Official: How Can We Serve You Better?

I disagree with the idea of going to a pure subscription model, I may not be a professional developer (in the sense that I have a day job that has nothing to do with games) but I'm a Unity pro user and I rather pay once... the problem is we don't have that, we have to pay more than once for every platform now and the price is high for every one of them, add to that having to pay for the new versions.

I think we just don't get enough bang for our buck...

 

Oh, and I should add (since Kondor reminded me in the above post):

I absolutely love the idea of going with a pure subscription model so that features and bug fixes can be released immediately when ready, rather than having to wait on major version updates. This would solve all kinds of issues that are currently happening.

That sounds fantastic. Any way to make such a system work would be quite desirable to me.

 

I'm part of a small (2 people) company that started with Unity in 2009. We do a mix of Unity work, Objective-C cocoa development, Cocos2D stuff, and custom engine work, often iOS. Most of our work is work-for-hire.

For us, the engine cost is probably pretty appropriate. We use Unity for about half our projects, but upgrade both our copies at the same time. The upgrade costs are kind of a bummer, especially since our clients tend not to want games that use the new fancy features. They're mostly 2D games, or even UI driven games that have an occasional 3D character.

Many people have mentioned bug turn around time- This is a fairly big deal to us. I feel if we find a bug, report it, and get it fixed... our contract will be over and done before the fix makes it to us. We've never been in a position where we can wait for a bug fix to get to us. Sadly, for this reason we basically stopped reporting bugs in ~2011.

We find ourselves writing native plugins for every single project. A lot of them center around iOS specific functionality or tying to other existing libraries.

Some sort of open source option would really be amazing for us. We've run into lots of simple bugs that we feel we could have fixed with minimal source changes (although yes, that's always easy to say when you haven't seen the source). We've needed to change some simple but specific Unity Time behavior... our changes wouldn't really be appropriate for the general audience, but would be a huge help for us.

I think open engine source would help a lot of our concerns with documentation. My current issue centers around AudioSource.GetSpectrumData.. There's an FFT in the Unity backend, and I understand your goals of providing as simple an interface as possible for beginner users. With source, we could figure out exactly what's going on there, and be able to extend it. I don't want to get too deep into technical details behind GetSpectrumData, just use it an example: The documentation doesn't answer many questions about what the function really does, (how is the complex number returned by the FFT being processed into the "spectrum" float, it doesn't mention it samples at AudioSettings.outputSampleRate, not the AudioSource.clip, it doesn't explain how to sample a specific location in a clip- and it doesn't allow you to sample a clip that isn't being played through an audio source.)

Improving that documentation would help, and source would help too. Source would answer all those questions and probably allow us an easy way to pass arbitrary buffered data to the FFT.

Maybe users who only program in Unity and only in C# wouldn't benefit, but there are many developers like us who would!

 

How can a pure subscription model have anything to do with the release of bug fixes and features?

A subscription models is a financial decision, the release of patches is a technical decision.

 

OKAY!

Seriously though, should we replace it? Or fix it?

 

Hello,
I'm at the head of the small indie studio Wild Factor, as well as the programmer and we are going to release an RTS game on Steam Early Access in few days (may 20th) called Freaking Meatbags. In the rush, but I take a few moment to answer this great thread!

- I made a first ios game download 360k times and It didn't paid back my unity licence ( pro + ios pro). I think the ios pro license should be priced lower.
I perfectly understand the business model. You can add as many palteform as you want because each time you can sell a new license.
But the ios pro version is clearly overpriced.

Like I said in previous thread 70$ is also overpriced for a subsciption model (+70$ for each paltform). But personnaly I like the one time buy.
From a business point of view, I will may switch to subscription if the price is right because it will give me more investement capacity for other things.

- Too many old things not fixed. For example
I never make undo/redo and manipulate prefab. Undo frequently crash the editor.
The edition of input is not in the user friendly standard of Unity. I can't access what key the player has assigned for the code. I think inputmanager need a little rework.

- You should buy asset from the asset stor to be include in Unity. It really feel like some basic feature are not developp becasue there is an asset in the asset store to do this.

- Nested prefab is probably a basic things. I was responsible of implementing this feature on a engine as big as Unity (used in AAA prod)
My guess is that it's probably a mess in your code and no one want to clean it... It's hard and boring and not glorious. No one want to do this instead of working on the latest GI renderer . But it's a feature that should have worked for years. Some did it on the asset store, you can do this also ?

- I have several years of experience and I was working at Ubisoft last Year. I'm also a big Fan of Unity.
My insight of the adoption of Unity by AAA company: I tried to push Unity when I was at Ubisoft. Well the main reason people argue to me is that they can't use unity when 50 people work with it, and I couldn't tell them they were wrong. Many times when I went to a local Unity users meeting, people talk about their difficulty with large assets and versionning etc.. That's goes to a point they think of switch to another engine. I really think that you should put has much effort in big team data management and collaboration that in the last GI rendering. I never myself experience Unity at more than 3, so I can't tell you what don't work.

- I really wish to have a pro service with "emergency bug fix". For example I'm near a deadline, I stumble on a bug. I'm will gladly pay 100$ for a 48H bug fix.
Of course if it's a complicate bug etc it may be more expensif or take more time. But I think having a solution/safty net is reassuring for every dev.
That's why people ask for the source code. They think that if you can't do it, they can do it themself.
That also a big concerned of AAA company. They can't wait for the version with a particular bug fix. They need to send the gold master to nintendo/microsoft/spny etc.. yesterday . Having the source code make them less dependent, and they can fix an engine bug at 4am before the E3. You should at least offer it, if the buyer buy more than 50 license for example
Having the source code is still a nice thing, even if I agree with you, it's a double edge sword.

Availability of prog on the forum: Well I think they should be more on the forum (1 hourper say is too much). This will make them a little more concerned by dev problem and more close to game production.
I also think that Unity should make their own commercial game (even little). Not that I like more competition, but I think some functionnality will get the right priority if internally, programmer had to deal with their own tools Of course you shouldn't divid your team in two or you may end to also get an engine team far from the game production problems. These complete game may be used as example for users.

I'm also for a beta open to all pro user.
I really don't see why I can't access the beta when other can. Do they know people I don't know yet ?

But overall Unity made game dev somethin possible for individual like me. So thanks !

 

Seems strange that the number of official replies has been so low in my experience, then. But then I haven't been paying much attention over the last 12 months. All I would say is to make sure it's a bidirectional thing - escalating forum comments to devs is commonly done, but not everybody prioritises devs answering things on the forums directly.

 

Offer official integration with Visual Studio, that would rock.

 

MonoDevelop:

I've always used a newer version of Monodevelop (and now Xamarin Studio) than what came with Unity. The new Xamarin Studio is nice.. I still have problems, but fewer than in the past. I'm on 10.9.

I don't know if there are license concerns on that point.

 

Because how can you release features/bug fixes on an 'as they're ready' basis with the non-subscription system? You know, given that people have to pay to upgrade to use new features. Would they pay every time something new gets added, whenever that might be?

How do you work that? With a subscription model, you just release it whenever it's ready. People are paying each month for that service, then.

That is something I would definitely like.

 

@Kondor0, Andy.Korth

Thanks for posting. Comments noted.


@Wild Factor

There's a new undo system in Unity for a while now. Is it crashing for you? If so, can you submit a repo showing the bug? Nested prefabs needed a few changes/fixes and not just one and given how core it is to projects is something that's taking time to fix. Maybe too much time for sure, but we'll get there.

Other comments noted, thanks!

@Kylotan

We're discussing this week how we can get better at connecting devs to posts.

 

Unity is an amazing tool, a clear result of talented professionals working motivated for a long time. I really love to work with and I find Unity price more that justified for given power.

I work alone in free times (2, 3 hours per day) and managed to write a web game and an asset store script. I'm paying UnityPro upgrades and cloud server hosting with gains from both. So far so good.

My target is really web games. I understand all the hype over mobile but the style of games that I like to do and play (simulation/strategy/RTS) does not really fit well in mobile world and I really guess that few devices are so good for good games as keyboard+mouse+big screen. I can afford to think that way because game development is not what I do for live but what I do for fun.

That said, unfortunately, more and more I fell that web game dev is loosing space (?). I really expect that WebGL, html5 and asm.js change things back... For example, how hard is to get a Unity web game monetized. There is ONE service for ads in web games for Unity, all the rest is mobile only. Portals are a temporary solution but I guess that I could do best.

Could Unity Cloud include web support for advertise, cross promotion and help web developers to see some more success from their web creations? I mean, that are lot of creative, hard core programmers and artists out there, that can manage to start and finish a game, but not THAT good as publishers, marketers or without the means or knowledge to put games in front of players. Any help in that matter would be great!

 

Yes we could and we will. We recently acquired Everyplay and they have several of these services, and we have others on the way too. Combined, and integrated into Unity so it's easy to use, will help customers be more successful.

 

CTO of Freejam, developers of Robocraft

as F2P game we wouldn't choose a royalty based model. Currently we are using both stand alone license and subscription model. They are both fine.

3D multiplayer online game

You are too slow fixing bugs. The public tracking bugs list was a great idea, but very important bugs stay unfixed for several months. This diminishes trust from us as developers. This is a communication problem in the sense that bugs stays without feedback for way too long time.

Honestly open source would be great for other reasons, but mostly to overcome the limitations of the engine. Robocraft is quite a unique game, with special technical requirements. We had to face a large number of very serious limitations that often would have been much easier to overcome having the source code available. Some are even bugs reported, but never fixed.

Infrastructure for our game is essential. Unity could invest in a vast variety of services and infrastructure, but this is not really an issue, since there are several available. The perfect one does not exist though. We are talking about services like: payment system, cloud based services, CDN and so on.

 

Background
I'm a Chief Solutions Architect for a large financial company. I have 30 years programming experience... mostly in C++/C#

Gaming
Because I love coding I've always done projects in my spare time... historically websites. A year ago I decided to give game creating a try. I started with AndEngine on Android and Panda3D.... I was hooked when I found Unity... free engine with C# scripting.

Projects
Like many beginners my initial projects were too ambitious. A few months ago I shelved those projects and have been working on 2 smaller games... ( 2D and 3D in 2D space). One of them will be released this month and the other hopefully in June.

Pricing
I find a lot of value in the free version and it needs to stay. Right now I have no clue if i'll make a dime from my games so I don't want to invest too much into my tools yet.

I don't think $1500 is to much for Pro. However... the mobile addons are to much unless they add significant mobile only features.

I wouldn't do a subscription unless it was super cheap because I never know month to month how much time I will have to allocate to developing.

I'm not a big fan of royalties however I have no issues with having to pay more if you hit certain levels of sales.

Biggest issues
GUI - So critical to a good looking game and so painful to use. I've spend more time on that then on gameplay. I bought NGUI which produces nice a GUI but again I'm having to spend why too much time learning it.

Terrain - When I was working on a 3D game I was spending way too much time and money on Terrains and never really got it right. TerrainComposer, LG3D, WorldBuilder, Toms tools... so much money and time wasted for something that is integral to most 3D games.

Visual Studio Integration - I did purchase UnityVS but I feel this should be build in.

Best Assets
Asset store - I'm not an artist so I have to rely on the Asset store for many things. As a beginner I've purchased several scripting addons that have saved me hours. I've been burned a couple of times by buying buggy, non-supported assets but since source code was included I was able to get decent use out of them. The sales work... more then once I've bought items on sale just because I think I might use them in the future. I'm still pissed off that I missed the 2Dtoolkit sale even though I don't have a project for it right now.

UMA - One of the things that stopped me in my large 3D game was knowing I had no solution for my characters. UMA will be a godsend when I go back to that game. I wish Unity would partner more often with developers on large addons like UMA.

 

I'm software engineer (C++) but in non game business. I'm making games only as side-project in my spare time, mainly 2D.

The price for unity in the state it is now is a bit high. But I would have no problem buying it if I know that if I encounter some showstopeer I could solve it myself or could get the fix in couple of days.

In my opinion making the SDK (which unity is) as subscription could work only if you're constantly making the upgrades and not using major/minor version as upgrades. Maybe it could cooperate somehow but I think the terms of use could be a bit complicated. A like the Unreal Engine 4 subscription, that is you could pay for month, then cancel subscription and resume anytime. But I would also like to have some choice for royality free option. I'm using free edition but I wouldn't mind spending the money for the pro subscription if it has good terms of use.

Now I'm working on 2D games. I know that 2D were only added recently but I think some really basic stuff is missing there (but it could be all solved with 2D toolkit and I think that you *should* use at least 2D toolkit to get some more complex project done).

I know a lot of stuff has been written already but I want to emphasis it..

The bugs are a real troubles here. There are a lot of bugs which aren't being solved (or are being solved and are solved but aren't incorporated in the updates - On other side most of the bugs I have reported should has been fixed (sometimes mutliple times ) and should apper in the next release). I do think more time should spent on the bugs already filled and features that are half-baked. From what I read (and have used by myself - but not all features have I used) a lot of new features that were introduces in 4.x are half-baked and can only be used in some simple demos (You try it in more complex scenarion and either everything gets messy/complicated or you hit some serious shortcomming of the feature). And I was hoping that these features would be finished throught the 4.x cycle but it looks the don't.

Also I think annoucing some "new hot feature" as somethinh "super-awesome" while having some serious bugs in unity to be a lame. When you're making some serious more complex project, these bugs show ups and you must make hacks on hacks to get it on some working state for the price of the bad software design, time, etc.

The API could be more robust and complete. A lot of API functionality is missing, a lot of documentation of the API is missing or is out of date. I do think that for instance MSDN documentation is somehow good where for each API functions you have described each parameter, return values, detail description what it does and most important the example and output from the example. Also having the user comments could be good. I would also welcome the C++ API as an alternative to the C#.

As a greggman (hope I spelled it correctly) posted, there are a lot of noobs questions like "I wanna be developer how I make a game?" which then hides really interesting questions in forums and are burried then. I think this should be solved at some time to let the people somehow know which questions are advanced, which are noobs. I think also that the problem is also in which sense is unity propagated. It is propagated like everyone could now make a game and that it is super simple and you only need some scripts and graphics and you're done. And then the lot of people come here and they post this questions like "How to create my game" and "Give me a script for the health" etc.

Also I want to note (and was noted in other threads by Eric5h5) that open source != source access (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source) Making unity open source isn't going to happen any time soon I think.

In my job I prefer open source libs instead of proprietary ones because I have control over the code and when I need some feature or need to fix some bugs I can do it instantly and then push/discuss the patch upstream. Having the source access to the unity would be good but I don't know how hard it would be to fix some serious bug. But in any case having source acces is not bad.

Also would be great if unity could provide nightly/weekly builds for some testing.

Thank you

 

And Sublime text

I would nevertheless try to fix Monodevelop too. Unity relys at Mono, right?

Another thought. Why limit yourself to one editor at all? Some uses Visualstudio, some uses Sublime, some uses Notepad ++, and so on. There are even some oldtime users like me who are still stuck with Uniscite. The logical step is to make them all as integrated as possible. No unhappy bunnys anymore

But yes, this needs resources. So when it's an either or thing then fix Monodevelop.

 

Hi, Ralph (Hauwert), one of the scripting team chiming in to outline our thinking about 2 common subjects in this thread.

On Monodevelop (@Kylotan @Ares @Gizmocracy @Amazingrus @eskimojoe @Shadowk @dkoontz).

While with Unity 4 we upgraded the monodevelop version we ship (https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/MonoDevelop/), that version does indeed have bugs on itself. Currently, because our integration for Monodevelop isn't contained in an add-in, upgrading to a newer MD costs quite a bit of time every time. To address this we will be (and are) investing in a path that ultimately brings us to an add-in only integration for MD, which in turn means that we only need to keep compatibility with the latest monodevelop on the add-on area and not porting our changes in MD itself too. There are some steps required and we are not there yet, but this is the plan.

Furthermore, experimentation and work is underway into making unity more of a host in terms of IDE integration; we are still in the early phase here, but the intent is that integration for project/solution updates becomes better and things like firing off the unity compiler from an outside IDE becomes more of an "api".

On Mono (@Chariots @Nanity @Breyer @eskimojoe @seon)

Coincidentally, we are working on an in depth blogpost about our (exciting) future for the scripting runtime in Unity. While I'd love to give you details here, the reason we are doing the blogpost is because there we have the space to outline exact and clearly what we are doing. It should be up over the next couple of days. We've been waiting to talk about this for quite some time and we think you'll be exited with us.

 

@sebas77, AndyLL, Trigve

Thanks for your posts. Comments noted.

I'm off to bed, it's late here. I'll be back tomorrow Other Unity peeps in the Americas or Europe may still reply though so keep posting ;-)

 

Visual Studio Debugging... That's all I need right now.

And I know that it's not simply done, but please support a higher version of mono. I want to use Tasks for many things, but I simply can't...

 

Thanks for doing this! May I ask if you could share some feedback about comments on page 9 please? (It seems to have gone under your radar )

Good night!

 

Hi Unity

First I would like thank you guys for this thread.

I'm speaking as the front man of a team of 10 people (mix programmers and artists).

* I think Unity Pro is not expensive considering what you get for the price and in fact I think the discussion about "how much should cost?" or "subscription model yes/no?" should be more oriented to "which set of features are include in the editor?".


* I'm agree to people said that it would be super-nice to have a public roadmap on Trello where community could vote for features.


* Regarding console development: I think what Unity is doing (free or close to free on almost all platforms) is really a value, a big value at my opinion!....and I hope that will continue and where possible it will evolve covering more and more platforms.


* I personally feel 2 things would make Unity even better: a node-base shaders editor (like Shader Forge) and a better Mecanim support....Mecanim is awesome but there still too many obscure points that prevents to use all its potential: often I had to use a Generic Rigging system because Humanoid was not working with my characters; it would be a problem on my characters skeleton setup but I had no clues about how to solve it.

In fact one of the biggest value of Unity and his forum is exactly the community! and so have Unity engineers jump on the forum from time to time and get some hints would probably be a invaluable thing and it can help out the community to get even more from Unity engine.
Create more advanced and "pro" content projects! that probably won't be immediately useful for everybody but it would empower medium/pro users.
I understand that everything comes with a cost so here what I think:


* About opening the source code: I think really few people will take the source code, mod-it, building and use it in a real professional context...the reason of that is intimately linked to the reason why a team is using Unity: create and maintain technology is a full time job...so either you do that or you code your game.
From a didactic point of view it would be interesting study the game engine but I never forget Unity is a company and it's not a charity entity.
Probably the only real reason why it could be useful get access to the source code, it would be related to a specific issue that need to be solved quickly and it cannot wait the first release cycle. In that situation have access to the source code, it could allow to understand better the problem and create a workaround in the game side (or understand better what it's going on on the game code).


* About communication: as I professional programmer I would love to have more and more opportunity to get in touch with engineers and talk and exchange opinions about my "headaches". Ideally I would really love to have meetup meetings all around the world...I'm from Italy and I rarely see Unity Tech Days or sort of.
I understand that I'm asking something not easy to handle.
If I can dream...it would be great if we could see "rise" a sort of "third-party professional evangelist" group of people...a pool of super-expert people from the developer community that can directly interact with Unity engineers and "spread the verb", help other developers, have something like this on all the countries....be a sort of "unofficial voice".


Looking to the near future, Unity 5...I'm confident that many things will improve...for example physics and clothing support should definitely improves with the upgrade to PhysX 3.3 and there are so many things like this on the new major release.

 

@PolishRenegade

Thanks for your post and thoughtful comments. Noted I don't have any specific replies at the moment to your points.

 

Long-time Unity user here (looks like my forum join date is 2006, oof). I ran Flashbang Studios for 8 years, which was a 4-6 person indie dev best known for the blurst.com series of experimental web games, and currently part of a two-man team making Aztez. Couple random thoughts on things:

- I actually can't speak to learning Unity anymore. We've been using Unity so long that I just accept the "Unity way" of doing a particular something as just the way things are. I've internalized a lot of broken stuff, or tasks that require heavy workarounds, to the point where I don't even see them anymore. So when it comes to writing more documentation, especially for newcomers, I think the best bet is to find someone who adopted Unity full-time recently (~6 months?), while their initial confusion is still fresh.

- On the communication front: I don't spend much time in the forums today. In the old days, I used to at least skim the title of every single thread. That stopped when Unity got popular enough that forum traffic massively increased and started seeing lots of recurring newbie questions. Like many of the older users, I'm probably more active on the alpha/beta/etc lists than I am on the forum. (I still skim every thread title in those groups). A lot of those discussions are very transient, though, and difficult to reference publicly.

- If we were a bigger team, we could have someone specifically tasked to keep an eye on developments in the forums and elsewhere and basically stay on top of tips and tricks. As a sole programmer, though, I can't do this. I would love to see an official Unity Twitter account or something focused on curating the high volume of forum traffic for me. The current @unity3d account is very marketing-driven, and a strange mix of announcements, hype, with sometimes retweets for neat Asset Store packages or tech things. It's trying to sell Unity more than talk to existing developers. There needs to be a super technically hardcore account that retweets, links to forum threads, etc (random example being techniques like this: http://pastebin.com/mG9diBfG).

- Many of the documentation efforts seem geared towards selling Unity, too (which totally makes sense!). Strong intro documentation is super important stuff. But at the same time, official efforts along the lines of http://unitypatterns.com/ would be great for current developers, especially language features and things that weren't around when I first learned Unity (generics weren't even available when I learned Unity, for instance).

- On costs: I think Unity actually feels less expensive the bigger you get for a team. Salary cost is always the biggest pain; that number grows a lot faster than license costs as you grow. As a two-person team, though, something like a 5.0 bump is a little bit painful. There's also the weirdness of sitting on Flashbang's six licenses, most of which have stalled at various points (one or two might be 2.x, some are in 3.x, some have iPhone addons, etc). There's no real way to cash those in or sell them or anything.

- This is probably a rare issue, but upgrading a project from Unity 2.x to current is surprisingly painful! (More so because our Blurst projects are actually JavaScript). We did this to some for Mac App Store releases, and also just to play around with Oculus support, and it hurts a lot. I'd love to upgrade the rest of them to 5.0 to try for an HTML5 upgrade, but it's probably a week or two per project, and with 8 projects...

- Along those lines, whatever stubbornness has kept UnityScript the official language all this time: Ouch.

- It's frustrating to see whole systems stagnate for multiple versions. Shuriken is one example: There are a lot of longstanding Shuriken issues, but more generally--particle systems are a big part of a game's look and feel! And the fact that Shuriken isn't being updated and improved alongside other big systems is crazy. Input Manager is another good example, but to connect the two--please don't ship a new Input Manager without keeping a developer on it for at least a whole major version cycle!

 

Hey, it's nice to see Unity here to actually talk to us. Here are my two cents on how I think Unity could remain competitive and become a friendlier engine to larger scale games:

Background

I'm a Software Engineer by trade, programming since I was a teenager and doing it professionally for over 8 years now. I work for a children's hospital, creating Apps, Websites, Windows and Mac applications to support the hospital as needed. I also create telemedicine software for them. I have used Unity on one of their projects, as a way to create a simple multi platform desktop application (using NGUI to create an UI to mimic an application UI).

As my "2nd job" which pays me nothing right now, I have been working on a game called Rebirth which was green lit on Steam last August. It started as a hobby project and has quickly grown into a full fledged endeavor with a team. It's first person sandbox survival horror game that uses procedurally generated environments (right now interior only, terrains are on the roadmap). It has some pretty cool mechanics we aren't ready to unveil as we have kept development pretty secretive until we feel the time is right.

My main pain points with Unity during this project:


* Cannot merge Scenes or Prefab files with source control. This means that if I change a scene and someone else does too, we have no way of consolidating and one person loses all their work. Very bad. Games are collaborative endeavors, we need an engine built with these basic ideas in mind.

* Nested Prefabs are not supported and the engine does not want you anywhere. I had to spend weeks re-doing work when I realized my prefab instances were broken due to this. Unity encourages a prefab workflow so prefabs should work as users expect them to. I ended up rolling out my own system for this, but because my scripts are all written with Unity's default behavior as an expectation, this now means I need to do additional work to make sure things work as they should. It's worse even to hear that nested prefab support won't even be in 5.0, which means I probably will never use them for my current project where they are sorely needed.

Use case: Modular asset creation. Placing prefabs of items/furniture/etc within a "room" prefab in unity, then creating a prefab of said room to reuse elsewhere later. If I update a piece of furniture later and update it's prefab, the prefab's changes do not propagate to the furniture inside said room prefab, thus requiring a lot of manual labor

* Too much reliance on Asset Store. I like the asset store, there's some great things on there and I've bought quite a few. The problem is that Unity is lacking in so many features as an engine that are basically needed for a high fidelity games these days, that we NEED the asset store to create a good game, or spend the time developing it all ourselves. This is mostly in contrast with other engines that provide such things out of the box (IE: UE4 shader editor, GUI, Networking, Image effects/shaders, Terrain System, AI Pathfinding, etc). The worst part of this is the feeling that because Unity gets a cut of the profit from these asset sales, there's no incentive for Unity to fix these issues. This is a bad thing for us because it means your engine license cost isn't the entire cost of the engine as you'd expect, you need to purchase essentially "Mandatory" assets from the Asset Store to get Unity to the same level as it's competitors (who are currently much cheaper for a hobbyist).

* Unity's workflows all favor static, baked levels. With a game using heavy procedural content, this has been a big pain point for me. I cannot use Beast or Umbra, I cannot use your pathfinding, in fact, a lot of Unity's built in features are unusable to me because of it. I had to create my own procedural culling system for my game (which is working great now) but these are the sort of things that took me months of development time that I would have rather spent on gameplay and design. It would definitely help to have more thought put on procedural content in future releases. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would benefit.

In general really the core thing is this. Look at the Asset Store and see the top selling plugins. Then implement those into the engine. The plugins people buy on the asset store should not be a "must have" unless it's a very niche game you are making. An asset like "Fluidity"? That's the kind of asset you should get from the store. Pathfinding? This should be built into an engine these days, there are very few games that do not require proper pathfinding in this day and age.


* Price.I know you guys say "other people think the price is fine" but it's likely those other people have already bought the engine prior to the recent news about the UE4 changes. A product's perceived value is a function of the product's quality/price in comparison to other products. You guys are looking at UE4 and from the perspective of a developer I see more value in UE4 as things stand. UE4 comes out of the box with a lot of features we had to buy for Unity from the Asset Store. The license is much more affordable for hobbyists trying to break into the industry. What you get is amazing for the money, including source code! The 5% hit is not a factor for the types of people who care about the cost of the engine to begin with. People who claim Unity is "Cheap" are not the people that are leaving in droves to UE4 due to their pricing changes. The people leaving are the people whose 5% cut is fine because for that to be a significant amount of money it implies they have made a hit game.

Unity definitely needs to improve it's price in relation to competitors. Unity free is not really competing with UE4, they are not in the same ballpark at all. Personally all things remaining the same, our team is likely to pursue UE4 after our current project simply because we see it as a proven engine for Big Games (which we like to work on) with good features and IQ out of the box for a much cheaper price than Unity at the moment.

*Threading/Multicore support. Currently we can use .NET for things but we can't interact with the Unity API. Unity games are notoriously bad about multicore usage, game communities have already seen it and are growing to hate Unity games because of it. I would like more threading and multicore support to be built into the engine so developers can have an easier time with multithreading.


About source code

I think Unity should still release updates. But I don't see why putting the source code out there would stop you from doing that anyways. Release the code and let the community fix and improve things. Then Unity can pick out features and fixes from the community and integrate it into the "official build" and release it. People who need to customize the engine can then download the chunks of code from updates that they want while keeping their custom code, or they can choose to just work off their branch entirely.

 

Perhaps is too early to ask this, but if there's a change on the Unity business model / licensing...

what would happen to people with active subscription plan still within the first 12 months of the obligated period? would that change/update to the new model? or will be stuck with the current plan until the first period ends?

 

I am a double user of Unity. I am a solo game developer, and a part-time University lecturer in Games Computing.

Having been a game designer since the 90's, I went indie a few years ago, but while waiting for the programmer to finish his work (he never did), I learnt to program and use Unity so that I could do another game all by myself. I have earned some money with Unity, but I am still in the camp that thinks Pro is too much.

If Pro included all the mobile platforms for $1500, that feels a more reasonable price, or $50 a month for the subscription to all platforms. 12 months seems a reasonable lock-in for the subscription, but maybe offer a higher priced option without the lock-in. This is speaking as someone who isn't in the position to purchase Pro just yet, but hope to be able to soon.

The Free option should remain. A lot of potential users are unsure of if it is for them. Any money at the start is a big barrier.

There is a big step from Free to Pro, with many in the gap between the extremes mentioned in this thread. I hope there is space for some other options. Here are some suggestions:

Option to buy individual Pro features on the Asset Store (or groups of features from those that are inter-dependent). Of course the cost of buying all features would be more than buying Pro, but maybe 70% of the cost of features bought could be discounted from a future Pro purchase.

I can see tracking royalties as being a nightmare. Instead, have a Unity publishing option (separate to Unity Games) that is open to all, subject to minimum standards. Developers can use Pro features for here only, except Unity branding must be prominent on loading and menu screens. Unity publishes and takes a cut before passing on money to the developer. Collecting at source seems more feasible than collecting many small sums from around the world.

On to the development platform. My biggest gripe with Unity has been that new features have had different interfaces and ways of working (I'm thinking of Shuriken and Mechanim here) to the rest of Unity. I wish there was more consistency. I still use the legacy particle system, partly for the features it has, but partly because of usability.

I could go on, but it would be too much for a fast moving thread. But it is great to see more Unity staff popping up on here. It is just like it was when I joined the forums.

 

Thats a good question.


Having a minimum subscription contract lengths that are long may scare some people away. And what about the ones who hit a really hard bump in life and say, lose their job (hence can no longer afford to pay), or something else that will impact their subscription contract length. Will UT punish them for breaking out of that lengthy subscription contract? And is UT really wanting to put time into doing stuff like that?


I say make the subscriptions on a rolling-3-month interval, and after the person has paid the same amount as purchasing an actual license, they get to keep that license. For cancellations, let them cancel at the end of each of the 3-month intervals and store the amount paid as "credit" so that if in the future they decide to renew their subscription and start paying again that amount credited can be counted towards reaching the license price. That way Unity wins, and the purchaser wins.

 

First, thanks for this thread!

I’m a hobbyist who has published a couple of C#/XNA games on Xbox a while back and had a blast doing it. A while after it was clear that XNA was going to die, I starting playing with Unity. That’s been just over a year. I absolutely love that I can continue to code in C# and essentially .NET.

I’m developing an action space RPG with robust Oculus Rift support, which is going to take some time to complete, but I sure am having fun with the process. Right now, it's PC-oriented, but I've love to publish to consoles too. Recently, just to experience the “this is what it feels like to finish a Unity game”, I made a quick, simple 2D game and published it for free on Android and iOS. It was surprisingly fun to do.

I was used to being able to do things like render textures and post-processing effects with the free XNA framework, so I eventually worked up the nerve to spend the $1500 and get Unity Pro. I’m glad I did, as shortly after that the Oculus Rift dev kit was available, and that currently requires Pro. I justify expenses like that as just part of the hobby.

I’ve also spent my share of money on the asset store, but I see it as a positive, as it’s enabled the scope of my game to go beyond what I’d have time to do on my own.

My hope is that the promise of “every Xbox One is a dev kit” will come to pass and that publishing to that platform will be accessible to somebody like me. I’d also love to be able to publish to PS4 as a platform, especially if Sony releases their VR product, as my game would be very well suited for that, but I’m not sure how hobbyist-friendly Sony is.

In terms of “How can we serve you better?”:

Pricing

I personally have no problem with the current pricing model, but I realize I don’t quite fit the norm. My plan is to stick with simple 2D games on mobile as quick breaks from my big game, so I don’t need any licenses beyond the core Pro license.

I pre-ordered the Unity 5 upgrade the day the pre-order was available. $600 for the upgrade feels very fair to me. I like the fact that I don’t have to deal with tracking royalty payments, if I do choose to charge something for my larger game.

It does seem that there needs to be better mobile Pro licensing options for those that need it though.

Features

As others have mentioned, one of the big holes in functionality that I wish was discussed more is the input system. For those of us doing PC/console games, it’s kind of a mess. I own the cInput and InControl assets, which both address part of the weaknesses as well as they can (ideally, if the features of both were combined, it would get us pretty far). What I would like to see is an opening up of the input API so that asset makers can do more. Right now, all we can do is build wrappers on top of the current system, which has multiple issues. Ideally, if there was an API that allowed remapping of controls and robust gamepad support, that would go a long way. The solution of popping up an ugly OS-native dialog box before the game launches is just embarrassingly bad.

In general, I think I’d like to see more API access to features and to enable more programmer-oriented options on existing features. Not only does that give game developers more freedom, but it allows asset developers to do more. The idea of offering Unity source code to tweak came up, but I think that’s going to far in the other direction. That could fragment things even more.

I use Visual Studio, so it’d be nice to have integrated debugging. I know there’s an asset on the asset store that enables that, but it’s a little expensive and you never quite know what you’re going to get in terms of stability.

Service

I’d like to see more focus on helping developers “connect” with console development. There are hobbyist and indie options available right now, but gathering information on what’s available can be tough. Like there’s a PSM platform that allows Vita development without needing a dev kit (I think?).

Now part of the problem is that companies like Nintendo are so weird with NDA’s that you can’t really talk about much at all. I didn’t know how expensive the Wii U dev kit hardware was until I was approved as a developer. That’s backwards. That’s not Unity’s fault, but still, it seems like there should at least be some basic info out there. Maybe Unity could have a console “portal” with very basic information how what platforms are appropriate for hobbyists, small indies, large indies, and AAA. And maybe Unity could even help to encourage the console companies to be a tiny bit more open.

 

I'm a full-time software developer (C#) who goes to university part time. I work on games with my nephew a lot, he is an artist and musician. He's also a student. I have worked on games as a hobby for quite a few years now, its how I got into programming in the first place. I studied game development in community college. I live near Philadelphia so there is a great game dev/unity community here (Philly Game Forge, IGDA Philly, game jams etc). I have learned quite a bit, but I still haven't released anything I'd call finished. I'm working on fixing this by working towards actually shipping a small polished game. I want to know what its like to set up a small business and ship a game.

I think the Unity Pro software license is reasonable for the most part.When adding platforms and assets things seem to get expensive, at least to someone who doesn't have experience shipping a game before. For example the game I am working on now I'd like to publish on PC first. We're using FMOD Studio. It's the tool we wish have existed for years, and its free just like Unity! But It's a native plugin for Unity support. I'd need Unity Pro just to use this native plugin on PC. I could release the game on Android or iOS with no extra cost but this particular game is an action game, it benefits from having a physical controller. That seems like a strange feature limitation to me. Unity is hardly the most expensive thing in the world, but one one-off feature might be the difference between spending $0 dollars and spending 75$ a month for a year / $1500 dollars? I would see things differently if I had released a game already and knew it was making money, but I know there's no guarantee you'll make any money your first game. If a license could delay me having to spend money until I actually make some, that would be great and I think in a lot of the cases Unity works exactly like this. I think subscriptions are great as an option. I'm not sure if they are better, just different.

I'm interested in all sorts of games and I started playing games on consoles so of course I want to develop for consoles! (and PC, and mobile, and handhelds )

I love the new Unity 2D tools. The game I'm working on now is 2D gameplay wise, we still might use 3d models though. The best game jam game I worked on was 2D (right before the 2D tools came out). I like completely 3d games as well, but I'm trying to avoid that kind of complexibility at the moment.

I don't need access to the source myself but if it it made it so there would be more frequent updates that would be a welcome change. Like others have said you guys make small fixes all the time that we all have to wait for. I have a bug in my game that will only be fixed when the next release comes out. It pretty much broke the entire game until I found a workaround. :? Having to download an entirely new installer for these changes would be a hassle though. If you had auto-updates, I'd opt-in.

One thing I'm concerned about in terms of shipping a product that may at some point need Unity Pro is how many licenses I would need? (For both Unity Pro and paid for assets from the Assets Store) It benefits everyone in a small team to be able to work in the same Unity Editor, but does that mean a team of 3 all need licenses? This could be a question for elsewhere buts its something I wonder about.

Anyway, I'm really happy with Unity and I can't wait to see what you guys do next!

 

Infos

Im a beginner in game making. I made my first multiplayer FPS with free Unity in the end of 2013 and I love your software because it's very easy.
Now im learning three.js for challenge and curiosity.

Thoughts

It would be useful to have more basic shapes and a modelisation tool integrated in Unity instead of using Blender or something else aside, for little computers or people who want to have an all-in-one solution and not have to learn an other software.
And a little texture painter like Gimp.

-----

In free assets, it would be cool to have a simple customizable character with a lot of movements blended (hit with a blade, shoot with a gun etc).

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There aren't enough tutorials above all written...
For some network users, we have to use Photon. And there is also a lack of tutos with this service.

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Thx for your work.

 

I'm not so sure that a lot of the API docs are completely missing or out of date but I would definitely agree that there are a lot of script ref pages that have far too little information. Having said that, if you know of any classes that appear to have missing pages then please let us know.

We've expanded some of the API docs for the forthcoming 4.5 release but there is still a long way to go and this will be a main focus for the doc team this year. We will be using automated techniques to detect pages with short text and missing sections and this will be the basis of a methodical approach to improving the script reference.

 

Since word is bibbinator is planning to look back on Page 9, I'll not restate my previous ideas, but I have some more to tack onto the list:

6) Input Manager could use some work. I've taken the liberty of recently writing my own replacement, because the default Input Manager does not support rebindable controls. This is a major oversight, since customizing controls is important for general usability. It also helps reviewers write better reviews about your games - if you look at any of TotalBiscuit's 'WTF Is' videos, you'll notice the first thing he does is dives right into the Options/Settings menus and comments on what you can alter to suit your own tastes. I realize that at the time the Input Manager was written, user customization may not have been considered a big deal, but now it is. Modifying the Input Manager to be modifiable means that we can more easily focus on writing our games, and not writing custom input managers that allow control rebinding.*

*: We still have to provide the GUI, and frankly that sucks. Of course, I don't think any developer here worth their salt expects a 'Summon Settings GUI' button in Unity 5, so don't worry about the GUI. Just the manager!

 

I'm an arty geek who actually study English at university rather than computer sciences, but I love games and I nurture a little dream to make awesome games. Maybe there will be a place for English-students in game-making in the future, eh?

So, I've been with Unity for a couple of years to learn how to make games – not necessarily to learn Unity. I think it's important to make that distinction. I'm fairly engine agnostic at this point. Up to this point I've been with Unity mainly because it's flexible and affordable for me as a student. Free is good, right?

What I'm thinking now is that if I am going to learn, then I want to have access to as much functionality as possible, and then UE4 beats Unity. UE4 does cost money, but the price is fairly trivial, even for me as a student. I would then like to see, for my use case as a student of game making, Unity to give me Pro – even if it meant that you put a reasonable price tag on it.

I'm aware that I wouldn't need most stuff in Pro, but I don't yet know which bits I won't need, and I wouldn't like to be able to learn things up to a point and then find that I can't learn more because of limitations of Free. I hope I'm making myself clear. When I started to learn a year ago, I thought I wanted to be a coder, and I learned C#. Now, however, I'm having much more fun doing art stuff. The arty geek in me is peering out here. If I had known a year ago that I would switch “sides”, and found that the art side would me shut off for me because of license limitations, it would have been pretty bad.

But thanks for starting to talk to us. That's what I've missed.

 

Noob! ;-)

We're conscious of a bit of "hump" that new users still have to get over when learning Unity so for the time being, introductory docs will indeed be our priority. However, advanced docs are still important and we would be pleased to hear from experienced users about things that could benefit from more detailed treatment in the manual. Would you say that language features are something we should draw attention to on Unity's side? There are certainly plenty of C# resources around but maybe seeing them in a Unity context would help make the usage of new language features clearer.

 

Unless you are on OS X. I still use unitron due to not liking the way Monodevelop works such as getting code completion popups I rarely needed and had to dismiss to continue typing. Why does it take alot longer to compile a small change to a script when Unitron does it almost immediately?? Why open every single script when I am working on one or two only at a time? On those few items I needed to reference the scripting API for I just highlighted the text and hit the docs button and it took me to the right page. Now it does not work and I have to open the docs and manually search for the function.

-R

 

This is a phenomenal thread. Thank you everyone for your honest insights which clearly have taken time and effort to write!

This is the place to do it. Please, share your thoughts on what we can do to improve the asset store!

 

Hi,
Thanks for starting this discussion and I hope you are able to read this message in due time. I have a subscription and I am working on a 3d game for PC with a couple other people. I believe that Unity offers some great features to indie developers but falls behind "other" engines in other areas. In my opinion the following are ideas you guys should investigate to stay ahead of the competition.

1. Full License price: I think you should keep offering the full price of the engine for those who want it but include iOS, Android, PS4, Xbone ect in that price. There should not be separate costs to develop for different platforms.

2. Monthly Subscription: I believe you should offer a subscription that is $29 a month that requires logging in to use. If someone cancels their subscription they should lose access to unity.

3. Rent to Own Subscription: I believe you should offer a subscription for $75 a month that is a binding contract (cannot get out of) but at the end of the contract the person owns a Full License. This would help people who want a permanent license pay for one without using a lump sum.

4. Do away with Unity Free after Unity 5. Possibly make Unity 4 Pro free with at 15% royalty. Unity 5 should require a subscription or license.

5. Upgrade your terrain system to include tesselation, parallax mapping, terrain holes, normal maps, etc without having to use a external asset.

6. Upgrade your post processing effects: We desperately need HBAO+ and other next gen effects added to the engine.

7. Create a graphical material editor on par with Unreal Engine 4. UDK and UE4 have probably the best material shader system out of all engines ever created.

8. Support dx11 and dx12 100% and brace for the mobile crash.


Now to answer your bullet points (Mine are in bold).

 

Hey all, I'm a Software Architect with about 18 years development experience, primarily in Java/J2EE world.

I have a slightly different take on what UT can do to make things better - focus more on helping developers bridge the gap from concept to implementation. As one of those who fall under the "hobby" developer umbrella, the biggest impediment to me is in investing time to use asset store packages or build the solutions myself.

If UT could focus some resources on picking popular asset store packages and helping those developers make them much more robust or integrating "game templates" into the fold that would be helpful. For instance, there are many different Third Person controllers floating around - from simple to parkour, but they are not very complete solutions. If I buy one of these kits, how does it work with my existing models/animations? How do we handle network synchronized animations?

Obviously a lot of this comes down to us building solutions, but to answer your original question here - what you can do to help is to identify the gaps between your core technologies and likely use cases. Mecanim is a great core technology that really takes us far to get animations under control and more easily build animation state machines. But where do you go with that? Once you get past making this really sexy animation graph and handle all sorts of cool movements, the actual work to apply it becomes very messy - polling animation states and trying to match up animation boundaries with actions or dealing with animation synchronization.

For me, something UT can really help with is focusing on bridging this gap - developing best practices and game templates which allow for a starting point at a much higher level. I'm not talking about your 3rd Person Demo here - what I'm looking for is a framework that provides RAD benefits to someone looking to prototype and quickly build to a milestone.

A great starting point would be a robust 3rd person package - not the old hardhat dude, but something that incorporate head look, foot placement, physics, aiming and ragdoll w/camera ... a nice clean solution which is optimized and allows for an integrated way of customizing it via the Unity IDE (Editor).

Anyhow, those are my thoughts - I think the core of Unity is solid and where the product is weakest and most open to competitive disadvantage is in the middle tier.

 

My name is Tiago, I'm a student from Portugal
I've been studying computer science for 5 years, i also started to learn programming there. I've been using Unity for a little over 3 years

I'm also making my own game by myself in my free time. You might know this game, since it's been in these forums for ever (3 years) called No Heroes, a realistic first person shooter which also has a very supportive community.

Lately, i've been feeling, lets say, a little disappointed that Unity focused so much on 2D, but i do understand that not everybody makes 3d games and the majority makes 2D games. I'm really happy that Unity 5.0 will be more focused on 3D games.

I would really like to see roadmaps. I like to see what's possibly coming in future releases and i think that's really important for people who want to buy Unity Pro. Knowing what's to come is something that everybody want's to know, but of course, it's normal that some things get delayed.
I also like to read technical blogs, i think it's very informative to see how everything works.

Personally, i don't really like subscriptions, but when you can't afford the full price, subscriptions are the second best thing.

For me, i'm okay with closed source and you guys fixing things with frequent updates. Of course it's not the same for others. Maybe making it more open but not totally open.
But with that in mind, it's really important for the Unity team to fix the majority of problems the developers report fast.

 

I think most of these are good ideas. I have a paid Pro license, but I think if there were free/cheap watermarked/ad supported versions with full image effects, you'd get a lot more "fanboy wars" where Unity fans make tech demos to show its graphical power vs Unreal, and having those demos out there is good for you guys and the rest of us. Broke teenagers can be a godsend as far as spending hours and hours working for free on something that will never make them any money but will look cool on youtube. You guys should take advantage of that and give them the ability to use Pro FX on their demos for publicity. An example: some random dude who rebuilt the whole Ocarina of Time zelda dungeon in Unreal just got front page on a whole bunch of gaming sites, with journalists ooing and aahing about how amazing the graphics are in UE4. Unity misses out on a lot of that because you put up an entry barrier that pretty much blocks poor teenagers with lots of free time but no plan for making money.

I'm currently working on both a 3D game (for almost two years) and a 2D game (for a few months) and the 2D game has been much easier to make, despite Unity being a 3D engine. I think it's mostly true that it's longer and harder to make 3D games; you also run into a lot more bugs in Unity because you end up using many more features. My 3D game uses Terrain, Substances, Physics, 3D positional audio, character controllers, etc., while my 2D game doesn't use any of that and is mostly just sprites and NGUI. Unity has a ton of bugs and gotchas in Terrain, Substances, and Physics that you will probably never run into if you are only doing 2D.

I would mostly like answers to a few of the big and consistently avoided questions. Though, to be honest, I probably won't like the answers and will yell at you guys about it. For example: "Are you ever going to actually update Mono, or are you just waiting and praying for some deus ex machina like the mythical Microsoft-Xamarin takeover to fix everything for you?" The answer I've seen over and over from Unity is "We understand that it is a big deal to some people" but that's a non-answer. I don't care whether or not you understand, I want to know if you're actually going to do anything about it and what that is. If the real answer is "We understand, but don't care, we're going to keep delaying and just hope that you guys put up with it" then I'd like to know that. It could at least open the doors to a third party to take over and try to create a solution, like UnityVS. Right now, no third party would risk trying to fix your Mono problem because there's a chance you guys might fix it yourself; if you said straight up that you are never going to fix it, someone else might jump in.

Subscription sucks; the reason that Unreal's subscription model is awesome is that you get to keep the software and use it even if you stop paying the subscription. If you did that, it would be great. It basically "forces" the Unreal devs to put time and effort into bug fixes and releasing updates in order to make the subscription valuable. If you have a contract-subscription whose income instead relies on your users being unable to finish their games in time and going over deadline, it actually has the opposite effect: Unity would be more profitable in the short term by ensuring bugs never get fixed and that development should always take as long as possible and go as far over estimate as possible.

No offense, but I'd say you guys actually are not doing a decent job of staying reasonably up to date. As mentioned above, your Mono implementation has not been touched in a decade. The terrain system has been stuck with bugs since Unity 1.0. Most of the bugs in your bug database are marked as "Won't Fix". I think Unreal's shared source is a great idea. You of course want to do what they do: the main branch is controlled by Unity and you only accept push requests when you know your devs have time to look over the bug fixes, but users could set up their own branch to fix the bugs that have been sitting around for years or the ones that you've said you won't fix; those branches wouldn't need any oversight from Unity, and users who use them would be at their own risk.

 

Ok, my bad, it's definitely not *lot of* but *some of*. I've a list with the missing doc, out of date docs, missing pages, etc but somehow couldn't find it now. Hope I find it soon.

 

sorry for duplicate question but i asked for Navmesh improvements.... this is still secret or Unity can elaborate on incoming improvment like @pierrepaul elaborated on Mecanim features?

BTW i made some comments/feedback on 8 page but no answer - i know u have a lot of people to answer and probably my post havent anything interesting but i only need know that my post was read?

 

As VS users here, me and some friends really were excited for UnityVS but it's not really any good IMHO, at least not for our development workflow. I think an official implementation we don't have to spend money on would be ideal.

 

@Breyer

my post on page 5 lists some of them - in addition i can mention that we did a lot general stability- and performance improvements lately.

 

Oh i missed these page thx for response. Then i have question: multi-scene-edit mean that i see change in all window if i change anything or this refer to only change navmesh? or i completely misread and its mean that we can have multiple scene View with completely different assets? (btw last feature could be useful for asset creator like in-Unity modelling software like GameDraw without any coding and trick with hiding unused assets in hierarchy and scene view)

 

Sandswept Studios here.
We are doing a procedural world and appear to use Unity in ways that it was not debugged for.

Our major issues are...

- Unity and Mono lockup and crash about 50 times a day, thus about 5 times an hour.
- It would be wonderful if the terrain collider could be used separate from the terrain rendering.
- We constantly create and destroy procedural meshes. This is very buggy and uses and leaks tons of memory. We hit 3 GB of ram very quickly.