Unity Patch releases discussion

We've just started a new thing! Please read this announcement for all the information http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/246198-Unity-Patch-Releases That thread will be used as an archive for these releases so please keep your comments/questions to this thread.

 

Excellent!

One question re support contracts: does having a support contract affect the likelihood that I can get particular blocking issues fixed? Can I effectively "buy" a particular bug fix through my contract?

 

It's not that black and white. One of the things some of us will be doing is triaging bugs. We have a gazillion bugs, so cannot possibly fix them all. We will use the issue tracker votes, how often QA and Support have seen bugs reported and discussed, and, yes, who's reporting the bug. Some large studios have very close relationship with us. So, for example, we have weekly calls with some of our big customers. I know it's easy to assume that only customers who pay a lot of money will get bugs fixed, but, in reality, they have the same issues that lots of customers have. So, we expect many customers will get bugs that they have fixed. There's no "pay money and get bug fixed" at the moment. Down the road we might be able to offer this through our consultancy service, but that's not being discussed at this time.

 

Um, well, we'll have a go at fixing anything we see affecting lots of users. If we can make fixes to platform code we will. There is some changing in 4.5 that will allow platform code to be fixed without requiring a full editor release. This is the Package Manager aka Module Manager feature. (In 4.3.4 you can see that under Unity Preferences. It doesn't actually do anything, but will in 4.5.) Basically the idea is that if Apple, say, made some breaking change and we needed to ship a new iOS runtime that didn't call some old Apple API, we could ship to customers a zip file that contains this changed code. We call those Modules. So, there is a parallel effort in Development to ship more rapid, simple, small, platform fixes. We don't know yet whether this will need input from the Sustained Engineering team.

A patch release is identical to the last official release apart from some bug fixes. So they will be 99.99999% identical. We will not test that a patch release is compatible with an official release. My advice would be to have everyone on the same version.

 

Yes yes we know. We decided to get the bugs fixed and shipped using the exact same release system we use for main releases. We don't like it any more than you do. (So, to compute the md5 hashes for the forum announcement we had to download the releases which took us 30 minutes. They come from our servers in Copenhagen. We have a 1G network connection from Copenhagen and a 100M connection here in Brighton. That's great but never fast enough to pull the editor installer.)

 

Once we have the new forum system, we can use the power of the crowd to up or down vote little johnny's posts. If Johnny gets lots of up votes his view might be important. If he's down voted out of existence we'll say "what Johnny?"

 

No it's not possible to do this. We don't chose to do things just to annoy everyone.

 

But we are working on this. It's the Module Manager. It's just not part of 4.3, so we couldn't use it for the patch release we just shipped. And obviously we can do a diff across the official and patch versions, and just pull in the changes. The thing we ship can then be used to modify your install. But maybe you want the patch version side by side with the official version. Or maybe the person getting the patch doesn't know what a patch is, or how to apply it. And yes, if the editor pulled the patch and applied it, that would solve that problem. So now there is an every increasing amount of work to do to ship 4 bug fixes to you. We'll get there, of course.

 

I moved your post here. It's not ordered correctly, but I'll work that out.

It's not "only for" enterprise customers. We're using lots of ways to work out what needs to be fixed. I know it's meant to be a democracy, but customers who have purchased hundreds of licenses, and have spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on support contracts to allow their high profile, high value IP games to ship on time have certain expectations and obligations from us in their contracts. (How much money they have spent isn't actually even a factor in our triage decisions.) What I am trying to say is that these large organisations are very good at highlighting their issues in the weekly calls we have with them, and reporting their issues to the support and QA teams

If you think any of the bugs that are fixed in the recent patch are unique to enterprise customers, PM and let me know. We are trying to be fair. If we've failed that, then I'm happy to hear you out and use it to improve.

 

I hear you. Shall we stop these patches and use 1.5 years unentangling a super complex product instead?

/troll

 

If a bug was marked as fixed and you found that it was not actually fixed, please submit a new bug report with the latest version of Unity. It's very hard for us to monitor the comments on every single issue and we just don't do it. But we have to process bug reports. Once you have a bug in the issue tracker people can vote for it. You can also mention in your new bug report that this is a regression, a bug that was supposedly fixed but you believe still exists.

 

The problem is that a bug can be fixed in many different versions. We have currently R&D work on 4.5, 4.6 and 5.0 + future releases. If the bug is fixed in either of these, we will mark the milestone and it will show up as "Fixed in a future milestone". These 4 new bugs are showing up now as "Fixed in 4.3.8" and a remark in the bug which patch you can see it in first time.

Again, handling a bug processing workflow across so many versions is very complicated and we don't like complicated. So we resolve it with a milestone in which the fix is first going to appear.

 

It is in line with official releases, just in a non-obvious way. The currently latest released version is actually 4.3.7, so the first patch for that is 4.3.7p1. However, you think that the latest release is 4.3.4. That is the latest *editor* release, but there has been 4 further web player releases since then. Because the 4.3.7 editor is identical in everyday to the 4.3.4 editor, we've simply not shipped this editor version. It's built and sitting on our servers, just not advertised or accessible in any way. Maybe that's confusing.

 

No, it just means that we find these to be important enough to go into a 4.3 right now. The fixes are in most cases backports.

4.5 is in release candidate 4 now, so it will be out soon. That said, we will postpone a release until we have a build without what we define as shipstopping bugs, regardless of how long that may take. We simply don't ship software we know is broken.

 

Quite the reverse. Since the sustained engineering team can fix bugs, devs are freed up to get 4.5 out the door. This release is just one of those that has had a million complications and issues. I'd love to give you a date, but we've been so wrong so many times on this release, it's not going to help anyone if I pull a date out of the air.

Edit: What Thomas said. (Thomas is my boss, just for the record.)

 

So, I've had my entire support team, plus people from Dev, QA, Build, and Infrastructure here in Brighton this week. The plan was that we'd have shipped 4.5 by now, so would spend the week fixing bugs on 4.5. 4.5 hasn't shipped, so we took the decision to make changes to 4.3. Going forward my team will fix bugs wherever they seem to affect customers. For console customers there are reasons why they have to stay on 4.3 and not plan to upgrade to 4.5, so fixing bugs in 4.3 is likely to continue. If bugs get fixed in 4.5 or 5.x, and we can see from editor starts that customers are still on 4.3, we'll see if we can back-port the bugs to the 4.3 product. This is all completely new, so we'll have to see how this all works out.

 

Hm. Just to clarify my intent, I wasn't asking from a "hey are free users gonna get shafted" POV, I was asking from a "hey if I have a submission-blocking bug in Unity then what can I do to ensure that you fix it so I can ship on time?" POV. (I know, I know... hang around here long enough and you get into the habit of hearing the former...)

I did already have this experience once with Unity - we had the game pretty much ready to go under 3.5.7, but a memory leak in the player meant that the game would crash after an hour of play. I asked whether the engineering team could take a look at the problem and maybe do a hotfix release for me - this was after 4.0 had come out - and was just given a flat-out 'nope, we're not going to do that' in response. So we had no choice but to switch to a 4.X release of Unity, fix the upgrade issues - while maintaining compatibility with 3.5.7, because of changes to lightmapping in 4.0 that mean we are forced to still author everything in 3.5.7 - and restart our QA cycle. To add insult to injury there was a PhysX crash bug that affected us in all versions of 4.0 prior to 4.2.0b2... which is what we now ship on. Seems to be a solid enough build of the player; shame about the Editor not being able to save changes to prefabs, though... but we get by.

What I'm hoping is that the existence of the sustained engineering team means I'll never have to face a situation like this again. It definitely sounds like things will be better in a world with patch releases, but I'm a little wary of the 'same issues that lots of customers have' description - if I have a submission-blocking bug that nobody else has ever seen, it sounds like it's going to be low priority for you, but for me it's a life-or-death situation. Is there really nothing I can do to insure against such a situation, short of just making sure I stay really good friends with you guys and then doing lots of impassioned pleading?

I guess the other angle with this is the open source route - if I can fix such a bug myself then the problem is solved. But that's a discussion for the other thread.

 

Hey Mr. Pig,

We obviously can't promise you that situation won't happen again. What we can say is that, unlike previously, we now have a release train for such issues, which is roughly infinitely better than it was.

 

Well, I guess 'roughly infinitely better' will have to suffice for now.

(Definitely interested in having that discussion about "pay money and get bug fixed" consultancy services somewhere down the line, though… assuming you guys don't open the source code before then. Or maybe you could introduce an "emergency source license" whereby you give me the source code in return for me fixing the shipstopper bug and then contributing the fix back to you...)