Feedback Unity Top 5 Annoyances survey & Discussion!

Awesome.

A couple of things... I filled that out a couple of days ago based on 2019.2, since that's what our project is currently using.

I tried 2019.3 for a bit yesterday and immediately noticed a lag when selecting objects in the scene. There's a small but noticable delay between clicking something and it highlighting. This workstation ain't brand spakin' new, but it's still a decent i7 with plenty of RAM and a decent GPU. To be fair, this is a large project which has a bunch of 3rd party and/or custom editor tools in it, so I can't immediately blame Unity as being the cause, but if I filled the survey out today I'd check in a new project and it'd be #1 on the list if it happened again.

 

I would propose for shader graph fast working with nodes. Every node which gets added or deleted, there's a pause.
If one relies on working in SG viewport, it can get frustrated after some time when nodes get complex.
One example in Cycles. In it you can add/delete as many nodes you want but node tree window won't slow down.

 

The top 5 interface/UX decisions I find myself fighting or working around the most, as asked for in the survey, are:


1) Editor performance has become really bad. Things like UI responsiveness, enter playmode, compiling scripts, asset import, etc feel all way worse than in earlier Unity releases such as 4.x.


2) Picking a GameObject in the scene is tedious and sometimes just doesn't work. When I'm working with UGUI and have UI that consists of multiple elements on top of each other, Unity basically isn't able to select what I want. I have to click like a thousand times until Unity selects what I wanted it to select with a single click.

I fixed this problem when I used to work on in-house game engine tools this way: Do not start picking with the top most element, but the element with the smallest area in screen space.


3) When entering numbers in the Transform Position and Rotation fields, Unity often adds .000001 or whatever to it. For example, entering "25" sometimes becomes "25.000001" or "24.999999". This problem exists for years and it's really annoying, if you have to work with Unity daily. Not only ugly to look at, but also causing version control noise.


4) Dragging items in the Hierarchy window is tedious. If you want to drag an item like 1000 items above its current position, there is only a small area where you can place the mouse while dragging so the Hierarchy starts to scroll and that scroll-movement is slow.

Having "Cut & Paste" functionality would allow me to workaround this drag&drop issue and it would fasten my workflow too.


5) Crowded menus with rarely to never used items. For example, why is there a "Reimport all" or "Seed XP Input Bindings" item in the project context menu? A context menu should provide frequently needed functionality in a clear and organized fashion, but it's filled with things that I never use, causing noise for me to look at.

 

Played around with it a little more this morning.

2019.2 feels a little snappier than 2019.3, but that could entirely be placebo effect.

In 2019.3, the lag is worst the first time a new thing is selected. With that in mind, I think it's probably the same as this. After the first time a new type of thing is selected I can no longer definitively notice a delay between releasing the mouse button and the object becoming highlighted, but there is still often a delay between that and the Inspector updating, which makes the whole interaction feel less responsive than it potentially is. I haven't tested this again in 2019.2.

Also worth note is that it would feel more responsive if objects were selected on mouse down rather than mouse up. That being said, I understand why mouse up makes sense (in case you're starting a drag), and I didn't even notice that until I started looking for latency, so I'm pretty sure that's on me.

Has something changed since 2018 about how GUI redraws are handled?

 

Will there be some kind of summary of the annoyances and what actions Unity plans to take to address them?