Please fix asset store window, what did you do?

(I would have posted this in Editor Support), but this isn't exactly an editor issue.

PROBLEM BELOW:

I woke up, got on Unity this morning, went to import a package. And then Asset Store window, is an utter complete mess.

Initially, it looks nice.
But then I realized, none of the assets are alphabetical order, couldn't find a filter option to organize it (so maybe it's there, I don't know???).

Then I noticed, the asset packages, if I leave the asset window docked into the editor, 3 assets takes the entire view-port. At least before I could see 10+ assets.

Please fix this.
Image below.

 

Join the "New Asset Store Is Crap" club. It's utterly dreadful in the editor and in a browser.

 

I should seriously try to get in touch with Unity and see if they'll let me convert that little editor tool I made to replace the asset store window entirely.
There's like no reason to even have that asset store window when you can just make a quick editor tool display the assets and click them, done.

The tool in this link. (it's not perfect, but it works).
https://forum.unity.com/threads/quick-assetstore-importer.520660/#post-3416338

 

The new asset store seems like it was designed for people who don't use it at all.

 

I'm beginning to think Unity is testing some kind of AI beta for their UI design. Connect is basically unusable. The asset store is confusing to navigate. What is 2018 going to look like? I hope the clean, user friendly interface isn't botched.

 

Have you joined the forum before or after the "Lithium Incident"?

 

........................................................... NOOOOOOOO. hahaha.

 

No. But should I wear a helmet and protective eye wear when I'm here?

 

If anyone believes the asset store is the worst they've seen they haven't seen the brief period the forums used Lithium. It was bad enough that we started discussing the possibility of creating a third party community to escape it and shortly after that discussion began they started rolling them back.

The Wayback Machine is unable to find them or I would let you see a glimpse of the horror...

 

EDITED: deleted my original "rant". You know what? It doesn't matter. They're just going to keep doing what they do.

 

Well I'm glad it's not just me experiencing this.

[Not sure if this is who to message] but figured you deal with the asset store, that perhaps you could point this to the proper people.]
@AndrewAssetStore can you guys like look at that editor tool I just released and make it read the actual Unity databases or something? It's under MIT License, so do with it what you guys want to do with it. But this Asset Store window is ridiculous.

If you're curious as to what it is, the link is up the thread a little bit, but I'll post it again.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/quick-assetstore-importer.520660/#post-3416338

Just make the thing read the PHP stuff or whatever you use, and have it give the options it already has - download, import, etc. Should be simple enough being import is already there. Just needs the download functionality and update functionality.

Obviously the way it is now, is quite basic, I just made it work. But that tool is sooooo superior to what the Asset Store window was before, and is now.

 

Boy have you missed out...
The lithium forum design was so high contrast that there were reports of people using sunglasses while browsing to lessen the eye-strain, functionally half the features didn't work, private messages were lost, links in threads broken, for some the pages kept reloading in an endless loop, switching engines was discussed by disgruntled users, and angry tweets where sent to CEOs.

It was a S***storm of proportions that I have never seen before and never want to see again.

And the best of all: they just switched us over to that trainwreck one day without a warning and in spite of all the mods etc. that they had given preview access having told them "don't do it, it's not ready yet".

 

I'm selling a range of tinfoil hats to all Asset Store devs so they can't hear or see any criticism of their perfect assetstore.

As you can tell, they're a top seller.

 

the joys of over using javascrap for everything.. everything starts looking dumbed down and becoming a slow broken over obfuscated mess. lol jk js frameworks are teh best and gathering all the statistical garbage on users is very important herp derp.

Anyway the package manager in 2018 might eventually be improved to take off from where the asset store tab functionality completely fails at providing any quick and easy management of project assets.. like showing a list of downloaded/owned assets that can be pulled and removed fom the project easily without the extra waiting on the servers because it would be designed to work offline aswel (lol jk ).. .. preferably with version, changelog (for all changes going back to release), description, and images of the asset.... in a side panel... never mind that wishful thinking.

"Boy have you missed out... "
I think Unity should do it again.. but this time instead of Lithium they do another forum for this year :...I propose NodeBB.. it has all the awful traits of growing and popular web app and best of all, it's built entirely on javascrap ... its the perfect candidate to test

Just think about it.. what could go wrong with another nuclear forum meltdown .. it's something all unity users can enjoy together again.. and isn't that what it's all about ..for the fun

 

JS isn't the problem. Using JS absolutely everywhere, including places where CSS does the trick, and just plain bad interfaces are the real problems. JS can be fast when used sparingly, especially if most of the page is static and you just load data in the remaining sections. But the latest web sites from UT make it look like they really want to be Cordova/Phonegap developers.

I don't really visit the asset store anymore. I expect to be able to click things, but no new page loads. After a few attempts I find something that pops open a quick view, and from there I can get to a product page. By then I'm tired of this crap and just want to be there anymore.

Now on the latest visit it started popping up a tutorial on tags. I F***ing know what tags are! I can't skip it. The store has become unusable. I can't F***ing browse it before I go through their shiny new thing, and I refuse to. F*** those guys.

 

When I need something, now I google for stuff on github first. Some people who offer free assets on the store also have github repos which are better in almost every way.

 

Same thing I mean when I shht on javascraps usage in websites.. it is necessary for some for functionality clearly, yet html5/css3 covers alot more than most seem to realize is possible without js being needed, especially with a conscience effort by the web developers to design it that way. I just don't think average users understand why the likes of faceborg, goolag and sili-con valley and there associated crooks have such a big interest in peddling javascrap and making idiot developers use it everywhere, intel gathering and analytics side of it is major business.. but on average for most sites to me its akin to a sales man handing a customer a brochure and then standing behind the customers shoulder to see what they are looking at... just asinine levels of data collection on your customers,

Unity use a lot of analytics.. like on help docs.. but there help docs have remained pretty much S*** for years.. so I don't know what levels of useful information they've gathered from those stats.. but I'm sure its used to show that people still look at the docs.. and therefore they are doing a good job.. like barely... php docs is far more useful for looking at api's...as are docs for other frameworks..

I kinda laugh at the levels CRO type stuff that goes on in the business world, it seems for all the level of analytics they gather.. they seem fking blind.

So yeh I don't care for modern js usage in sites that are stupidly built around literately requiring it, else they are barely functional if at all, developers that subject their visitors to the worm that keeps on giving. You could see how a site like soundcloud has more of a need for js to offer its functionality.. but most websites don't come anywhere near that experience, and I vote with my wallet.. most website developers and ignorant clients don't care about the what ~5% that use noscript like plugins... they don't care that some in that ~5% might spend more than some in the other % users silly enough to browse most the internet identity and privacy raped by js infested websites that have no calms about dumping every script they think is useful to them in gleaming information about a visitor etc.

I also think the lack of improvement in html and css.. by the infested consortiums of those with alt agenda's and browser vendors (goolag, crapple ms etc) draggin their heals in favour of javascrap being the solution to all improvements in user frontend experiences... scumbags.

 

Click top right button - "Shop Old Asset Store".
Fixed.

 

That fix only works short term. Eventually, Unity will take away the old asset store link and force us all to use the new asset store.

 

BTW, I despise when web pages try to partially or fully hide the vertical scroll bar. The vertical scroll bar is a useful browser feature for many people. This is one of the ways the new asset store favors design instead of function, and it is terrible choice. As a general rule, designers should only hide the vertical scroll bar if they hate their own users.

 

What you're saying is that we need to buy up all the assets we want now, right?

 

Unfortunately true, although an alternative could be leaving it up - as it would only be a visually modified mirror at that point, and the button could read - Use Old Asset Store Permanently.
I'd like that.

 

I don't get why Unity is so quiet about this. There has been a ton of complaints since day one, they have gotten very clear feedback, and still they do nothing. Any day now they'll remove the link to the old store and force everyone to switch

I just saw the Keynote from GDC, where they talked about how we perceive <500ms as instant. Maybe remind your web team of this mantra?

 

Who said that, and in what context?

 

The CTO said that, and I believe he was saying anything 'in general' is the way it sounded too me.

EDIT: Anything in general with Unity I mean.

 

In all honesty... probably because every time they make a change of any kind they get mobbed by an entire angry village carrying pitchforks and torches, and the feedback is usually just something along the lines of "Garr... it sucks... change it back" instead of something more constructive.

Ok, yeah Lithium was bad... and my forum username is forever screwed up with a stupid dash in it now... which is annoying. The asset store window in the editor is not great and missing important features... the new asset store site could use a lot of improvement (and especially speed improvement... some things like trying to get the full list of reviews is slooooooooow)... but rather than starting to discuss on suggest specific improvements, most (not all) people just attack Unity... attack the devs... attack the product without being constructive... what if that were a forum group of people talking about a game that you (you being any of the rabble rousers, not roxIndie specifically) developed... Of course it's important to know when something needs improvement but if they're just destroying your product and not being productive, how are you supposed to improve it?

There's an obvious vision, or at least direction that Unity is heading... trying to make things more modern and more mobile friendly. It needs improvement and we absolutely should figure out how to open those lines of discussion, but if we continue to just go on the attack every time something changes and we don't like it... eventually they'll just tune it out because it's just noise. I have a feeling that's a bit of what's happening now.

 

The pitchforks seem to work though. Without them we'd all be using the Lithium forum right now...

You make a very good point about the feedback loop, but in the cases of forum and assetstore I was happy enough with the old ones that I can't give much more constructive feedback than "the old one was better". The forum still is my favorite online forum that I ever used (css could be different for my taste, but that can be fairly easily overridden with browser addons if one wants), and the main issue I had with the old assetstore was that payment processing felt unreliable (still better than the new one though as it seems).
I just in general strongly disagree with making these things more "modern and mobile friendly". The Unity editor doesn't run on mobile devices. Till that changes, in my opinion the Assetstore has no business optimizing its design for these devices. It should be optimized for usability, for the people who actually use it. That's just my two cents. Rabble rabble....

 

That's very valid... remember I was talking about "direction" not necessarily "result". I can say that large parts of the asset store now are far better on my phone than the old one... however I'm not doing a lot of asset shopping on my phone either. Anyway... I agree entirely with your sentiment... we just need to figure out a way to communicate it more effectively as a community.

 

They have been given vast amounts of constructive criticism and guidance on Asset Store 2.0 going back to last June (close to a year ago) and yet very little has changed or been updated on the user-facing end. In most cases it is not the change that they get abuse for it is the failure of addressing obvious issues. Really, when is this website going to be fixed? (hint: it isn't.)

 

In principle I completely agree. Every time you change up the basic flow of an UI you will get a group of users that hate it, just because it is different than what they are used to. These must always be filtered out when evaluating feedback.

But in this case, even doing so, you're still left with a lot of constructive and concrete feedback. And even more so, it seems to be a wide spread opinion, not just the loud rants of a small group of people.

In addition, if Unity want constructive and concrete feedback, they must actively follow up on these threads, instead of just being silent. Giving good feedback requires significant effort from the users, and therefore should be encouraged and replied to.

 

I didn't mean to sound like such a butthead when I said what I said at the top. It's just the common sense stuff is missing, that's what really erk's me.. No Alphabetical order?

EDIT: I mean I know all of Unity has a lot on their plates. More-so now more than ever sense they keep adding all this new stuff, it just makes (I'm sure a lot of us), feel like the sands are shifting in another way simply because stuff (for years) stuff, still hasn't been fixed, or added that they said they would. Like, ya know - the Terrain System we were supposed to get like 7 years ago or whatever it was. Instead we're getting all this new (and obviously cool tech getting built into it), but in reality, I'd rather just have a very smooth almost bug-free editor experience first.

 

I agree, but there is a lot of non-constructive feedback as well. I worry that some of the constructive feedback gets lost in the noise. That was my point.

Also agree here. They should probably be more actively engaging the community. I'd love to see them gather the feedback... list out the 10 or so biggest complaints, and then let the community vote on them so they can prioritize them.

 

Oh you didn't... I was referring to general community as a whole. Like I said, there's been a lot of good feedback, but a lot of noise drowning it out too. I actually thought you did a good job of listing your specific issues.

 

Ahh okay. Well i did an "Edit" to my post if you want to read it.

 

I do a lot of browsing and wishlisting on my phone. If the store gets better on phones, that’s great. The magic of CSS allows them to work on desktop and mobile layout independently, so all they need to do now is to actually make some positive changes on the desktop/inside Unity

Why is the store just a webpage in the efitor anyway? They could have made a better native GUI and passed product data.

 

Exactly. That's why I made a little Editor tool that does all this for you. Well, sort of. Being the Unity stuff is in their secret hidden databases. But if you've already done downloaded an asset from the asset store, you can just open the Editor window and just click on the one you want to important.

 

People who don't like change in UI/UX or whatever... don't like it often because they notice a very real change in how it isn't actually better than how it worked before especially in workflow..That is the issue. As one good thing I could say about it.. being able to preview an asset in modal popup is not bad enhancement.. its just a shame 'little' improvements like that weren't just added to the previous layout etc.

The new asset store page has very few good changes, for most part things changed, but didn't really improve. The layout/style sizing is actually my biggest issue with it.. its awful... on a scale of fixing that, it probably the easiest thing.. ofc on making it actually functional without javascrap being needed well they've blown that bridge. Now every little thing is a giant modal popup window you have to CLOSE, to remove out the way..literately an increase in workflow steps to do just about everything compared to how it was before.. really ads up to time wasted when just browsing really.
.. want to look at the other screenshots/videos.. lets open this giant modal window over everything..lets click the close button. Want to look at the file list.. lets open this giant modal window over everything. lets close it now.. as opposed to how was done before and all fitted in the page layout without giant oversized fat padded modal windows. etc.. Don't get me wrong.. if you're just using the quick preview on an asset.. then these modal popup windows are actually useful.. but if you open the asset into a new tab (I'll often open assets into separate tabs and go through them that way).. the layout is just overal worse that how it was before.

And information wise the same stuff is all there.. like nothing actually improved in showing previous asset changelogs.. or allowing users to download older versions.. its all the same content..and all the same procedures.. but in an oversized layout designed for mobile devices as opposed to desktop screens.. and a requirement of javascrap to view it otherwise the entire site doesn't even work at all now.. wonderful improvement.. I can only hope from a backend side it's now much better.. I kinda doubt it though. What little improvements are in it, could have been added to the previous store. Seeing how its even worse for using in the unity editors single sht tab browsing ... is even more disappointing.

whatever though goal achieved made unity asset store replica using latest javascrap framework

 

In this specific case, yes... but most times it's the "Who moved my cheese?" effect:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4894.Who_Moved_My_Cheese_

 

Change Management is a thing and they obviously don't do it. They should have made the reason for the somewhat drastic change known ahead of time, loud and clear, like on one of their notice ribbons on the new asset store. Not, 'hey, it's a nicer look!', but the concrete business reason to have to do it. But that's not even the biggest problem. As has been stated already, there doesn't seem to be any noticeable improvement in the new store given all the feedback to date.

Man, this type of thing is what Agile Development was meant for! Iterate, iterate, iterate! This whole prettying up things that are meant to be functional for pretty's sake is driving a bunch of us up the wall. They did it with the forums, even before the Lithium fiasco. Less rows and all that. I come here for information, not pretty, though you can do that too if you don't screw up the functionality. You know what I really want? A dark theme for the forums, all this white space is killing my old and tired eyes.

Hmm, that went longer than I had anticipated, I'll let myself out now.

 

This is the main point for (my) posts - if products can't be purchased via mobile - why the push for mobile friendly? It doesn't make sense - I surmise the connect 'changes' are directly linked to the asset store changes - but I've stopped going to connect because after the 'changes' it feels - FRONT PAGE HURRY HURRY HURRY! I don't know what that means - really - but it's similar to feedback about the character feeling heavy - because there are too many animation frames in the animation cycle.
Translation = Past content can't be easily browsed on connect like before - and I like reading older content. That is all.

Orb - you are the very first person I've ever heard say this - From Unity's actions I'm guessing you are in the majority - but its still kind of odd the site is being changed to be optimal for mobile when mobile is clearly not the main avenue of access.

 

What else am I going to do while spending hours on a bus, train or plane?

Most people don't post on forums either. There are actually very few regulars, with the vast majority of first-time newbies asking questions never returning (possibly not even reading replies, for all we know).

But Unity Technologies have metrics which tell a lot more than a few forum posts. They can see how long people sat staring at a page through analytics (which the people who need to be spied upon the most won't know how to disable), and they can follow the trail of clicks by seeing the order of page hits and infer some data from that. They can definitely find a lot of details about which devices are most used for browsing or buying. Only some of us lie in the user-agent string

 

Searched the forum for a thread where I could also complain, was not disappointed. Yeah this new asset store is embarrassingly terrible. There are a couple of BARE MINIMUM things that any sort of large list GUI needs. Here they are:

1) A way to sort the list. Usually this is done by having different columns and you can click on the header.
2) A way to filter the list. This is usually done with a separate dropdown list at the top.
3) A way to compact the things in the list to be able to see more of it at once. Rather than having three lines of text take up the entire screen.

For examples of these techniques, see the previous asset store or literally almost any list UI anywhere since 1980. Without these features, the asset store list is completely unusable.

 

yep, the new asset store are really bad. Now after they change the "My Purchased Assets" page it just getting worse.
- cannot sort my assets by name anymore
- and now all purchased assets are on multiple pages, really?
they really don't like efficient ux it seems :/

 

Unity itself decided to use the new store again, and with that came the stupid tutorial yet again. This time it popped up with the top where the close button is just out of reach, so I had to close the store window and open it again, because while in tutorial mode it also disabled the buttons to go to my downloads.

Another issue that irritates me constantly in the new store is that the thumbnails for assets are useless. I can't click on most of the contents of that square, and have to exactly hit the little preview link in the middle, THEN it graciously allows me to click ANOTHER link to go to the product page, which was the thing I wanted to do immediately. Why can't we just click the bloody thumbnail and go to the asset?

 

Aside from all the current issues and problems - on older mobile (iphone 4s - yes I need to upgrade) accessing the asset store pages directly from links on external pages (not the functionality on the pages) is faster and feels more immediate than last time I tested (around January). So - good job on that - Unity asset store team.
Small progress every day - results in big progress over time. It's just so small every day - feels like there is only 1-2 team members working to fix all the issues part-time.

 

As long as they leave the "shop with old store" option available, I'll be... ok to some degree.

 

Me too - I wonder if Unity is running analytics on that button?

 

I agree with you that there are generally a lot of complaints that are not very well articulated. But the thing that bothers me the most about Unity's community management is that they never seem to respond in context to what is going on within the forums. It's almost as if they are watching a bunch of analytics stats for a year or two and then go "OK, it's been a while, so who wants to stick their head out and go say something directly to the community?". And so their communications don't reflect what we've already been discussing for a long time.

The reason is that we have an endless amount of threads articulating problems of all kinds, and then a Unity staff member will appear with a question like "So what do you guys want to see us prioritize?" and then disappear into the ether when the predictable answers come.

I want to say that I think they do great, really fantastic work in a lot of areas, and on specific issues (especially universally well-received features) they engage very well with the community, but especially on contentious issues they seem to have difficulty dealing with a bit of white noise surrounding a core problem.

I think the number one thing I'd like to see is that when they reach out to the community, they don't just respond to positive or deferential comments, but also respond to ones that, despite being a bit critical, make a valid and constructive point that a lot of people weigh in on. At least acknowledge these points and provide some sort of clarity about whether or not they think it's worth fixing, and what if anything they are planning to do about it. They don't have to pander, just let people know what their own priorities are so we know where things are going.

Otherwise things will be resolved by pitchforks, which as Martin pointed out seems to be among the only effective ways to deal with really poor choices made by Unity, but which I'm sure we can all agree is not an ideal situation.