.

Note that 1800 / 120 equals 15.

What possible reason would there be to subscribe? It just makes _no sense at all_.

Are people with no cash flow using it as a sort of financing thing? (if so the effective interest - the number of extra months until unity6 .. is enormous.)

Bizarro.

 

Hey-
I am a hobbyist, that MAY release my game at some point but will have to wait until I get further along.
I definitely want it to be playable so if I consider it that (playable), I most likely will release it at some point, most likely stand alone or web or both.
The game is mystery/puzzle/adventure 3D free movement (not point and click), sort of MYST type inspiration with my own storyline.
My biggest hindrance so far has been the out of memory errors, but think I will be able to go back into full development mode once 64 bit is ready.
I will go with whatever payment plan Unity decides.
I am on the Adobe subscription since it started, before I bought the Creative Suites.
I've owned 3ds Max since 3.1 and am on sub with them too, so keep up to date with it.
I think the Adobe plan does have advantages as far as updating the software, not sure they really add all that many features though,
any more than their full and .5 releases, so it's basically the same price as updating the Creative Suite every year at full and .5 releases.
Max hopefully will be gaining some new momentum with some recently added people that are known to really care about Max and
expected to get some innovation back online.
I do hear a lot of good things from the (Unity) developers or those in contact with them on closed lists,
so I know they are working hard to make Unity all they want, as they are able.
I would never (as far as I know) move to anything else, since I am only an artist type and programming does not "compute".
I paid a lot of money to have my scripting structure built and expect to use it for a long time.


As far as developers spending more time here, I'd say let those in contact with them relay information,
though if they want to spend some time here I think they should be allowed.


As for open source, as you might guess, I'm good with how it is now.

 

One other suggestion I wanted to mention:

When a developer finishes a game a whole new set of difficulties are just beginning. There are the daunting tasks of getting it published on the various marketplaces, getting the word out, and then keeping track of it all.

A great way to generate profit while helping people succeed would be for Unity (or Epic, or whoever wants to step up and do it) to offer some sort of service that would take care of these things for the developer. The developer would finish his game, submit it, pay a submission fee and then the service would take it from there. Once the game is on the market the service would extract a share of the sales for their profit and provide a place where the developer can view sales statistics and keep track of it all from one location. Maybe there could also be optional advertising packages, localization services, liability coverage and other things the developer could purchase.

To get a better idea of what I'm talking about have a look at this popular and successful service called TuneCore which provides a similar type of service to what I described above for independent musicians:

http://www.tunecore.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TuneCore

 

I've been using Unity since 2009, back when the iOS version was based on the 1.x code base. Since then I've published iOS apps, worked on a large educational title, developed an app to be used as a museum kiosk, and am now part of a 3 person studio working on our first title.

The pricing of Unity free vs Pro for desktop seems very reasonable to me, I paid $400 back in the day for my "Indie" license and I thought that was pretty reasonable as well at the time. The add-on pricing seems a bit high though, paying $1500 for the pro editor and then $3000 more just to publish to the 2 major mobile platforms seems exorbitant.

Our game is 2d out of necessity, we just don't have the staff needed to do a 3d title. 2D is one of those places I feel that the Asset Store is doing a better job than the official system. We are using 2D Toolkit and I feel it handles far more common problems than the built in 2d system. A a previous poster also commented, I am confused how a single or small team of individuals out-engineers the UT team (2D, GUI, Networking, Pathfinding just to name a few systems). Systems Unity has talked about doing like a visual logic system are also well represented on the Asset Store with nothing being produced by UT. This to me, just stinks of bad management. You clearly have the resources and have been very successful, you've hired tons of people that I will give the benefit of the doubt and assume are smart people. So the only conclusion I'm left with is that those smart individuals are building the wrong things or building them in the wrong way. It's fairly distressing to me to see UT so incompetent when it comes to something like a new GUI system. Even just buying the most popular one on the market via hiring it's author doesn't seem to have accomplished much, it's been quite a while and still no new official GUI system. Find some really good project managers, put the egos and politics aside, and get your teams making good stuff again. I was a super die hard Unity evangelist for years and now when a new engine gets discussed on blogs/reddit/wherever I actually am interested in hearing what it does because it feels like UT has lost all its momentum.

More communication is good. Knowing that when you have what seems to be a really reproducible bug that's causing you some pain that someone at UT knows about it, can confirm it, and will be addressing it means a lot. It means less if you need to ship in 3 weeks but as was discussed in other posts that's something you seem to be working on.

One big development problem I feel is the overall structure of Unity's component system. It's super easy to just plop a cube into your scene and slap a MonoBehaviour on there and look ma, it's moving around! However as you scale up your team, your project, etc. there are a lot of problems that Unity actively works against you for. At the top of my list would be testability (nothing is an interface, how on earth can you ever write a unit test that mocks out a Transform, a Rigidbody, etc.) I've resorted to passing around a wrapper class that implements ITransform just so that I can actually write a regression test suite. I understand that interfaces introduce indirection and that has performance considerations, but unless you're making an absolutely bleeding edge AAA game, it seems a poor tradeoff. Another issue is that many of Unity's systems are programmer un-friendly. Shuriken and Mechanim would be a couple recent examples, the Input system is a long standing one. If we have no programmatic control or access into these systems (or parts of them are just unavailable) it means we are at best totally reliant on the Unity provided interface, and at worst, unable to accomplish something we need to do for our project. I feel sometimes as if there's a mythical designer that is the ideal client and the programmer that must enable all the functionality is not really considered all that much. For example, why is the template used to generate a new MonoBehaviour stored in the Unity app directory instead of in your home directory? Every time I update Unity my template gets blown away and I have to go find wherever I've stored it and go dig into the Unity app structure and replace the file. This is insane, does no one at Unity ever customize that template and then get annoyed every time a new update comes out? Along these same lines would be the fact that using the solution/project files produced by Unity is pretty awful in MonoDevelop/Xamarin. Since those apps use the formatting rules in the solution/project instead of the defaults in the editor I have no way of customizing the formatting since the solution will just be overwritten by Unity on the next refresh. Having a way to specify the settings I want and have those propagate into the solution/project files would be much nicer.

 

@Carpe Denius, Xaron, Metron, Don Gray

Thanks for taking time to post. Noted.

@Fattie

The subject was the one-liner question: how can we serve you better? The rest was giving some areas that might be interesting to talk about.

@Teo

We don't think about how to milk our users for more cash, which we've proven time and again by establishing an affordable solution to make games using Unity. We have from time to time adjusted our business models which everybody does as times change and we may do so in a way that hopefully makes sense to everybody if and when we did that.

Thanks for taking time to post!

 

This is simply not true, at least if you are on windows. Like I said PS 5 (not CS 5, but 5) still works on my XP system and probably Win7 and Win8, PS CS2 works fine on Win7 and that is 9 years old! Sure some software is more dependant upon being kept up to date than others, but even with Unity I would imagine standalone PC and to a lesser extent Mac builds will work fine for many years beyond the last released version.

The problem is where as in the past I could buy a product and keep using it until 'I' found it outdated or the OS stopped supporting it, with subscription you have no option but to pay perpetually to the end of time. Its short-sighted as it simply acts as an on-going pay wall to those who can no longer afford to pay or justify the subscription. Not only do you lose them as paying customers, but in the case of say Unity you instantly lose them from the community and forums as they have no further investment to remain.

But like I said i'm not against the concept of subscriptions, in fact i'd be all for it, as long as safe guards were in place that meant you could have similar rights to the software after a pre-determined amount of paid subscription fees as that which you would have had you bought the software, namely the ability to use but not get updates to the last version until it becomes too outdated or unusable.

 

Wow, first of all: Thank you for approaching the community in this way! That's very much appreciated! Also thanks to David for chiming in like "in the old days" (and every once in a while also in recent times and in-between back then and now). My guess would be that UT developers are actually still very active on the forums. There's probably even more participation than in the old days (because there's more of them ;-) ). However, since Unity iPhone (as it was called back then), and even more so since Unity for Windows, there's simply so much traffic on these forums that you have to be a little lucky to spot that participation. Some things just don't scale that well ... however, I think you did an awesome job with creating Unity Answers, Unity Feedback and the Issue Tracker (and of course, the alpha and beta groups ;-) ).

So Kudos for that

This posting ... whoa - I thought I was the only one writing messages that are so long that people sometimes tend to give up reading ;-) ... the OP is so rich in content that I think it actually deserves its own forum. Seriously! Instead of posting this huge thing in a single posting in "Unity Gossip" - why not have a new forum, maybe call it "Talk to UT" ... or "Talk to Us" ... or "Official Conversation" ... whatever - and make sure this new forum serves the purpose of this posting: A lively communication between UT and the forum community.

This would also be a place where UT dev forum participation would be more obvious than in the other forums ;-)

You could take that posting of yours and create probably 8 or more "sparks" for discussions, each in their own thread - and each probably having a lot of value not only for current forum users but also kind of as a reference for future forum users.

Once that's done, go ahead and read my favorite posting on the Unity forums evvaaarrr:

Overcome with Emotion *Weep*
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/4125-Overcome-with-Emotion-*Weep*
​

I think that really captures it (back then, in 2007, UT was still called OTEE ... and this was even before Unity 2.0 was released)


So ... to answer some of your questions:

Tell us who you are in this thread if you like; Freelance programmer? Student? Hobbyist? Artist? CTO of a big studio?

I've wanted to do game development for as long as I can remember (and actually also started quite early), almost became a popstar (well, at least I almost tried ;-) ), studied computer science and ended up doing freelance software engineering for a living (and becoming a meditation teacher ... but that just as a side note ;-) ). Early 2007, I started researching game engines and because I wanted to be able to build to Mac as well as Windows, and I wanted to be able to use C# / .NET ... I found Unity. Actually I also would have liked to build to Linux - which happens to now be possible (back then, it wasn't important enough for me to drop Unity just because it didn't have Linux support ;-) ). So ... in 2007, I moved from using Windows to using a Mac so I could use Unity. I got a little scared (I knew this was gonna change my life) ... so I waited to actually buy Unity until end of 2007. Then I had almost a year where I spent almost every free minute working on my first game, Traces of Illumination, which also took part in the Unity Awards 2008 (see here, here, here, here and - that was my very first game demo: here ... which unfortunately doesn't run in the current Unity Web player anymore).

Unfortunately, due to several circumstances (one being multiplayer load-tests that made it clear to me that I wouldn't get anywhere near the intended per-server-player-counts with Unity's built-in networking the way I used it; another one being that almost a year doing nothing but software-engineering to earn money and game development and sleeping very little was too stressful), at the end of 2008, development really slowed down ... towards working on the game only very sporadically ... the project is currently still on 3.4.2 (and porting it to a current version of Unity is something I've been pushing off for a little while ... obviously - one major reason being that from 3.4 to 3.5, a LOT broke in that specific project because of how the modo importer was changed).

So that much about "developing games" vs. "shipping games".

End of 2011 I started my game company narayana games, which currently has one package on the Asset Store (Score Flash - Scrolling Combat Text on Steroids: GUI for Scores, PowerUps, Achievements, Tutorials), and did several client projects. At the moment, I'm not taking any money out of that company (it's my little piggy bank ;-) ) - so eventually, that'll be enough to keep me running for several months without having to do any software engineering projects or game contract work. The strategy to "get there" is having several packages on the Asset Store as well as doing a few more client projects. The nice thing about client projects is that they are always shipped and always generate nice income ... I've also had some game related contract work as a result of having ScoreFlash on the asset store (those were usually customers I first provided support for ... and then they hired me to help in other areas ;-) ).

I'm very much looking forward to getting my hands on UNET to finish up Traces of Illumination (it was kind of funny that the new Unity networking technology was announced right at my 39th birthday ;-) ). I currently have it on Photon which I think is a really nice package - but external dependencies and their updates are kind of a pain IMHO (I had my GUI using EZ GUI which was also "ok" but later got really annoying - and NGUI ... meh :-/ ).

I'm also currently in the process of writing a book about game development with Unity that will hopefully be released very shortly after Unity 5 is released.

Unity's pricing

I'm in the "Unity is really cheap compared to what it delivers" camp. I think anyone who is living in the western world and knows what software-engineering costs should not have a problem with Unity's pricing. I do think that there should be discounts for updates when you own multiple platforms (like Pro + iOS + Android), and especially if you have multiple licenses (say Pro + iOS + Android for 10 employees ... or 100 employees ;-) ). But I do find the pricing acceptable even in those cases (well, I'm in the 1 license Pro + iOS + Android "camp", and I already own 5.0 even though I could play with it until release anyways because I'm in the Alpha group ... which I think is the only thing I can say about this without breaking the NDA. Oh, one more thing, maybe: 5.0 will be awesome ;-) ).

That said: In my opinion, the subscription model is a joke. I don't like software subscriptions anyways, so I guess my opinion doesn't count much. But if I did like subscriptions, I'd pay maybe €49 per month for everything. I don't care how UE4 or CryEngine or anyone else for that matter handles their pricing. I want an engine that is awesome, that is created by awesome people I can talk to and that I don't have to learn from scratch. And I want to own the license (that's why I don't like subscriptions ... except for companies like Adobe that I don't really like - whenever I find reasonable alternatives for their applications, I'll end the subscription that very same day and won't look back ;-) ).

I think the free version is awesome even though I've never used it (back when I started, it was still "Indie" and I felt I immediately wanted to go Pro). The point is: You can do enough and hey, it's FREE as in free lunch!

Royalties, IMHO, are a big no-no. I can see why people like the idea - but I think people should earn money based on what they create, not based on what others create. I guess the Asset Store (and App Stores), are kind of special in that regard ;-)

I hate ads. That's why I was kind of disappointed when Unity Cloud turned out to be an ad network (at least for now). I'd rather have awesome analytics built right into Unity.

Consoles

Awesome ;-) ... I'm planning to develop for Sony's project Morpheus (since Oculus sold out to Facebook, they're almost dead to me), so accessible console support is definitely appreciated!

2D / 3D

I don't care much about 2D. Even as a child I dreamt of creating virtual reality. On the other hand, I think it's awesome to have 2D in Unity because I believe there's a lot of awesome games to be made in 2D. And those are more likely to be shipped than the ambitious 3D multiplayer VR projects ;-)

Communication

I think you still do communicate a lot. Maybe I missed the gap because I wasn't listening carefully enough for a while ;-)

Owning Software Licenses ...

... is very important to me. You build a game engine, I give you money for that. Then I can do with it whatever I want because I own it, no questions asked. Subscriptions and royalties are evil. EVIL! ;-)

Who owns what does matter more than most people are aware of. Greedy corporate capitalism has a very strong potential to destroy this planet and believe it or not - but me owning a Unity license feels much less like the bad kind of capitalism than having to pay a subscription or royalties ... and there's Unity free for those who can't afford Unity Pro and still want to develop games. That's awesome!

Open Source vs Closed Source

I do like Open Source - but the thing that's most awesome about Unity is that you draw the right boundary between "let your users do whatever they want" and "keep the system simple". For that purpose, having a blackbox is actually a good thing.

For most packages from the Asset Store, I do have the source code. And frankly, it sucks. I find bugs, fix them, find stuff I don't like - fix it ... and then comes the next update and I'm in merge hell. Don't tempt me. Get Nicholas back on board (he's awesome with these things, really really awesome), and focus on finding the right balance between "flexibility" and "simplicity". So far, with a few exceptions (Unity's old networking is one example that I like to quote), you did an awesome job. Surface Shaders are an awesome example of how this can be done.

The biggest problem with getting games done ...

... is simply because creating games is really hard. Especially multiplayer. Especially when you have to do it in the time between earning money, meeting friends, having a relationship, maybe kids and sleeping.

I think the Asset Store does help a lot ... but it can also be a problem (personally, especially with code-based packages, while I do get an initial boost in productivity, it often slows me down later in the process, e.g. because of updates the mess everything up, or because I have to dig into and fix code I'm not familiar with).

Unity 4.6 will be awesome because finally, we'll have an awesome GUI system built right into Unity again. For me, the situation with the GUI system was a real downer: When I moved to mobile, I converted parts of my UnityGUI approach to EZ GUI. Then I ran into limitations and also, while EZ GUI is quite nice, it just was too uncomfortable to still be enough fun to keep me motivated. NGUI - meh, I used it on one project and I'll never ever use that thing again.

Just keep on creating the most awesome game engine you can create and things will be fine:

With much better built-in networking and an awesome built-in GUI system, two of the main pain points I had during development of Traces of Illumination will be gone. Of course, these two wouldn't have needed to stop me. There's always ways (and I did try with Photon and EZ GUI), and perseverance is probably one of the most important traits for anyone doing game development - especially if you want to stay independent of corporate capital. But what you - as game engine developers - can do is remove those "issues" that cause frustration because the technology just isn't fun to work with.

 

I am a Senior Programmer at a company making interactive E-Learning using Unity, based in the UK.
I also use Unity in my own time for personal projects.

One of the consistent problems with working with Unity at our company is the inflexibility and opacity of Unity and it's API.
I could name a few major problems but that's not the point of this discussion.
Something that would really help is more transparency, in all areas.

One thing that absolutely boggles me is this comment in the original post:

Why on earth is this internal only? All of those things bar the testing groups would be incredibly useful to anyone using Unity.

I'm also amazed that this question needs to be asked:

Bluntly, Yes. Don't treat your customers as idiots, give them more information than they need, it's far better than not enough. Just because people aren't coming onto forums and shouting 'great job on that latest bit of info you added!', doesn't mean it's not useful.

So that's what I would like to see from Unity, more transparency, and not just in technical info, tell us more about what you are working on, the progress of features, issues you've identified and are looking at fixing. Don't shut your customers out of your development, it's a symbiotic relationship.

This goes doubly for features that will be defunct! WebPlayer is changing into WebGL and what do we, the developers who will use it, know about that implementation? Next to nothing, which makes it incredibly difficult to make business-oriented decisions on essentially the entire engine. (Note we almost exclusively use WebPlayer to get our programs onto LMS). Given the very open nature of other engines with the same WebGL technology, you can see why this becomes a problem for us concerning Unity.

I would request other things that would help me personally, though I know these will be minority opinions and very unlikely to be implemented, I'll stick them here at the end though feel free to gloss over them, they are far less important (to me), than the bulk of the post above.

- C++ as a Unity programming language. I realise this is not a likely feature at all, and probably not a highly requested one, but it is a draw of other engines to those wishing to add (very) useful skills to CV's.
- Visible engine code. Whether open-source or not, being able to actually see internal code (such as Mathf functions are just float-based wrappers for System.Math functions) would be wildly useful. Note this could be achieved through (much) better documentation!

 

@dkoontz

Thanks for taking time to offer detailed feedback.

Some think asset store items are a godsend, some think it's things we should have done, but given we started out small it allowed others to help build missing functionality into Unity and earn enough money to keep supporting it. There's always a hundred things for each and every person to work on and to some people that got what they were hoping for it's good management and to others that didn't bad management.

This feeds nicely to the point we should get better at communication. If it was all visible and you could see what was being worked on and why, it would be less frustrating for users I think.

I also suppose all projects "suffer" from this. Even if somebody contributes code to say UE4 is Epic then responsible to maintain code they didn't write? It's easy to do it in the beginning, but in a few years from now when it's been pulled in a hundred different directions without some way to keep it all solid and stable it will be a mess. They'll be numerous forum posts discussing which branches to pull in, how to integrate stuff, etc. just like there is in the web app community trying to get code from different people working.

Hopefully we can come up with something that works for everybody. A good starting point is more visibility on everything so the discussions can become more focused on specifics.

Thanks!

 

I'm a Technical Director on a quite big game as well as an indie developer on the side.
What I would like to see from Unity is even more completeness on the data access side, making sure that everything can be set and get so far as it is logically possible. For example, I can .SetCurve() on an AnimationClip, but I cannot .GetCurve() for no (to me) obvious reason. Quite a few things are read only when they could at least theoretically be set as well and there should be no damage caused by setting it.

 

1. Stop vendors from reselling asset store items. I've raised this in the past (and a set of invoices for a set of things I don't have a license to), and I think it got ignored. You should consider banning asset store vendors from reselling other asset vendors to other unsuspecting developers. That represents a severe breach of contract of the Unity Asset Store contract. Nothing done, as usual...


2. Banning fake/fraud idea guys permanently from this forums. I think this has been discussed before. Also put there: This person is permanently banned notice, so that other people get warned about it. If you have a fake LLC, fake incorporation, you shouldn't be doing asking others to work for you, for free, also, you should not be scamming others to give you free work.


3. Fake unaccredited institutions peddling snake-oil training. These persons has fake degrees, complete noobs and asks stupid basic questions on alt. accounts. Should Unity start giving stern warning for setting up fake unaccredited institutions, and then luring developers to put money into fake teaching lessons? A line has to be drawn somewhere to warn about this. This hurts the credibility and reputation of the Unity more than anything else.


4. Idea guys on the forums asking for unpaid works. @Brett, I think you know this one, since we pay our developers and artists here. I find it disgusting that Unity allows these idea guys to dupe others into giving free works, by allowing anonymous people to post for jobs on the jobs forums section. You work for free for more than 8 months? You stupid or what?


5. Lower costs for secondary licenses. Developers who need UnityPro/Android/IOS have to fork out double the money or triple. It gets hard to renew licenses.


6. Now, we've been doing mandatory testing of all our candidates, as previously they have been telling us all lies, very bad artwork, very bad 3D models, causing us losses. I sent to you, Brett, one of the lowest C# scores and very bad artwork of some of the candidates who come here.

Since, then, we've hired ex-studio employees now. We have ex-lecturers here who administer the tests. So two National University ex-lecturers give mandatory arts tests and coding tests to candidates. Out of 100 candidates, only 5 are studio-quality. To be specific, for Unity, they fail, fumble to do basic Unity basic things.

Do you have the syllabus guide for the Unity's official tests? The ex-lectuerers have been improvising and making up their own tests.

 

Brett, thanks for sticking your head out.

I'm an old school pixel artist turned technical artist, turned programmer in more recent years - and like a lot of people around here I have Unity to thank for that last step. I'm pretty sure without you guys I'd still be writing tools in python.

I work in a small studio, and my charge is art and pipeline - workflows, keeping things organised, and figuring out how to get things done with a minimum of hassle. Quite often this means getting answers to technical questions that I can't resolve from the information available, and often can't be answered by the community.


In that respect I'm interesting in the hardest part to address - increased support and engagment, transparency and accountability.

Engagement

I realise that this is a hard nut to crack without compromising development - there's no easy way to filter the levels of need (hobby user vs developer desperate to get paid) in the forums or answerhub to form an effective monitor:response strategy, especially when the questions can be infinitely diverse. But if you're looking for an area to really innovate and set a new standard, this is a good one - and obviously you get the importance of engagement as that's what this thread is all about.


Transparency and accountability

In simple form: Sometimes, there's a problem that's just a bug. I file a bug report, get a reply within a week "yep, that's a bug! thanks!", and never hear about it again. There's no offer of dialogue or "how important is this feature to you?" questions - it just get dropped into (what I imagine is) a big bug database, with a priority that feels right to whoever is filing it. Please make it clearer what happens to the things we report. We're typically reporting them because they're stopping us from doing something we need to do.


Documentation:

The other wrinkle in the cloth is documentation and front-facing information. This is something you need to ace, there's no other way to put it. The manuals appear to be out of date in places, and there's inconsistency in the code samples...some are only C#, some are only JS...and there could be a lot more besides. Not enough people RTFM, but more would do if the docs were better, and perhaps integrated or linked to tutorial material on the main website.

On which subject, there's some nice beginner material on the website but I'm sure there was an "Advanced" heading 'Coming Soon' in Scripting; if so there isn't one anymore, and perhaps there should be, covering topics such as GL drawing and PostFX, programmatically accessing lightmaps, adding multi-platform plugins, customising build processes ... performing low-level tasks and so on. Not "How to Program", but "How to make Unity Bend Over Backwards for You".

Remember not all Unity newbies are new to development, they're just new to Unity, and it's easy to forget that Unity is quite a paradigm shift. A lot of purist programmers, unlike artists, designers - and what we might call Creative programmers - aren't used to working in a GUI environment, but if they can make it their own, they feel a lot more in control. They may know what they want to do, but are left with breadcrumbs (often stale, mould-covered breadcrumbs from AnswerHub or 4-year-old blog posts) to figure it out for themselves. I work with one such chap, and while he's an ace coder, he finds working in Unity to be a complete pain in the arse.


Asset Store:

I know you love the Asset Store. Lots of people love it, and it has some great things in it, and I've bought a *lot* of assets from it, often just out of curiosity. It also has a lot of not so great assets in it - some of which are good ideas, just badly implemented, or implemented in a way that doesn't work well with what you're making, and some just plain don't work or do what you expected.

Please don't shelf or postpone development of key features because there's something in the UAS that seems to 'cover it'. This is exactly the sort of thing that hurts your bottom-line feature set - there's no way to evaluate assets en masse, one shoe doesn't fit all sizes, and we don't pay for multiple Pro licenses for just "new" features... you have a responsibility to keep the old stuff up to date as well as long as you list it as a feature. Unity's Terrain toolset is a good example - Terrain is a massive feature, but Unity's Terrain is not good in any way. I'm being very kind here!


Pricing:

We have mixed Perpetual and Subscription licenses. I don't have a problem with the current business model, and I doubt I'd have a problem if it changed. I'm just grateful you don't convert $1 to £1 like some other essentials-vendors.

I'm surprised nobody appears to know that you can get a discounted 1-year subscription on Pro and all add-ons if you already own a perpetual license (even just base-Pro)... it is rather hidden away on the website...maybe you'd get a bit more slack if it was more center-stage?


Asset Server:

This REALLY needs updating to modern standards, especially when you're charging for it. Unity is billed as a collaborative tool, yet UAS turns collaboration into extreme sport. Perhaps if you are going to experiment with open source, Asset Server would be a good starting point?


Just a few cents...time for coffee.

 

@jashan, 3agle, Ulven2

Thanks for posting. Noted on comments.

Unity grew organically and like any think that grows, outgrows things along the way. We get that we need to communicate more and are already starting to do that. We might need some more time to get there, but given that communication is a common request, we'll try to get there sooner than later

 

Hi folks.. thanks Brett for opening this thread up.

I've been using Unity since 2006 (v1.5x) and have been a full time indie since than point, right up to today, using Unity mostly 7 days a week, and supporting my family entirely on my own IP made in Unity. That never could have happened for me without Unity, so I will forever be your biggest fan.

I have to say I love Unity as much today as I ever did, but I also hate it a lot more today than ever before.

The fact that console platforms are fragmented to hell, that some of the longest missing features are still a no show 5+ years after they were promised - (ahem, Input Manager), and editor stability issues (crashes, freezes etc) just makes making games for us today way harder than it needs to be.

I understand that the majority of your customer base is focusing on mobile, but many of us are moving away from mobile and web and there is just way too much Unity and services focus on mobile and not enough on desktop or console. Unity used to be king on the desktop - alas, no more.

I've never had a problem with the pricing model. I don't mind paying you guys so you can put devs in chairs to get great tools made.

Epic have shown their hand, and there is much about UE4 that is currently way better than current Unity (particles, material editor/shaders, networking, blueprints, effects, physics ) but there is currently a lot about Unity that is better than EU4 - asset pipeline, platform range, rapid dev proto-typing, multi-viewports/game views, UI (3rd party) and asset store.

Unity 5 is a step in the right direction to address a lot of those, but Epic have also shown that they are prepared to move at a super fast pace - faster than Unity have ever been able to maintain - yes that's me throwing down the challenge

I think the ways you can serve us better is to consolidate platforms as fast as possible, get away from Mono as fast as possible, get the longest outstanding features in (it doesn't matter that it is now only for 5% of your customer base) - most of those 5% have been with you since day dot, and finally speed up minor releases (already covered with dot dot updates ).

Finally... knowing a lot of you personally, I am totally in awe of the dedication and insane amount of hard work and effort you all put into making Unity. So a BIG thanks from me.

 

Hey,

I've been using Unity professionally for ~4 years, shipped >40 apps/games for clients. I operate in Cape Town, South Africa with a team of 9 developers. I'm a technical artist/programmer, so I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I have used every single feature that Unity Pro provides, except compiling to Flash and consoles.

On average, I love Unity, but most of my time is spent fighting it, rather than just using it.

The biggest issue that I have with Unity is that it seems that more attention is given to new and shiny features, rather than fixing and improving existing systems.

A few examples (which have put a proverbial arrow to my proverbial knee):

Input Manager is a mess - There is no way to affect the input manager in code without actually writing your own, this is one of the top 10 feature requests in the Feedback yet where there appears to be zero dev feedback. It is disappointing that there has been no visible/meaningful improvements in this area since I started using Unity (2.6). It's not a sexy job like adding the new lighting or audio engines, but it can be argued that it's more integral than either. (The keyboard mapping thing at app startup is horrible and should be replaced with the ability to map input via code at runtime).

NavMeshes are half implemented - No dynamic generation (ie. no navigation on dynamic levels) , only one nav mesh per scene (ie. agents all have approximately the same mobility across a level), etc.

Mecanim is full of holes (ie. no events on state changes, etc.)

These are just a few issues, there are many, many more. I'm not talking about adding new features, just completing/fixing those that we already have. Most of my ire stems from what appears to be apathy on the part of the Unity Developers where the Feedback forums is concerned, just tell us what you think of the feedback presented, tell us if there are pitfalls or workarounds or something, just let us know that we're being heard.

The other thing I have to say is more of a suggestion/request. How about giving every single Pro user the ability to enter the Alpha/Beta channel as and when they choose? I like to think of my self as a power-user and I love early access (and I send out bug reports like it's my job!), and my attempts to enter Beta channel have thus far been unsuccessful Give that Pro price tag a bit more mileage, while letting someone pay you to improve your product

This is a bit of a rant ( and a bit jumbled ), I really do love what you guys are doing and without you I wouldn't be doing the job I love, but Unity definitely needs a few more rounds of housekeeping where the Feedback forums are concerned.

Thanks!

 

I think it's great that you are reaching out to the people who are using Unity. I'm a software developer for a company in the financial sector, though I worked for a game development company way back. So currently I'm a hobbyist game developer and mostly work on my game over weekends. I use Unity Free with a couple of assets that were bought from the asset store. My current game is 2D but the next one will be 3D. My current hurdle in releasing is creating good looking graphics. As a programmer I find this crazy tough. The game is mostly working with prototype graphics though.

Enough about me and on to Unity. Unity Free is excellent and serves my need. To be honest when Unreal Engine 4 came out with their subscription model I was very intrigued. For a hobbyist to pay a low fee per month and then to pay royalties is very attractive. If Unity had the same model with the same price as Unreal, I would go with Unity because of C#. I'm not prepared to pay for Unity Pro at this stage. As a third world citizen I see it as expensive. If I were a full time game developer then it would have been a good buy but as a hobbyist it's way too expensive. Especially if you target different platforms. I like the idea that someone else had: Unity Free, Unity Hobbyist (subscription with royalties, make the editor unusable if subscription is not paid), Unity Subscription, Unity Pro. Or something to that effect.

Playing with UE4, you get a lot out of the box. Things you have to buy from the Asset Store in Unity, which may or may not work as intended. Someone else mentioned some kind of visual shader editor. I too would love that dearly. Also for some reason UE4 looks so good as is. You can put a basic scene together and it looks amazing. In Unity not so much. It may be because I'm used to Unity Free though.

Currently I'm staying with Unity until I get this first game out. After that I will decide which way to go. As attractive as UE4 is, C# is a joy to work with plus I've got got one asset that I use in Unity that's really amazing for the kind of games that I make. UE4 will be getting a marketplace soon though which may change things. Or maybe, just maybe Unity will change their pricing structure and then I don't have to think about UE4 at all.

However as a programmer my biggest hurdle is not Unity at all but rather creating graphics. Whether 2D raster or vector. I even thought of 3D pre-rendered but Blender is a beast to learn and will take a lot of time. 3D is just another problem altogether. So I'm very happy with Unity for now.

 

@eskimojoe

Noted. Aurore is your girl. We appreciate your help in calling our attention to these on an ongoing basis!

@Pix10

Thanks for your comments. Some of our doc team, Hugh and Andy, can weigh in about what changes are coming. Be great to get more feedback on that. I'll try to get them to post here soon.

We have been doing a lot of work on the asset handling and version control and will be rolling out some great stuff in the coming months. I'll try to get Andre or one of the collaboration team members to post something more here.

 

@seon

We love you too! Thanks for the comments. We will get consoles merged back, I promise (famous last words, haha).

@Wahooney

I agree it seems we do nothing that creates grief. So another scoop of communication please! Appreciate adding your voice to some of your biggest pains. Noted.

@SolitudeSA

Thanks for posting. It's fantastic to hear from our users around the world and all the stuff they're doing. Noted on your comments.

 

I`ve been working with Unity for 2 years.

My only concerns with Unity were pricing and GUI. I simply cannot afford Pro at this moment no matter what.

If I`ll make like $30k with my project then I`m gonna say the same thing.
Dont think there is any kind of magic behind such thinking, you should come up with a pricing model that fits this reality.
19$/5% is just an amazing example.

Yes. Yes. Yes.
Please do that

• 
  "If I do well I share my income with you" type of business model would fit me best. 19$/5% would be amazing.

• Also indie pricing is an option[ex:500$ for Pro if you earn below $25k annually].

• Watermarking and paying after publishing with Pro(first $XXXX from your game goes to Unity). That would be amazing too.

 

Amazing job guys!
The 2D stuff is working great. You have some good tutorials and live training, however none of them specifically explain 2d physics and more importantly Joints. There are plenty on 3D Joints but 2D video tutorials are no where to be found.
Just my recommendation

 

@Ness, maltadirk

Thanks for your comments.

Hey, does "maltadirk" mean your from Malta?

 

i'd be interested on that also, either purchase or subscription: "unity indie pro"..

(most likely wouldnt even earn that 500$ from games published with it, but would be pretty nice to play with all those pro features, having some splash screen wouldnt matter)

 

> A Pro version with small watermark that you can use for development and then pay only on publishing?

Can you make this possible? Something like a cheaper UnityPro with a watermark, for the modellers here doing bakes and testing the product on Android and iOS...

They can only do 15 bakes a day max. because the terrain is quite large and working hours limitation. On average here takes ~ 45 minutes to do a bake on a Core i7-4960X and with PCI-SSD. We're getting concerned because of the long time taken to do bakes.

Make the Cache server free of charge. It is not productive to wait hours for switch platform.


Or better still, make a UnityPro version only for development only and not allow the project to be used for other members/groups.

 

I'm employed as a mobile games developer, however I also spend a lot of my spare time playing around in Unity. I recently started a small two man company where the time we have we have left between our full-time jobs will be spent on developing games for various platforms in the hope of one day going indie.

The main issue I'd like to bring up is pricing for mobile games development. The subscription model is a great alternative but what it offers should be reconsidered. Currently I can pay $75/month and get access to Pro, which is great! But when I want to develop for Android, that's another $75/month. And then of course I'll want my game on iOS as well, another $75/month.

Should it really be three times the cost to develop for smartphones when one of Unity's big selling points is multi-platform?
Unity Free allows you to publish to PC, Mac, Android and iOS. It would make sense if the Pro version of Unity gave access to the same platforms.

 

Me: Running a small business that allows me to spend a good deal of my time working on basically whatever I want. I've always enjoyed building interactive experiences, so a year ago I decided I want to dabble in mobile app and game development. First was Cocos2D. I thought that (technically) it's not that hard as I thought, so I became a bit more ambitious and started thinking about going multiplatform. And here I am.

Wants: (even) Easier to use and more affordable tool.

Yes, I've heard so many times that "Unity has unmatched workflow and prototyping/development doesn't get easier than this". For the most part, I share the same opinion. But it is the little things and bugs that I ended spending most of my development time on. I didn't expect the "little things" to be a serious barrier so early in my days as a Unity user. Just a small example from my yesterday's struggles: there is no visual interface for managing sorting layers and orders. Yes, I can do that from code, and there is a plugin in the asset store. But I can't help but feel this should be packed with the core Unity experience.

Price. I landed on Unity with the plan that I'll purchase Unity Pro when/if I release a product or two and it proves it's worth (financially) its price. And when I'm ready for my first PC project. Because at no point I've considered buying the iOS Pro and Android Pro addons. Unless somehow a newbie like me manages to release a smash mobile hit, of course. Which is not very likely. I'd rather use a different tool/engine if Unity Free's features happen to be a limiting factor.

Subscription: in its current variant - a huge No for me. It just doesn't make sense, for me at least. But I'd be interested in a reasonable subscription offer, yes. If I have to be more precise, I'd definitely pay $30/month (royalties-free) for Unity Pro + Addons Pro, locked in a yearly contract. Or $45 if I can cancel subscription at any time.

Thanks for reading my wishlist :-D .

 

The docs layout for 4.5 will match the Learn team layout, so associating docs with Learn content will be easier.

 

@Wahooney

Regarding navmesh; were working towards more runtime features. The first changes were allowing runtime modification of offmeshlinks and obstacle carving. Support for additive loading of navmeshes is coming up - then multi-scene-edit support.

We've made quite a few enquiries of users/studios needs. There is a big demand for runtime creation of navmeshes - so that will be the next focus. In addition to continuously improving documentation and examples.

I'd like to know about more the needs for multiple navmesh per level, please share your use-case (either here, pm or mail).

Cheers..
/Jakob

 

Thanks to everyone who has given feedback about the documentation. A quick update is in order to give you some idea of our plans for the docs in the near future.

Firstly, an overhaul to the docs has been a long time coming but we are pleased to say that the docs that will ship with 4.5 have been extensive revamped. As well as new content, we have also made changes to the structuring of the docs that we believe will make information easier to locate. One of the recurring criticisms up to now was that the docs do contain useful pieces of information but having read it once, it is hard to find it again. The new structuring aims to gather related information in specific, categorised pages rather than having it scattered around.

Also, this is just a first step in our plans to improve the docs considerably. Our first priority, up to now, is to get more detailed descriptions of features to make it easier for newcomers to get up to speed. However, it is interesting to see requests for more detailed technical information in the docs, since this is not something we usually get asked for.

@3agle: "Much better documentation"... I guess you would like to see more detail about the way features are implemented as you mention in your post. Technical overview pages might be one way to improve what we've got (perhaps this would be a bit more formal and findable than blog posts with the same content). Also, some script ref pages already include a bit of "internal" detail but we are working on improving this. Please let us know if there are any specific areas you think we should focus on first (eg, is the main problem a lack of detail for optimisation or is it more about subtle "gotchas" cropping up during development?)

@Pix10: part of efforts for 4.5 have been to update the old material and get any obviously missing stuff put in place. However, there is always room for improvement and we are certainly working toward integrating the docs better with the existing video tutorial content, as well as writing some new stuff of our own. The lack of C#/JS parity in some code samples has mainly been down to an issue with the systems we use to generate the docs, and this will soon be fixed. Our overall plan for the script ref examples is to avoid the frustrating one-liners and try to ensure each important class has good and relevant usage examples.

Any other feedback about the docs would be most welcome but hopefully, we are now moving in the right direction ;-)

 

What about a comment function for the docs? That way users can add missing bits and explanations.

 

That would be mind blowing

 

This level of communication is the exact thing that Unity needs right now. Thank you!

One thing about low hanging fruits that I have to mention, is locking sub gameobjects. Currently, when you click on something on scene view, it randomly selects sub gamaobjects, where you need to select the parent. This happens very often when you have stuff like LODs and sub physics objects. There should be a way of "locking" sub gameobjects, where it should select the first unlocked parent if you click on something on scene view. Currently, this is a source of major inconsistency, as almost all our assets have LODs, the error only shows itself later when you play test, and requires you to constantly check what you have selected on hierarchy window to prevent it. Hierarcy should behave as it is, and there could be a shortcut for selecting locked subobjects on scene view (alt + click for example). Fixing this would go a long way for making the editor much more reliable and usable.

 

Hey @bibbinator,
yeah I'm from Malta. The gaming community is really growing here, especially the Unity install base. 4A Metro developers moving here very soon so that's great

 

A system for user submissions to the docs is planned and will hopefully be available later this year.

 

Source code access is something we'd be very interested in. I believe it should be available. Just because it's available doesn't mean you need to use it but, for those who need/want it, it's very important / useful.

 

Turns out I'm moving to Malta in September