[Official] Request for Unity Windows standalone platform feedback

Who Are You?
I am Asvarduil, a one-man band who has released three small projects, and a bunch of prototypes that have never seen the light of day.

What Kind of Game Are You Trying to Build
I'm working on Sara the Shieldmage, an eastern-style RPG for PC/Linux, with a trial version playable in the browser.

How Does Windows Player Fit Into That?
Windows player is one of my primary targets.

What Are The Good Things About Windows Player That You Like?
In my limited tests on my in-progress thin-slice, there's a lot of advantages above and beyond my previous webplayer target. For one thing, having access to file I/O so that I can create real game saves, and not use PlayerPrefs for everything save-related, is huge. Additionally, having no extra steps to playing the game is really nice.

What Are The Bad Things About Windows Player That You Don't Like?
It's less the player and more the editor default for a Windows Player project - the startup popup that prompts you for keybindings is a bit obnoxious. I think it should be turned off by default, because I think it makes the presentation of the application seem amateurish (it's not even an in-game settings prompt, it's a separate form! How 1990s!) That said, you can turn it off via the editor, so it's not as offensive as it could be.

How Could We Make It Better?
For right now, don't have the keybinding/resolution prompt appear by default - have if off instead. It's generally better for a game that we have the settings configurable within the game for presentation reasons; it's certainly what most gamers expect, and what some notable reviewers (e.g. TotalBiscuit) look for when evaluating a game.

 

Who are you?
Part of a two man team making indie games, as well as doing some contract work.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Currently, for standalone, a RPG and a city builder

How does Windows standalone player fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
For a desktop game, windows standalone is (the most) essential.

What are the GOOD things about Windows standalone player that you like?
Easy to build from Unity.

What are the BAD things about Windows standalone player that you dislike?
Input system.

How can we make it BETTER? What use-cases, features, workflows would you like to see?
* New input system with better support for re-binding
* It would be neat if Unity could build an installer/uninstaller as part of the build

 

Isn't that just having DisplayResolution Dialog set to Disabled?

 

Pretty much. Alternatively, it'd be cool if we could reskin the dialogue, similar to how The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim has done for its PC version.

 

Who are you?
Well I am Goat, not really but for the internet being a goat will suffice and is par for the course when the crowd with their pitchforks come...

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
...but anyway, at long last the HW & SW available today, for real, is sufficient to make games without a lot of addition programming, lots of staff, or lots of money (and I realize 'addition programming' is a subjective evaluation).

So given that; I make simple games using Unity Free and the Asset Store as the basis with plans to sub in my own art as I make something I like. Code wise, I don't plan to sub any Unity code or Asset Store code if I can help it but to supplement with my own code for hopefully somewhat more unique game play than Unity Free and Asset Store items integrated alone can do. I hope that each of the supplements that I have in mind wouldn't need to exceed 10,000 lines of code each but, well, that is a when it's done, it is what it is.

Well actually I've only published one to the Google Play, and the Amazon Store for PC & Android.

I don't know how to label the games I want to make as except 3D Arcade style. If you've seen the Looney Tunes Runner from Zynga like that but with more eventually more originality in game play then I or they currently have. Not so much the Looney Tunes IP although that's a good problem to have and I like their use of it in their runner.

How does Windows standalone player fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

The term use-case confuses me, it's been too long since I added a feature to a product as SW Engineer. If you mean the Windows Standalone Player my use case is a published game that I will be adding scenes to over the next year. Same also for the osX Standalone Player.

What are the GOOD things about Windows standalone player that you like?

I can say what I like about Windows Standalone (as with osX Standalone) is the quicker ability to test outside the Unity Editor. Also as I am going to build one large free game with different scenes and distribute it via the Amazon Store for Digital PC Games software download, Unity built to Windows Standalone is important.

With all the build and feature options available for the differing mobile and console platforms and the pitfalls of maintaining those differences I also use building and testing on Windows Standalone and osX Standalone as a basic check of correct functionality.

What are the BAD things about Windows standalone player that you dislike?

The input system. OK, the keyboard is OK, it is what's it's always been in every game I've ever played, but when someone tries to use the mouse to aim the viewport, it is awful. I typically, even for demos i'm interested in, will stop play of a demo within a minute if it involves mouse use for aiming the player/camera viewport.

How can we make it BETTER? What use-cases, features, workflows would you like to see?

I haven't tried it yet but I think it's already possible - to use touch in Windows Standalone would be nice. The other thing is I used InnoSetup 5.5.5 to create my game installer as the Amazon Store requires. It would be nice if Unity would make an installer and it include both 32 bit and 64 bit options to install the game.

Another feature is were Unity to make the Launcher have an optional Social Scoreboard integrated into FB or maybe Unity's own Social Platform or along those lines, but not information directly needed for current game play, if you see what I mean. I'm talking the icon area of the launcher.

Thanks.

Ciao

 

Who are you?
Shkar T. Noori, Lead Programmer at Kurdify Technologies,

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
currently working on a multi-platform game.

How does Windows standalone player fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Our main goal and main platform is the Windows Standalone player.

What are the GOOD things about Windows standalone player that you like?
fast build.

What are the BAD things about Windows standalone player that you dislike?

1. Not being able to build a project with both x64 and x86 in the same folder.
2. The error dialogs are not configurable...

How can we make it BETTER? What use-cases, features, workflows would you like to see?

1. Being able to build x86, x64 and (x86 & x64).
2. The debug mode should contain anexecute console for simple functionality { quit, fullscreen, mute....}.
3. Patch builds & Updates (currently using VisualPatch)

Thanks,

 

just had another thought and actual need for the Windows Standalone, being able to specify the game version, right now the executable shows the version of unity which the game was built on... so I hope you can implement that too.

 

Who are you?
Indie dev.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
MMORPG

How does Windows standalone player fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
It's everything. I'm building for windows, so this is a must.

What are the GOOD things about Windows standalone player that you like?
Most of it to be honest. It's Unity and it works fine, both as the client, and as a nographics server. Using Unity for both client and server ensures my physics, and terrain/model AssetBundles work on both happily.

What are the BAD things about Windows standalone player that you dislike?
The lack of a permanent patching system for MMO style patching. AssetBundles (uncompressed and cached) go somewhat towards what's needed, but it's not the easiest. I have to have a separate Unity project just to act as a Patcher that isn't full screen, and can patch the main project by downloading new AssetBundles and moving them to the Main Project's folder. This is not ideal, and horribly hacky. See GuildWars2 for the perfect example of how this should look and work.

How can we make it BETTER? What use-cases, features, workflows would you like to see?
A more professional out-of-the-box, download-and-keep game patching system (non of the asset store ones are up to the job).

When windowed, the ability to hide the window frame and use a background with alpha.

A proper 32bit/64bit Installer. Having to rebuild into Inno is a workflow downer.

Not just windows standalone related:-
1.Being able to palm more things off onto other CPU cores. Safe multi-threading built in.
2. A whole new terrain system in keeping with the this decade and the next. We're falling behind the competition on this point.

On the whole it's not too bad, just a bit of spit and polish needed.

 

Who are you?
A hobbyist developer.

What are the BAD things about Windows standalone player that you dislike?
How can we make it BETTER? What use-cases, features, workflows would you like to see?

I believe, screen/window resolution handling needs a bit more love. There are a couple of annoying issues there.

Issue #1
I use two monitors. If I launch the player in windowed mode and set the resolution to maximum, the window always appear in the middle of the monitors - the left half of the window is on the left screen and the right half is on the right screen.



Issue #2
As I have noticed, the standalone player tries to remember the previous window resolution. There's a problem though - it fails to remember non-standard window resolutions (I prefer to keep "Resizable Window" option turned on). The next time I launch the player, I offers me one of the standard resolutions which is the closest to the previous one.

It wouldn't be a big deal, but if the previous resolution was 1920x1018 (the window was maximized), the next time the player will try to run in 1920x1080 but
- a window which client area is 1920x1080 doesn't fit into the screen,
- see issue #1.

Issue #3
Is there a reason why "Visible In Background" is always disabled for DX9?


It doesn't look like a technical limitation because "-popupwindow" command line parameter does exactly what I want, it forces "fullscreen window" mode with "visible in background" turned on.

 

Who are you?

I'm a sole programmer on a localization team, and have released several retail games using unity.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

We bring Japanese visual novel games to English (a niche market, I know!). Often the original code isn't suitable for localization, but for various reasons, sometimes due to OS compatibility or other issue but more often than not they no longer have the code, so we need to port the game to a new engine. As you might guess, Unity is by far the fastest and easiest way to do this.

If you're not familiar with visual novels, they are (usually) fully 2d, and play like elaborate cutscenes, with character sprites, portraits and backgrounds arranged on screen to make up scenes while text and voice conveys dialogue and narration to what's happening. At times can make decisions throughout the game that impact how things play out. They don't always count as a 'game' from a end-user standpoint, but the backend is all game. Behind the scenes, large script files direct all of the onscreen action and text.

How does Windows standalone player fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

Our games target windows as the primary platform, though we do release for mac os and linux as well. The games feature high resolution hand drawn art, so having a fast, pixel perfect 2d engine is an absolute requirement. While 'visual novel' as a genre is often associated with static images with text, what animation and movement occurs must be smooth and appealing, and being able to handle masking and transitions between cameras to create special effects and transitions is also important.

What are the GOOD things about Windows standalone player that you like?

For the most part, working with unity has been a blast. It is incredibly easy to get something up and running, and even as a sole developer on the projects, I've been able to get complete games up much faster than I would have thought necessary. Unity's workflow, from the robust scene hierarchy, game objects and components, it all just really clicked with me and I find that there's a huge amount of power in it. To single one thing out though, a lot of these games are heavy on the UI, so unity's new UI tools are an absolute joy to work with.

What are the BAD things about Windows standalone player that you dislike?

The biggest pain I've had with working with unity has to do with the Asset systems. In my use case, our games contain a vast number of assets, usually in the 1-4 Gb range, mostly in the form of textures and audio assets. As an example, the current game I'm working on uses over 20,000 individual audio clips for character voices. The vast majority of assets are infrequently used, and sometimes only ever called on once. Unity completely falls apart when dealing with such a volume of assets. Ignoring the incredible time it takes to import or change platforms, prior to unity 5, you couldn't even select that many files without unity crashing.

I attempted to solve the issue by using asset bundles, as this is the recommended solution for this use case, but it turns out it's not really acceptable on desktop platforms. Loading asset bundles will load the entire bundle into memory, which when paired with my game's huge number of infrequently used assets, was a no go. Technically I could suffer through and split things into thousands of smaller bundles, but when I attempted to do so I found that Unity will actually cache the asset bundles in the user's appdata folder. That means that if I loaded 1Gb of assets, somehow unity would cache all of that into the users profile to take even more space. It makes sense if you're loading asset bundles from the internet, but it makes absolutely no sense on a desktop platform.

In the end I ended up building my own external archive format and loading assets at runtime. It saved me the headache of having all those assets within my project, and allowed me flexibility to make useful changes (such as loading from a patch archive before others). This though wasn't without challenges. Unity provides no facility to load audio files from an external archive. There's just no way to do it. There's functionality for loading ogg files via the WWW class, but you can't load an ogg from a file stream or memory. I ended up using the library NVorbis to load and play these audio files, and piped the audio samples into unity using a custom audio filter. One giant hack.

I've ranted for a while, but one last note. The games I work with need to be pixel perfect, at least as the default resolution. I had an older game I worked on ran natively at 800x600... but if the users had a wide screen monitor, the game would stretch going full screen! Surely this should be easy, I could just handle the alt-enter key press to switch to a resolution of my choosing. But it's actually impossible to change the alt-enter hotkey, it's hardcoded into unity, and cannot be disabled. Ultimately I wrote a hook into user32.dll and kernel32.dll to intercept the keypress and use my own handler, but it's one of those "things you can't turn off and can't change" that sometimes happens more than you'd like.

How can we make it BETTER? What use-cases, features, workflows would you like to see?

I think I covered my grievances above. I love unity, but yeah, there's some issues. I think a more sane implementation of asset management and asset bundles would go a long way to making things better. Right now I don't see why you would use asset bundles on desktop, it just doesn't make a lot of sense, not without the ability to use them without loading them fully into memory (similar to how you use the 'resources' folder now), and not with them caching to appdata. Both sound like a result of only having the WWW class to load asset bundles. Relying on WWW to access locally stored assets in general seems like a bit hacky honestly.

Beyond better asset bundles, which would solve a lot of my current headaches, I guess I'll re-iterate the usual nested prefabs suggestion, and more granular control over windowed fullscreen settings. Being able to switch while running to borderless fullscreen and such would be pretty grand. As alexzzzz mentioned before me, window positioning and fullscreen handling could use some love.

 

THIS ^^ is the assetbundle issue. I hope that the new 5 assetbundles don't load the whole thing in before deleting everything but the one asset you need. Assetbundles need to be quick and low on memory use to extract a single asset, so that we can regularly extract single assets without loading everything every time.

 

@Whippets If I'm not mistaken, if you load an asset from an uncompressed asset bundle created with AssetBundle.CreateFromFile, it doesn't load the full assetbundle into memory.


Who are you?

Indie developer. Some games I made/worked on : Krautscape, Plug & Play, Drei. Normally working on a Mac.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

Mostly small, sometimes experimental games for different platforms (standalone, mobile, web).

How does Windows standalone player fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

We use Windows standalone builds for gameplay testing and if a game should be released on Steam.

What are the GOOD things about Windows standalone player that you like?

- Just works
- good performance in general
- fast export

What are the BAD things about Windows standalone player that you dislike?

- Bad Game controller support, platform differences. This is a problem on all Standalone platforms.
- ugly icon downsampling (this also applies to OSX Player)
- Steam integration/publishing could be easier.

How can we make it BETTER? What use-cases, features, workflows would you like to see?

I'm pretty happy with it, but I'd love to see the old problems mentioned above fixed.
A nice thing would be if it was easier to publish builds for steam, which is our main use case for standalone builds. Ideally we'd have an option to build standalone builds for all platforms on cloud build and push it directly to steam.

 

Dear Unity.
Is there a way I can integrate the functions of the configuration menu into the actual game? So the end user can change settings within the game? Cheers

 

Who are you?

I am an indie developer / one man development team.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

I am building a single player Dungeon Crawl RPG "The Rise of Dagon" similar to Legend of Grimrock

How does Windows standalone player fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

I need to have reasonably high quality visuals for my game. I switched to Unreal engine for a few months when they announced their new pricing and while they have higher visual quality the lack of hand holding was costing me a lot of churn and therefore I was not as productive - therefore you got me back!

I intend to use mid to high resolution assets that have fairly large poly counts as well as mid to high resolution PBR texture maps.


What are the GOOD things about Windows standalone player that you like?

As a sole developer I like the hand holding it does. I like that I can drop almost any asset in to the editor and Unity knows what to do with it.

I like the scene editor, I like its customization options and extensibility

I like that its easy to build and deploy my project.

I like that its a reasonable proposition to profile my project.

What are the BAD things about Windows standalone player that you dislike?

I hate the keyboard mapping / resolution picker it needs to be skinnable.

I am a pro user and I pre-purchased Unity 5 because of the PBR workflow however in my current experience the metallic/specular shaders are broken when it comes to highly metallic surfaces as seen in this logo screen:



the "black" rim around the shield should be iron and look more like it does in Substance Painter Pro as seen here:



There are a lot of threads with GI problems and black materials in the forums ; I'm hoping you are working on this but it really makes it hard to create and test my assets and light my scenes properly with the GI engine in this condition. ( Yes I have reflection probes, yes I have checked baked lights, yes I have deleted the GI cache, yes the mesh is static, etc.

But not only is GI broken - its slow. The main menu screen as scene in my example is the entire scene and with my i7-4790k 4ghz system with 16GB win 8.1 system and the CPU usage on baking set to high it still takes about 10 minutes to bake. If I set it to lower settings it takes in excess of 40 minutes.

The brokenness + slowness is really costing me gigantic work churn in getting my project done and I'd like to see improvements in these areas!


How can we make it BETTER? What use-cases, features, workflows would you like to see?

Real time GI is as important as Baked GI to me. My users will have a level editor and I will build scenes at runtime that are not baked.

Real time GI needs to be robust, performant and look as good as possible.

As someone else already mentioned the asset bundle system is actually a problem for me too. I want my game to be moddable and have a lot of resources. I'm not where the other customer was at yet - but I forsee this to be a nightmare.

With all the other ways Unity makes things easy for us - and especially consider this is an age of customer modding - its really a huge sore point that externally loading files is such a pain.

Edit: To be clearer what I'd really like is to be able to define a folder where I can drop files of supported binary/text types and be able to load them as needed during runtime. I also want my customers to be able to drop files in the same folder after I've deployed my game to them so they can mode it by either editing my files or adding their own (which obviously I have to handle in code reading in files they've added).

 

Who are you?

I am a student currently studying at a Master's program in game development. I come from a different major.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

Creating a game based on quirky mechanics. Most of the mechanics are mostly inspired by drinking water at the water fountain at my school's gym. Thanks to courses I took, I can methodologically put a few of the mechanics from inspiration to planning to production.

How does Windows standalone player fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

I could see this as an easy alternate method of deploying in-house (well technically, major-related course assignment and ISP, MQP) game development made for experimentation and quickly churning products. This method of deployment is then easily put onto our lab computers, so we can have the ability to assess and iterate our products through testing and redesigning. The assessments can be done by inviting other students and classmates to participate on gameplay testing and QA, while iterations can be made by snatching over a lab computer, redesign, build, and deploy across the lab computers easily.

What are the GOOD things about Windows standalone player that you like?

I am thinking of easy deployment. It cuts down the number of times we have to reinstall Unity Web Player on lab computers, especially when certain lab computer rooms are closed at certain times.

What are the BAD things about Windows standalone player that you dislike?

May have additional security issues. Since deployment becomes easier to manage, it is more likely to be targeted for nefarious intents.

How can we make it BETTER? What use-cases, features, workflows would you like to see?

Not sure how it can be better, when I haven't seen any downsides to it. I probably don't have experiences to see the downsides, so I may not be able to see what I liked to see.

 

It's hard to say if Unity Tech are looking at this feedback, is a Unity Tech able to comment if it's being looked at?

Who are you?

I am Nathan Hold, lead developer at Bifrost Studios and indie developer in my spare time.

github
Company Profile (second from the top)

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

At the moment I am attempting to develop a cross platform (Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS) 2D pixel art game. I am about one week into developing and while I have experience developing with Unity this is the first time I have actually created a windows build of significance (I have mainly used it to develop mobile games).

How does Windows standalone player fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

Well obviously I want users to be able to play the game like they would any other on their windows desktop.

What are the GOOD things about Windows standalone player that you like?

It works, mostly. Seriously the windows standalone player works, it will load up my game and run it how I coded it to and to the features that the editor exposes.

What are the BAD things about Windows standalone player that you dislike?

1. Very slow initial start-up time on multiple monitors maybe due to exe size?
2. Substantially slowed down OS response while the initial start-up occurs. (Clicking back onto any program while it loads takes 2-3 seconds for the click to register, no other events go to those programs even after load)
3. Selecting a monitor and selecting windowed in the configuration does not work as one would expect (It will always load onto the main monitor)

How can we make it BETTER? What use-cases, features, workflows would you like to see?

1. Lower the exe size based on settings, I do it with my own engine by only linking to things the user uses e.g. Is their game purely 2D with no physics? Then deploy with the player that is only linked to my SFML based graphics renderer, scripting system and base game engine. I am not sure if this is a viable option for you guys though.
2. This should definately be worked on, I can't do anything while my game loads whereas every other game I test is no problem.
3. This should work properly, also there should be a windows (full-screen) option in there somewhere.

I'll probably add more to this as I develop this game but those are what stand out after developing for windows for a week. Hopefully you guys can address or even put some of these things onto your roadmap! Thanks for all of your hard work!

 

Yes. (But it is a 6-month old thread.)

 

Good to know! I wasn't aware stickied threads requesting feedback had a timeline on it but if that's the case there are avenues to take to ensure it doesn't get posted in.

Again, thanks for all the hard work.

 

I'm Ashkan Saeedi, a developer at www.nooparmy.com
Previously We've been making a Kinect based serious game for a medical research project which allowed patients to do fun excersises so their broken hand or leg gets moved and ...

The standalone player is working Ok, I would like two things to be added. A better built in console which also can show warnings and logs as well as errors.
Secondly some commandline switches for setting width and height and full screen/windowed modes are broken and not working. I ended up implementing my own and yes it is easy but it was 6 hours to the deadline and I assumed unity has these and it had, but they were not working.