Unity feedback about bugs and release schedule

Hi,

Been using Unity forever, published several games, however I am starting to get fed up with fighting against it.

Does anyone else feel like they are constantly battling this dang engine instead of working on their game, especially in larger projects?

All these new features, deprecated features, preview features, etc. I understand they are doing their best, but it just gets so frustrating & they can't seem to get anything to a stable, production ready state in a reasonable amount of time.

I just seem to run into issue after issue, just to find out from the Forums or Issue Tracker that it is a "known issue" and will be "Fixed in 2020.1" or whatever, so then you upgrade to get the fix & yay 10 new issues, however those will be fixed in 2020.2, so you upgrade to get the fixes & the cycle continues.

I am sure all the the other popular engines have a plethora of issues as well, but holy sh*t I can't wait for the day I can focus on the actual game instead of finding hacking work arounds, or buying third party assets to solve engine issues that shouldn't even make it past basic QA in the first place.

While realistic options are limited, has anyone who felt similar to me switched over to a different engine and had a better experience there?

Just a rant..

Cheers

 

Welcome to the rant thread:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/2019-3-entered-the-final-stages-of-beta-testing.792882/

 

Well in Unity's defence - 2020 is in alpha, which is of course expected to have bugs.

 

It's not about Unity 2020. It's about the feeling that for the last two years, everything of Unity is in alpha.

 

You can still use versions that are so old that they will never be changed.

The fact that Unity is constantly upgraded and in a moving state just proves how healthy it is and you are not forced to use any of the new features; you can use only the ones you actually need in your project. Making it more modular will make it lighter and more specialised in the future.

 

@APSchmidt I don't think you get the point either. Did you read some of the posts in the thread I've linked above?

How long should I avoid "new" things like Vulkan, LWRP or URP or whatever it is called next year, Shader Graph and everything in between because they just don't work in combination? We've released a game on Google Play for current devices, making use of a shader requiring Vulkan - just to find out that on 1/3 of devices (which do support Vulkan) it doesn't get rendered at all.

Staying on Unity 5.6.x or 2017.x is not an option because of the new devices only supported in recent Unity versions.

 

Nobody said making games that work for every existing platform in the world was easy. I don't even think that it is possible to make games that can be played on every existing platform and type of device.

 

I believe this is a common state of affairs in software development in general.

"Welcome to the future where everything is half broken!"... regardless of framework you're using.

 

Most certainly not.
None of the fields I come from are so bug riddled as unity. I’m talking orders of magnitude different.
The problem isn’t just unity, it’s deploying to mobile devices and the huge mess that is Android ecosystem.
In web dev, many frameworks front and back are extremely stable and cross browser support is mostly a problem of the past.
Switching to game dev and unity and mobile devices is a mine field vs the flowers fields of web dev.

 

I liked unity 5.xx because of the simple use.Just start making games. Now the Engine looks more fragmented. Need to download many many dependencies. All is doable, no questions. But its too time consuming. I wish they would do some pre configurated unity versions. A donwload-link that has it all.

 

2019.3 is notably bad, to the point where we got an official response on the blog about everyone going "this 100% is not production ready" to a degree I have not seen before. 2019.3 is absolutely broken and kinda a great example of how Unity's current release schedule can go incredibly wrong.

Like... it's a pretty bad situation, especially considering the in-flux state of the tech stack, the way the SRP APIs have changed a lot seemingly every couple months, on top of the API stuff. I can't even fathom trying to use 2019.3 for even prototyping DOTS-heavy projects in its current state. My current project is version locked, but what about my next project? What about the project after that? What about projects that should be able to leverage the new tech? The Tech releases are becoming increasingly difficult to work with.

 

It would mean installing all the modules and packages by default; it would make a huge and heavy thing, unmanageable and bugs prone.

Installing all the available modules in the Hub would make a 20 gB install, plus all the available packages?

Unity as a kit suits me, I can install only what I need making it light, 2.84 gB for 2019.2.17f1.

​

 

1. Unity LTS is where stability is because it is unchanging and bug fixes only. LTS builds will be more stable because only new features cause instability, specially with millions of gamers and hardware configurations.

2. All engines have problems, it's the nature of actual dev. Only a click game maker can be controlled enough to guarantee enough stability. But please download them and try them - should be free to get started.

3. Like someone above posted, if you have issues the best way to talk about that is to the developers and this is on the beta forum area usually.

 

Most certainly is.

Visual Studio, Windows OS, multitude of forgotten and broken android applications and so on and so on.

Few weeks ago, youtube on my android tv has broke down because Google did something to youtube service and it stopped functioning, this affected plenty of users, and can only be partially bypassed by 3rd party app which is far from perfect.

When I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10, during installation process I had pages of issues which required registry edits, console fixes, and one of the issues caused random freezes for 2 months before I accidentally found a fix that was not ever documented everywhere.

My bread and butter application - visual studio has glitches that hasn't been addressed for years and will likely never be touched because "we only deal with most voted features!!". Also, apparently I now have to upgrade to 32 gigabytes of memory to program comfortably with it. Those problems did not exist in mono develop, however monodevelop had another mountain of problems and probably deserves a title of the buggiest application in existence. But hey, killing and restarting it only took a few seconds.

Also, currently languages without type safety system are in vogue, which indirectly results in bizzare situation where a code editor that should be using 16 megabytes of memory devours gigabytes instead, because somebody decided to use electron and that means one has to run nodejs for an offline desktop application, because javascript was totally made for this. Actually that resulted in security vulnerabilities ( https://thenextweb.com/insider/2016...-trend-micro-exposes-all-customers-to-attack/ )

So, it absolutely is a state of affairs right now. Everything is broken and is built out of S*** and is ready to collapse. Sometimes there's a layer of paint and lacquer top of it so it looks pretty from distance, but underneath it all, eldritch horrors and stench awaits.

Speaking of the web, there's a fairly well known "just keep digging" comic which is related to javascript.
-------
So. While it is highly likely that @Murgilod is correct regarding state of affairs of current release (as due to circumstances I do not closely following current release.. although I do recall problems associated with, I believe 5.0.2 release), "everything is half-broken" absolutely Is the default state of affairs in software development.

That's why you use version control, backups, that's why you do not chase bleding edge, rely on murphy's law and so on.

Such is life/C'est la vie.

Everything is half-broken. Feature you need will not function and won't ever be fixed. At the moment when you create a workaround, a fix will be released that will break your application specifically. Despite that you still has to ship the product.

Such is life of a developer.

At least that's how I see it.

 

Please bring back Monodevelop editor. It's lightweight and I didn't have any problems with it.
VS Community 2019 draws much more hardware resources and it has 1.8 GB.

 

@neginfinity
Yeah that sounds no fun at all.
Been working on a Mac for the past 2-3 with no issues. Before that on Windows 10 also no issues. Had a period on Ubuntu which is just raw pain. For the past 15 years most of my work was either on python, or C# both extremely stable. As far as IDE’s you have endless choices with vscode sweeping devs left and right despite it’s memory footprint. I actually didn’t believe it could happen but I switched to Rider for the tight unity integration. Until I began working with Unity I had no fear of latest version of version upgrades. Now I tread carefully.

 

Failing to demand better is little more than complacency and the other things you have listed are not broken nearly to the extent that 2019.3 is and will continue to be. There is no chance in hell, especially given the historical state of Unity fix deployment speeds, that 2019.3 will be in anything better than what would be considered (for comparison's sake) the earliest versions of the Microsoft Edge dev branch where they were testing an entirely new backend for the browser.

Like, when Windows breaks, it is often breaking because it is deploying to a massive amount of machines because it is the most common OS in the desktop space. It is an absolutely huge undertaking to push out a Windows update. 2019.3 is broken and incomplete as its baseline. It's not because it has to be deployed of billions of machines across the globe, all of which may have their own configurations to account for, but because it's just not done. At least with the Edge Dev branch, it's firmly labeled as an indev and not one of the default options that users get. Hell, 2019.3 is going to be the basis for 2019.4, which is supposed to be the LTS branch! In its current state, I can't even see it being usable then.

This is a problem and Unity needs to do better because careers rely on this.

 

Monodevelop was anything but light.

 

It was lighter. About 0.5 gigabyte.

 

Until you ran it. Monodevelop was notorious for its in-use resource issues and poor performance.

 

One should pick their windmills to fight carefully.

You can voice concerns/complaints, but generally the best idea is to expect that nothing is going to change because of that.

It is lighter than visual studio and lighting fast in comparison.

Now, granted monodevelop had a lot of trouble connecting to unity debugger and even greater trouble of not breaking during routine operation. I mean that's the only application in existence where I saw Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V glitch out. Before it was deprecated, however, when it worked it worked quite well and was fairly responsive. When it wasn't glitching, that is.

 

yeah ... the hub is okay. But there are more dependencies, beside usual packages. I mean something categoric link:
develpoing for web or for mobile or for VR or for AR (desktops are no prob). You need to search and install. For this major publishings, it would be nice to have pre-configurated unity versions. Of course, versions as usual, so users can decide.

 

Pet-peeve alert.

No, careers do not rely on this at all. At least not professional careers. Everyone who has at least a couple of months (on which timeline it is possible that they would start a new product line and the need to choose base-technology would arise) experience would already know that this is the reason for the
- public bug reports
- publicly listed known issues
- publicly listed changes
- early tests

If your career rely on this you will choose your base software which fulfills your requirements, not just download the latest. And this is true for everything, from language versions to even OSes in certain situations.

Yes, your career may rely on this if you blindly choose the latest and ignore every warning you come across, but then it is a failed career and Unity is not to blame.

Game devs careers in general will be just fine even if all of us ignore and skip 2019.3 and even the 2019.LTS.
Even Unity will be just fine.


BTW, just to be on the same page, I agree 2019.3 is not production ready just yet, but this won't change the rules. It is my job to choose my tools to achieve my goals from everything available. Maybe this Unity offering is not the right one to choose as of now. Maybe two-three (or five-six, whatever) weeks from now it will be. Who knows.

 

Careers do rely on it because in some cases you actually do not have a choice, especially if you're dealing with console releases which often only support a very select few Unity versions. If the Unity version you are releasing on console with changes (this has happened with Nintendo and Sony several times to continue support, I don't know about Microsoft because I haven't really dealt with them) and that version has a lot of issues? That's a problem. That's a career affecting problem.

And that's going to be a very big problem because if that ends up being Unity 2019.4 at some point, I'm not sure how sustainable that'll be because I can not imagine, as stated earlier, that 2019.4 will be at all usable. Honestly, I'm not even sure if DOTS will even be remotely stable by 2020.4.

 

Use Script Inspector 3. It's 5 MB.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/visual-scripting/script-inspector-3-3535

 

Also VSCode is right there and I think it has debug support now. It's super lean.

 

Setup is daunting https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/other/unity
If you update Unity, you have to set it up all over again because code completion doesn't work.

 

If anyone finds that daunting they have no business trying to write code.

 

Tools worked against me in 2019. I wasted a lot of time fixing things. I got weary. I want to be more productive.

 

+1 for vscode. Free, works well, relatively lightweight. Debugging works, at least in 2018.3.

 

How do you fix code completion and compilation of scripts when you upgrade Unity?

 

If you want to be more productive and not have problems where you're fighting the tools you need to pick them using proper criteria. How much space they occupy is not one of them when you can purchase drives capable of holding the biggest for only a few dollars.

https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digital-16GB-Traveler-Flash/dp/B00G9WHMCW/ - USB 3.0 16GB - $3.99

 

I'm trying out 2019.x and it crashes a bunch of times especially with RTX. I find I'm getting side tracked with all the new fancy features. I suppose it isn't bad, but for indies I can't help but feel we're missing the point nowadays. Where is the gameplay? Where are the simple blocky prototypes? Just stop cajoling me with all these AAA toolsets I probably won't ever use outside of testing.

 

I mean, DOTS and the whole general ECS workflow would be a major boon to me for an upcoming project because the alternative would be a whole bunch of really difficult to connect systems for handling large unit count AI behaviour and a bunch of custom mesh instancing stuff, and it falls firmly into an indie scope.

 

By bringing us the same tools used by the large studios Unity continues to democratize game development.

We need to look to the future. Within a few years raytracing will be as fundamental as supporting textures and lights.

Finally, as good as the large studio game examples for raytracing have been, Minecraft continues to be one of the best ways to sell it and a large part of that is because it isn't using tons of AAA techniques to make up for a lack of it. Indies push this industry in ways that the AAAs will never push it.

 

You gurls aren't helping me make interesting gameplay in my current wip but are encouraging me to get sidetracked with graphics and advanced AI using dots lol! That's it I'm downloading godot engine RN!.

 

I use sublime text and snippets bro.

 

It is not super lean, because it also runs on the goddamn electron, but it is responsive enough. Unless you enable vim mode. Then it'll become painfully slow on some commands like V.

It works and is closest to the proper monodevelop replacement. It is not optimal, as there are still glitches. For example, adding new file from vs code may require a restart of the editor.

I find that highly doubtful. The improvements are minor, and performance cost is high.

There was significant change in visual quality when going from 2d to 3d, when switching from tweened animation to skeletal ones, when adding realtime lighting, when switching to realtime bumpmapped lighting, when switching to pbr, and so on. However, raytracing offers no such improvement right now.

What's more in games like minecraft raytracing instead of being raytracing is actually hacked to be used for realtime GI.

There is definitely going to be a popular realtime GI solution in the future, but it doesn't have to be raytracing. It may gain higher traction when it no longer requires a specialized chip, however.

Do you guys remember how PhysX was born? First there were PPUs developed by Ageia, except nobody actually used them. Then after some struggle PhysX acquired non-PPU acceleration in form of CUDA, and then went opensource. And now, as a result, it became quite popular. This is the possible path for raytracing.

 

Lord no, for unity i was a die hard Monodevelop user until 2 or 3 months ago ( because i silently awaited VS Code to become serious C# development tool - which it still is not because of - silly as i tmight sound - missing symbol define support ). Finally installed the smallest required VS 2015 package ... and lord how happy i am getting rid of that crappy monodevelop pile of bad code ... )

 

Do you have anything against Visual Studio Community 2019 and, if yes, what? I was reluctant using it when Unity dropped Monodevelop but, after several months using it, I find it very useful and it's not that heavy (less than 2 bG). Code completion works fine; all the Unity functions are automatically completed too, what do people want more?

 

I use sublime text and snippets Anne.

 

Yup it is now called 'Stadia.'

 

Why?

 

More lightweight, and I have all the useful snippets embedded in muscle memory.

 

Sure, you're going to tell me that it actually works, for free and without internet connection.

 

#1 It actually works
#2 For free

Will be addressed in the future for sure.

#3 (without internet) is just you being a silly sausage

 

What about the silly sausage being the people who are unable to live without their "smart" phones and internet?

 

The sad truth is I've had my finger hovered over the download links, for CE5 for production ready realtime GI, and Unreal engine, because I think that faffing about with Quixel (now it is free for Unreal) will be an easy port to unity if neggy writes us a Unreal to unity exporter and we don't care about the legal ramifications.

When the reality is, I should really be hovering my finger over Godot or gamemaker as a one guy dev team arrrrrgh.

 

What does this have to do with Stadia's platform availability? You said "every existing platform and type of device" then moved the goalposts to "works for free and without an internet connection."