Official Unity Docs feedback survey - participate and win some swag!

The "rank these features" thing doesn't specify if 1 or 7 is the "most important". I assumed 1 was most important since that's what value it got at the top of the page, but I wasn't quite sure.

Also "how likely are you to recommend Unity documentation to a friend"? Very unlikely, as I'm not socially awkward enough to recommend somebody to read some docs. Did you copy-paste a question from a toothpaste survey?

 

I just answered the survey and wanted to make a remark: I gave relatively high answers in the quantitative sections,refer but that only applies to the main docs. The packages docs I would rank them at like 2 steps below both in amount and depth of the info, and usability. Finding info on a specific version of a package is cumbersome, and many packages' docs are little more than crash courses right now.

Still, I think the combo documentation-forum-answers is one of the strongest points of Unity. Keep it up!

 

I didn't answer the poll because I would have to answer "sometimes" or "rarely" to all questions.

About the scripting API, I just made a search for "foreach" and got no answer that suited me. I eventually understood that you put in the API only what is relevant to Unity, not the basics of C#. To refresh my memory about foreach, I had to go to the Microsoft documentation.

I suggest that you had links to the Microsoft documentation for each C# basic search we can make.

 

True.


I have no C# experience at all. It is hard to start without this knowledge.

I do have approximately 800 hours of self-taught VB knowledge in combination with MS Office. So there some basic knowledge of scripting logic and that helps a lot in my case.

Maybe, as a newcomer to the community, I might not have the insights needed to form a well-founded opinion on this matter. But still, I’ll give it a try.


If I look through topics posted on the forum I see a lot of people giving it a try doing a solo project.

If a person (or small start-up) is trying to create some kind of entertainment (game/movie/animation) there is mostly a creative drive to do so. Learning scripting is like learning to chisel when trying to make your first sculpture. It's the hard labour to give your creativity a shape.


I have some friends in programming, they are absolutely non creative persons. They see everything in black or white / yes or no, without nuance. No creative blood what so ever.

Your customers have to be of the creative type, or there will never be any good end product, just solid scripting and clones of AAA titles with no chance of succeeding without huge marketing budgets. Creative persons mostly don’t have affinity with large text of abstract scripting.


I don't think telling people preferred requirements will help. It will only tell potential customers "don't expect any extra service from us", "you’re on your own from here".

Unity is the block of granite you want to sell, but if you aren’t willing to teach people how to chisel you won’t sell those blocks of granite.


The tutorials you guys offer don’t tend to the needs of the ‘creative’ either. The whole 'karting game' thing is just too overwhelming at first. It’s an interactive tech demo for promotional purposes. You don’t need to convince the user anymore, they downloaded Unity already, they are willing to invest in this.


This ‘First game’ is like you are telling us our first work immediately should be a Sculpture of David. It should not, it should be programming doodle, it should be about bouncing a red cube on a small surface using the ASDW-keys, making a score counter and adding a few different scenes where the surface differs in shape.

Basic stuff. Help people with the 'hard part', starting a new project. Not editing a existing one. If there is creative blood in the user that sculpture will come eventually.


If you are willing to teach yourself there is still the hurdle of information, or lack thereof.


From my own experience, as mentioned at the start of this post.

If I enter "VBA EXCEL" followed by any type of question or statement in a web search engine I usually get a clear answer within the first 3 search results.


If I enter "Unity C#" followed by any type of question or statement, most of the time I get search results that don't apply to my situation.

So I have to trouble the forum dwellers of this site to provide me with answers. So work speed is slow having to wait a day for people to react to my questions. I have a daytime job so that’s not really an issue for me, but probably for people investing more time in this it will.


The search function on this forum is not helping either. It would also help if I could filter only on 'forum' or 'specific forum topics' to search in. Most of the results I’m getting are referencing tot the Manual while I’m mostly looking for are C# scripting solutions.


This is/was not a mad rant of some angry frustrated guy it’s more of an answer to your OP question “ … to understand a little bit more about you and your documentation needs.”

Well, for what I’ve experienced now, the scripting side is where most of the action lies and most of the hurdles are, and that is just the thing you are saying you don’t want to get involved in.

 

As a long time user the main issue is things being wrong or outdated.
There just does not seem to be enough people checking and fixing the content.

For newcomers a better intro explaining C# usage with Unity and monobehaviours vs straight C# classes might help. Not all of your code has to be monobehaviour classes yet I've seen it happen.

 

Question "13. Please rank the following in order of importance to you" is missing a few key items:

• "Good descriptions" seems like an obvious one, yet many pages do barely anything more than repeat the method name.
• "Usage recommendations" should be there so I can give it a low priority. In many cases the documentation just tells us how we should use something, which is really unhelpful when we want to do something slightly different and don't know if it will be covered. Explaining what things actually do and how they work should always come before telling us how we should use something.
• "All features being documented" seems like another obvious one, yet the Motion class (the base of AnimationClip) still doesn't have any of its non-inherited members listed. Then there are things like PreviewRenderUtility and ReorderableList which are extremely useful but are not even listed in the documentation.

 

Unity docs should work like... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/aspnet/core/blazor/components?view=aspnetcore-3.1

Drop down to switch version, each page comes with a Open and Closed feedback that can be viewed in threads..

 

i just picked a random page. ConstantForce.

Let me read it and write down my thoughts.

*scrolls down*
why is 'bool' an operator... oh they mean c#'s "public static implicit operator bool"... probably for convenience... wait! is this autogenerated documentation??!
*scrolls up*
ok inherits 'Behaviour'... huh... british spelling. I can dig it. Why am I reading about RigidBody *first* and then about ConstantForce? I don't want to read the differences between this and anything else, I need to read explicitly about *this*. "The force or torque to a new value"... force *or torque* ? Can i apply torque with this? I sure hope they mean "this applies a force or torque, depending where it is applied". Every frame. Render frame or physics frame? Do i use this in FixedUpdate or Update? What's the better option?
force... the force applied, ok... relativeForce... aha... relativeTorque--- oh so it *can* explicity apply torque. Why doesn't the first line say so? "A force or torque applied constantly" it's just two more words...
inher--- oh god it *is* automatically generated... 'enabled' i suppose this is a boolean... doesn't say if i can set it. I will assume i can. "Has the behaviour had active and enabled called?" This doesn't even make sense but i suppose it is a convenience for ob.enabled && ob.active or something. "The game object this component is attached to" so... the *owner*... seriously? The *name of the property* is the *name of the type of the property* ? I should be thankful 'enabled' wasn't named 'boolean'? tag... of this game object... transform of this obj--- no wait...it says *attached* to this *GameObject*. Does that mean anything different? hideFlags... i will guess this is an enumeration.... name, ok... methods... static methods... operators... 'bool - Does the object exist?' getting existential here... what does 'exist' mean for a GameObject ? has Destroy been called? Has the GC wiped it? Is the object referenced null? "operator != Compares if two objects refer to a different obj---" Wait what? Compares if? What the hell does that mean? "returns true if the two arguments refer to different objects, otherwise returns false" was too weird? "Compares two object references *to see* if they refer to the same object" Do you people know how to write simple english? "Returns true if the two arguments refer to the same object, otherwise returns false"
Ok... where are the examples? Did i miss them?
*scrolls up*
*scrolls down*
wellp... guess i'll never know how the programmers intend for me to use this thing. I'll just shove whatever into the properties and hope for the best.

 

I need to implement an options panel where the player can choose what post-process wants to enable and at what level of quality. This is a very common need/pattern for PC game.

In the past (post processing v1), I don't find anything about that in the documentation and the only way was digging hard on the code by my self.

Today I have the same need and I'm using Post processing V2. I look at the last version of documentation (https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.postprocessing@2.3/manual/index.html) and I don't find anything yet.

But I found this sentence "You'll find more methods by browsing the /PostProcessing/Runtime/PostProcessProfile.cs source file.".

I don't want to be rude, but it is a bit unprofessional.

 

Kind of funny you still have the survey up. Are you aware the documentation site has a feedback form on every page? Are you aware the 1-5 rating is fake?
The short answer is: Have you shipped undocumented classes and methods in a stable product (yes)? Then you have done something wrong.

 

The amount of effort Unity puts into documentation is an absolute joke.

I reported that the example for ISerializationCallbackReceiver doesn't work because the initial values in the lists immediately get cleared by OnBeforeSerialize and you can't add any items because of the Mathf.Min in OnAfterDeserialize. Of course, the person who responded couldn't follow a simple explanation and could not reproduce the issue, but two videos later they finally got it and said "I have reproduced the issue and have found that this issue is a known one" and explained exactly what I needed to change to fix it.

Then they gave me this issue tracker link where it's marked as WON'T FIX (and the problem is still there in the documentation 2 years later).

Nothing about that situation makes any sense. Why would you mark something as "Won't Fix" if you already know exactly how to fix it and all you need to do is copy a couple of lines from the bug report into the documentation? It isn't some code that could accidentally break something else, it's an example that already doesn't work. The worst that could happen is that it continues to not work for some other reason. Yet rather than fix their product, they would rather let people keep reporting bugs and wasting far more of everyone's time instead.

 

While I do agree that this is incredibly irresponsible on their part, the resolution note there leads me to believe that the issue was closed as part of an automated process:

Again, absolutely unacceptable, but I don't think someone actually looked at your report and refused to do anything about it for no good reason.

 

Hi i am a new user please tell me how this works