Official: How Can We Serve You Better?

I knew it felt a little difficult to swallow, that amount of bug fixes didn't make sense. Thanks for clearing it up Thomas.

 

Okay, speaking of communication issues, I think we need to stop having things like this happen. This isn't the first time I've seen this happen and I'd really like it to be the last. We need better information and we need that information disseminated to all people associated with Unity.

 

Key is to FIX the bugs. Just a fixed bug doesn't make trouble anymore. Just a fixed bug does not produce new bug reports anymore that needs to get dealt with.

We go in circles here. You can never catch them all, that's true. But you should at least try to fix the ones in reach. And you should definitely fix the showstoppers. I already named three of them that bugs me since eons. All reported. One declined, two never fixed. From my angle of view the current strategy has failed. It is time for a new strategy.

Then you should make sure that the people knows that the Issue Tracker exists. In Unity there is just a send bug report button. The Issue Tracker button and/or a hint in the bug report text is missing.

 

So, without wanting to stifle debate, maybe we should get this thread back on track, so Brett can collect people's views on the product. (I know bugs and support is also important to people.)

 

Really! Unity is getting nothing but asset purchases from me. I would happily subscribe and pay every month for the updates. I would even pay more than $20. In fact, I would pay $50 if it wasn't locked in for a year!

Even if people cancel and just use the current build they still put something into the system, more than they are now!

 

+1.

 

Why should this matter to you? In your locked for good reason pollIIRC you claimed you don't use Unity.. Troll much?

 

Then you haven't worked on large systems with millions of lines of code. They've already provided the math on how long it would likely take to clear all of the currently reported bugs. I think people are forgetting that the 400 employee number is not just developers, but marketing, support, admin, QA, etc. Not to mention that having more cooks in the kitchen does not automatically mean you will get a better product faster.

On the system I work on we have the following triage priorities:

Showstopper - system is down or severely degraded, must be fixed immediately
High - performance impacting or affecting a large number of users bug where a workaround does not exist, must be fixed in the next build (though not always possible)
Medium - performance impacting or affecting a large number of users bug where a workaround exists
Low - minor annoyances where a workaround exists, usually cleared by new developers learning the system or during a rare slow period when we'll just squash as many bugs as possible

This is a fairly logical way of triaging our bugs, but as you might guess, our users still complain about their pet problems (performance reducing or not). So, we implemented a top 10 list that we promised to fix for the next release, if at all possible. These could be of any priority. It went a long way in reducing the amount of gripping we got about long standing bugs. Some of these bugs were actually impactful on the user, but they had not made that clear in their bug reports or during our monthly teleconferences.

I think Unity's voting system is a similar approach and that is why he was pointing you to it. Your particular concern may not be triaged as highly as you may like, but at least they are giving you the ability to potentially affect that.

As for the hard to reproduce bugs, I would hope (and suspect) that they are adding debug info into their builds to eventually track them down. This is something we have done with some success, though it is a slow processes depending on the frequency of the particular bug. I suspect this along with the patch releases would also help in tracking these down sooner.

I'll end this by just saying that it appears to me that people are getting a little too worked up over some of these small blurbs the Unity folks are providing without giving them the benefit of the doubt that there is obviously more going on than what was stated in a 100 word post. It makes me feel better about them when I hear these tidbits of information that show me they have a process and they are continually trying to improve it.

 

+1 to Tango, you beat me to the punch.

 

Yah, I could see myself looking into Unity Maya LT at $50 a month each for a year with Unity 5 a good uGUI; not worth it (to me) with Unity 4 as is.

 

== removed: sounded a little to argumentative and per Graham's wish to get thread back on track ==

 

As someone who has often had to have someone fly out for my company... I'd like to say that opening a SevA case with Microsoft was, *ahem* expensive, unless it was already in the support contract.

So, if you want to pay Unity 10K to fly someone out, then yes, I agree. Microsoft, RedHat, IBM, and our other vendors do not fly out for free. It's either in our rather expensive support contracts, or we pay extra for it.

 

I would think a Skype + desktop sharing type of solution would be more cost effective solution for those cases.

 

U5 Pro is a most have for me, and I'm desperately waiting for 4.5 (bug fixes, improvements), I'm not very interested in uGUI as we made our own GUI core.

 

Graham, thanks for bring this up.

I think this is an important thread, and we all could do better to keep on track.
If you just feel like lobbing complaints for the sake of hearing your own voice, I'm sure there are better threads for that.
This is a genuine opportunity to talk directly to the people that make decisions at Unity.

Bringing the topic back on track:
One thing I was thinking about this morning was how cool it could be to allow a path for content creators in the Asset Store to have a monthly licensing option for their plugins. Hear me out, sometimes you make a great tool for Unity, but the money it would take to recoup your costs means that you have to sell the asset at over $100.00. Which really narrows your pool of potential buyers. If I could have a system in place supported by Unity that allowed me to license the component out at say $10.00 a month over a year the situation reverses. More people get access to the tools, I get more sales and a predicable income, unity gets more revenue as well.

Thoughts?

 

My main issue is owning Pro and when I get requests to port to iOS or Android..more frequently iOS but some Android I am not making enough even over a year to afford the full licensing for those two platforms. If I had a monthly locked down subscription it would chew up 150 a month whilst I was doing industrial design with no Unity used at all. Since most of my work is from contract you would not get money from me from royalties so that is not fair to Unity..I use it and make some money with it..but not enough to justify a further 3000USD on top of the 1500 I have paid. I have invested 4500 into 2.x, 3.x and 4.x and 1500 into 3.x Unity iPhone Pro which sits idle not recouping the original investment.

That said ideally you should have to own Unity Pro and get a good discount on iOS and Android and the coming WebGL or a good price on the subscription model..one that if on the upper end above 50USD you can own a copy at some point by tossing the difference between the license and paid subscription into the mix..or have a price that realizes many folks do not make full use of the subscriptions all the time such as myself and I am sure I am not a corner case here. Somewhere between 25 and 50USD/month with a shorter locked in period.. The economy sucks and the cheapest burger meat is nearly five bucks a pound. 150 a month means I go hungry or pay overdraft fees if the money is not available. I cannot take the risk of either..especially the hungry part. I cannot do much creatively or thinking wise with a grumbling stomach. Many of the requests are bogus in this thread and of the nature of wanting everything for free. I do not want that and do not want folks coming to me asking me the business equivalent for my product or services. I just want something I can justify if it sits idle a couple of months and then used for a contract or two to go idle again.

Thanks for listening.

-R

 

So, back on track.

By day I work on a couple million line cancer data collection system for the state of California and by night I'm a Unity hobbyist with dreams of indieness. I mostly work in the 2D spectrum as it's just me and I don't have a lot of working capital nor the patience to do 3D right given those restraints. I'm not really interested in consoles due to the situation noted previously.

On communication. Yes, please, more. I loved the last roadmap you had put out and totally understand you're pulling back from that. But, I would hope you would remember the silent majority. And I will try not to stay so silent when you do provide that type of transparency in the future. I like the tech blogs, it's always nice to get better acquainted with your tools and it's just interesting in general. Devs should definitely engage in the forums more, I think an hour or two a week would go a long way in making us feel we are being listened to.

On pricing. I like having both the subscription and licensing options. Currently the prices are too steep for what I'm doing. I wouldn't mind having the ability to develop with the Pro tools with the option to purchase in order to release. I could see purchasing the Pro license if it included the mobile platforms, otherwise it's just too much as a hobbyist at this point.

On open source. I'd rather you put your resources towards a quicker release cycle than into managing an open source model.

On shipping. My biggest issue is time and motivation. A lot of my time is eaten up with the day job and my triplet 5 year old girls. So by the end of the day when I get time to work on my game(s) I'm pretty exhausted. So, you can help by releasing better tools quicker. Here are the things I'm looking forward to having in order to increase productivity during my precious little development windows:

uGUI - I'm tired of purchasing GUI solutions that don't integrate with the dev environment. DFGUI is doing a good job at this point, but I've had to go through a few solutions to get to them.

UNET - I like to do collaborative games so any improvements in this arena is welcome. Please keep in mind disconnected type of multiplayer games (think WebAPI back ends).

Native JSON Serialization - I'm tired of purchasing JSON serialization solutions that are not up to the MS built in stuff (enums anyone?).

2D NavMesh - It would be nice to use NavMesh for 2D top downs.

Best Practices Document - I've run across a lot of best practices stuff in the forums and elsewhere. It'd be great to have a single (and searchable) place to go for those things.

More cloud services built into Unity. As has been mentioned, leaderboards, authentication (Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, etc.), ad services, analytics.

It seems like a lot of these things are in the works, hence the want for a more agile approach to releases/patches.

I think that’s enough for a Friday. 

 

Hi all,
Totally mind-blowing how much great info and effort everybody has put into this thread, and remained surprisingly civil throughout!

I have read all the posts, posted updated summaries along the way to be sure we captured the most popular takeaways, and also made a lot of notes on individual ideas that were very interesting.

We're still here participating, but I guess we should consider what should happen to this thread: Should we close it? Leave it open?

We're happy to do anything that works for you guys, but a lot of people have contacted me and asked for a sense of "closure" (pun intended) and so thought I would see what everybody else wants to do. Alternatively, I guess at some point people will stop posting and it will go stale, and then 2 years from now somebody will find this thread in a search and post a reply and we'll all have a good laugh at it being resurrected

 

I cannot speak for others, but I see this thread as a formal Unity sponsored opportunity to provide feedback directly. As such, it should have a close date and be locked. People will inevitably start new threads but those can not be guaranteed to be read by Unity VIPs where as this will be.

May 31st makes sense to me as that still gives another full week and a long weekend for some to post.

I have enjoyed reading this and getting the one person studio perspective up to the 150+ person studios.

 

As long as the communication doesn't stop, it shouldn't really matter. The big thing is having the communication. That's what I think, anyway.

 

The problem here is that as Asset Store asset downloads the complete source and cannot be locked into activation and deactivation as easily as an executable program. It would basically be the same as the refunds - the money goes back to the buyer but there's no way in telling whether he still has the Asset and is still using it or not.


*snip* now for something completely different. Something I only thought of earlier but I didn't actually state it really clear, I think:
Personally I still think that Unity should consider whether it's possible to include the Team license int the Pro Version by default some time in the future. Besides all the bugfixin stuff an option for a team to work together is something that is a rather "Pro" feature, IMO. So far I found it a little alienating that this is charged extra, though. It's not something very high priority to me personally and I know there are integrations with other - even free version control software. Yet somehow I think the Unity way should be to just have it available and in that case I am not too sure whether it's sensible to keep it separate behin a paywall forever.

 

Personally I think it's about petered out but since this is more about making Unity better and I realize more profits means more can be diverted to new IR&D into new versions of Unity so which economic model is chosen really does matter. We can argue in the forums til we're blue in the face but Unity accountants and lawyers have the privy access to the numbers and the licensing, we don't.

As far as some new improvement I'd think if Unity would throw a bit more coin towards UnLogick Ribeiro to further improve and diversify UMA it'd do Unity a lot of good.

 

This. Better close it at some point anyways but leave it as sticky thread for a while so people can read it without browsing tons of pages.

 

A status board somewhat like your License Comparison page to summarize things would be cool, you could add it as a tab on your 'Buy' and 'Download' section of your web page, it would also allow other workers at Unity know what is going on in other Unity teams at a high level.

 

Question about asset server, my studio has a license for it but we don't use it as it caused a bunch of issues, so instead use SVN hosted at the office. I thought I remember seeing that its being updated, will these updates be included in Unity 5? or is this another feature that will be pushed back until after it comes out?

 

With all due respect, nice selective quoting!

This still applies:

I understand you PRIORITIZE, but you have pretty much stated that:
1. Bug reports from enterprise clients get priority
2. Bugs need votes in order to get pushed to higher priority

...which means that if we, as a relatively small company with 2 seats of full pro setups, file a bug report for something that is not critical then it is not likely to get fixed any time soon. And you think I should think that is ok?

Frankly, I find your attitude a bit arrogant. I hope I am misinterpreting your intention.

(Edit: Just want to add that the background to the above is that I do not really accept the explanation that "we have sooo many bugs, we have to triage". You should not have gotten to that situation in the first place. You have actively ignored bugs and incomplete features for years while implementing the next shiny thing, that sometimes works as intended.)

 

I think it's frankly naive to think that this should be the case. Bugs happen. Lots of bugs happen. They can't all be dealt with. That's how big software works.
It mounts up over time, and in the end you have to pick and choose. When you have lots of customers, that's just what happens - no way around it.

 

will you ship 4.5 with that report? is the report coming out in the next 12 hours?

 

What he said ^

In any case while I agree, the bugs exist and to deal with them in an efficient manner, triage management is absolutely a must. There's no other reasonable way to approach it and make everyone happy unfortunately.

Edit: PhobicGunner beat me to it.

 

I don't think it will do any good to close it until Unity makes some announcement about any changes they plan (or do not plan) to make. Other threads will just continue to spring up an take its place.

 

No, I am not naive and I find it insulting for you to imply that I am. I have 20+ years of software development behind me. I understand the nature of bugs and the fact that they add up. I also understand that you have to pick and chose to some extent during active development.

But you have to be deluding yourself not to see the fact that we are not only talking small, insignificant bugs or small insignificant incomplete features. It has been *strategy* to skip fixing bugs and broken features in favor of new features that will bring in even more customers.

It is in that context I find it arrogant and insulting to be told that they have to PRIORITIZE (caps borrowed from Unity rep). Yes, I have seen how they prioritize over the course of 8 (yes, eight) years and I am stating that I do not like the way they are handling non-enterprise but pro customers. That is my opinion. Period.

 

Even Blender is far more effective at fixing bugs than Unity, and it's a larger product with fewer developers.

You're right that some bugs can be skipped, but of the bugs I have reported, almost none have been fixed and one of the worst took over a year to fix, and it was a showstopper (Cloth being basically unusable). The reason is clear: UT heavily prioritizes based on who reports it (enterprise and beta testers), and on the number of people who run into the bug (tracker voting). This means too bad if a normal unprivileged (but Pro) user has a bug that only appears in more advanced cases (I think most people don't use Cloth, for example - no Unity demo shipped with the product has). This is unacceptable to me and I have never been treated with such contempt by any other software vendor.

 

Please at least have the respect to not imply that I have done things I have not. I have not implied that you have stated anything you have not nor misquoted anything. If others have, so be it, but do not try to imply that I have been involved in that. Thank you.

What I stated was MY opinion. Yes, I think that the objective should be to fix all known bugs. We do try. Do we succeed? No. But I am not going to simply throw my hands up and go "Oh, no - they are too many." Or even get to that situation. That is my opinion, and please have the courtesy of respecting it.

 

the 12 hours just came up in my mind. I was thinking that 4.5 may ship in this week.

 

That bit of passive aggression was targeted at me, not you.

 

I think this is probably the best course for this thread.

Having read it all, it started of great, but the last few pages have just devolved into bickering white noise. By now, most posts are just repeating previous points.

 

+1

Personally I am really glad the QA Team decided to open this thread and go into open conversation again.
And I really hope it will go on from here again as well as be contsructive.

 

Don't worry, it's easy for regular members to notice who of the whiners or offensive posters hang around in here and other threads spreading bad spirit with negative posts and delusional or troll like requests or statements. There are people who like the staff replies and whats being told without them posting any positive comments here.

I wish the forum would have some karma system up so we could down vote the people who ruin things. I'm not saying we need to censor negative feedback but some of the posts have zero content and feel like trolling every now and then. As dev I would not like to participate for too long or share whats might be coming up if I would get constantly attacked. Hopefully new forum system will improve this so UT members can participate more without getting needlessly attacked by these certain type members.

 

Frankly, the above is not professional behaviour. I have not seen bad behaviour in this thread. I have seen passionate customers raising legitimate concerns and voiced criticism. I thought you wanted honest feedback. This is not personal for me, nor for others I would guess but I obviously am not speaking for them.

We (as in me and my colleagues here) have been using Unity for a long time. We are not new to either Unity as a product nor new to software development. As such we have seen the product develop over quite some time and think there is and have been a problem of focus. If you chose not to accept that point of view and take it into consideration but instead respond like you have in this thread (and you = more than one Unity rep) it really does not give me more confidence in Unity as a future solution for us. And that is in no way a rhetorical blurb, it is my honest reaction after reading and taking part in the last few pages of this thread.

 

Honestly, I don't see the problem. Unity needs new features to stay relevant. They also need to fix existing bugs. Some bugs have workarounds in place already, some only affect a couple of users, some are fairly major - of course they need to prioritize them.
There needs to be a balance between fixing bugs and pushing the tech forward. The new SE team is responsible for restoring this balance.

I have yet to run into a bug that I haven't been able to work around - With 600,000+ (active?) users, 16,000 bug reports is pretty low considering the number of people who are using the system in different ways.

I think UT are doing a great job - and the Sustained Engineering team was created because we weren't happy having to wait for bug fixes. It sounds like they're listening to their community, this thread is evidence of that.

Perhaps an Open Beta/Release Candidate would help? Then we (as a community) could look at the new features and offer suggestions/improvements/bug reports before the final version is shipped?

 

Something I would really like to see, as far as the asset store goes, is that when you import an asset, it goes to a specific folder, not just where ever the creator wanted to to go. It always drives me nuts that these assets are all over the place, and there is no rime or reason for their directory structures.

 

We don't all think that way - this kind of thing happens in any industry, and I know how demotivating it can be. At the end of the day, everyone's opinion is valid but sometimes I feel respect gets thrown out the window.

The majority of us here really do appreciate the amount of time you (and others) have spent in this thread (and in other posts) trying to communicate more - try not to take the few negative comments too personally.

 

To reiterate, the most serious problem and what got me into this discussion in the first place is the perceived lack of interest in communicating with non-enterprise pro users. I have filed numerous bug reports in the past, even with repro cases, and the general feeling is that 1) feedback takes way too long 2) fixing is not something you can rely on in any way that will help your current project. To us at least, that is a problem.

Then I must admit getting very annoyed at the statements about how bugs get prioritized when the implications were that the kind of bugs I usually report (more advanced scripting, not likely leveraged by many users) will likely not get any attention. Perhaps I should not have engaged in debate, but I honestly thought this thread was the place to express how we feel and for UT to listen. Not so sure about how that turned out.

My workday is long over and the weekend is here so with that, I bow out of this with the relative certainty that I have expressed how I feel about the current state and wishes for the future.

 

We all know Unity is a little rough around the edges, but in general we asked them to be more honest and open with us. Unity 5.0 isn't even out yet and people are jumping up and down on them. My team have our own qualms and issues with Unity as a whole, but this is how it goes in a professional environment: We give them feedback, if they don't choose to listen we move to the competition (Don't read into me saying you're un-professional that's not what I'm saying). I do agree with a lot of your points, if you pay for a product (Even software) you expect it to work for its intended purpose. If it doesn't it becomes a major problem in many ways...

What I am hinting towards is, let's all ease up a bit.

Unity: Whatever you do and I mean this with all due respect (Not trying to tell you how to do your jobs here) DO NOT release Unity 5.0 before it's ready.