Substance support NOT working as expected

Indeed. It is completely unacceptable as a Pro user that Unity crashes when doing extremely basic things like changing scenes or building a desktop app. Why Unity QA is incapable of finding such glaring bugs before shipping a new version is totally beyond me.

 

I'm glad the issue has been resolved and we apologise for your email to QA being ignored when your case was being dealt with. If this happens again I'd recommend either replying to the email or submitting new bugs with the latest versions of Unity and referencing your old bugs.

With regards to quality and new features, we prioritise stability over new features and actively omit new features if they are incomplete or destabilise the engine. You can see features being moved on the roadmap here.

We've also expanded our Sustained Engineering team who handle bug fixing dot dot and patch releases, we have more engineers fixing bugs and dealing with incidents now.

 

Yes, that is the exact thing: The build crashed, the stack trace pointed to Substances *each and every time*. To make matters even more embarrassing for QA, the same functionality did run in the Editor. Still, according to them the most likely reason for this was hardware error in my new Mac Pro.
I still get kind of angry when writing this. It is really a low water mark for how to handle software QA.

@Aurore
It pleases me that Unity appears to have learnt, and is continuing to learn, from past failures and mistakes. I am still concerned though, and it will take a few stable releases and good experiences with features for me to eventually change my mind.
Right now I am waiting for 5.3 to stabilize. It looks quite bad at the moment. Likewise SpeedTree where the performance is still nowhere near where it should be. I logged 3-4 bugs last week alone, 2 of them about core technology that has glaring bugs (in 5.2).
So while I understand that no single Unity employee is responsible for the state of things, I hope you do sympathise and understand that some professional developers with money on the line are quite annoyed at this point.

 

Hi! Is texture caching working in Unity 5.2 now, or I need to wait for 5.3, or submit bug report? I've tried all the options, like 'Do Nothing and Cache' and 'Bake and Discard', still, everytime I reload the Editor, substance keeps regenerating. So I am not sure - is this a bug, is it known, or I am doing something wrong? All I want, is to generate substances in editor, and never regenerate them again, until I apply some changes.

 

I will copy/paste the answer I wrote on our forum, people here might find it interesting as well.

Hi

The "and Cache" load behaviours are only applicable at runtime, and "substances always regenerate when I open the editor" is today's intended behaviour.

I have a rework in progress for this which would basically cache all Substance-generated bitmaps in the editor so that it does not happen anymore, and so that "I want to generate substances in editor, and never regenerate them again, until I apply some changes" is the way it works, but it's unlikely to happen before 5.4.

Best Regards,
Eric

 

I don't know if I'm seeing the same problem but my substances aren't working quite right either. The substances don't seem to load properly until I select the object. They will then be loaded but after a certain amount of time passes/with game plays/unplays they seem to unload. This will normally result in a black material. I have to reselect the GameObject for the substance to refresh/reload.

I think it appears to only affect Substances I have tweaked in the editor but not certain. Is this the same issue this thread is referencing?

Thanks