Official Unity wants your feedback on usability and artist workflows!

Canvases which are disabled (the component itself and not the game object) still get selected in viewport.
It is just not intuitive to get something invisible selected when you try to click on something visible.
Is this a bug or expected behavior?

If it is not a bug could you please make so the disabled canvas objects can not be selected in the viewport in case there is no some good reason for it to be like so...!

Thank You!

 

Another must: Let us use PropertyBlock to change UI graphics materials.
Since _MainTex is a [PerRendererData], the property block should be there, just expose it to us.
I'm implementing a custom UI shader and currently need to hack parameters into it in vertex data.
Or break batches, which sucks.

Some more discussion and request for this feature here, here and here.

 

Please this menu have a way to become possible as standalone window.
Its annoying that it always closes and can't be open all the time to quickly access.

or expose the layers enable/disable in the Unity API so I can code my own window.

 

You can do this with Menu Items and shortcut definitions. Here's one from World To The West:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2.     [MenuItem("WTTW/Select/Editor Mode Spawn Point %#l", false, 40)]
3.     private static void SelectEditorModeSpawPoint() {
4.         //does the thing
5.     }
6.  

That makes ctrl+shift+l select the spawnpoint used when we play the scene from the editor. The syntax for those shortcuts are here. Downsides are:
- there's a menu item now, which you perhaps didn't want
- there's a long standing bug where the shortcuts misses their index in the menu right after assembly reloads. So after a recompile, there's a chance that the shortcut activates a different menu option.

So use at your own risk. Don't combine custom shortcuts with menu items that does something that you can't recover from or takes a very long time.


What I'd really like to see would be a visual way to set shortcuts that are usable by non-programmers, both for shortcuts to custom scripts and for shortcuts to Unity's built-in stuff. There's the Preferences-Keys menu, but there's only a very small set of things there, and we can't (afaik) put our own stuff there. Things like ctrl+9 for the Asset Store should be defined there, not be hard coded somewhere under the hood.

 

Yep, those two reasons are exactly why I requested actual shortcuts (no need to clutter up the [already buggy] menu area -- for example, have you tried setting a checkbox toggle/bool to one of those menu items immediately at code reload? [hint: it doesn't work without jumping through hoops])

Here is an option though:

• Sometimes I don't want to use CTRL/SHIFT/etc. before a key (such as when needing the "Space" key or "mousewheel" for an editor tool), but instead I might want to know if a particular set of editor windows (including the sceneview/gamewindow/etc.) are open before activating the shortcut script function, so perhaps let us make a global editor script with bools (sort of like EditorPrefs) or a return value from a script that lets us tell Unity when we want the shortcut to activate so that we don't interfere with other assets/editor-tools/unity-shortcuts/editor-windows.
  
• Different sets of shortcuts could actually be tied to the new UI "workspaces" feature actually, to help with organization, and whether the workspace is active or not, you can monitor the aforementioned scripts when a shortcut is activated (and let it execute or not, based on what windows/objects/workspaces/etc. are visible)

I 100% agree with you there man.

Unity's one major strength against other engines like Unreal is that it gives users control over its own EditorWindows -- and to be naive enough to hide USER-interface-controls AWAY from the USER who needs to control them is a very strange design decision in any scenario, but that's especially weird when the rest of your interface is under the user's control!


See how important control is to us, Unity?

 

Adding a custom Collider wich can be customized just like the Light probe group where you can add more vertecies or remove them.

 

I would also like to see non square terrain support as well as substance support for Unity terrain :]

 

Hi, i feel there is something weird in the whole PBR workflow in Unity. I struggle achieving a good looking surfaces for so long now. Stuff that is so easy to achieve in Unreal.
i would love to know, is there any more room to improve the PBR workflow because i am not really happy with it.
Personally me, i really need "Unreal Like Rendering Quality" in order to stick with Unity !

Thank You!

 

Hi,

Can we open more than one animator window at once? I have several animator which slightly differ from each other but I want to keep some states, transitions and parameters to be identical (so they can be handled using more or less the same code/behavior). I can't use the animator override asset because the slight state/state transition difference they all had. It's been a pain in the ass to compare and review the animator controller one by one..

Thanks!

 

Hi,

I would like to see a built in setup for working more easily with larger scale UI projects. Two areas in particular:

1) Styling

A built in alternative to the old gui style for the new ui system. Essentially an easy way to setup styling once and then be able to reuse it and apply it to multiple UI. Similar to this asset: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/47163

2) Animations & Transitions

It should be so much easier to add simple animations to ui elements and transitions without needing to touch key frames. It would be much more artist friendly to have a library of standard presets for common animations and transitions which can simply be selected and applied to ui elements. Much in the way that this asset works: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/49628, and also similar to how Adobe Captivate handles UI.

The existing workflows are great for advanced or very custom solutions, but quite tedious if you would like a simple solution up and running quickly.

 

Also, a gameobject "Replace" feature like in Eon's Vue.

For example, select several benches in the scene go Edit > Replace then select a chair GO click ok and tadaa, all of the selected benches get replaced by chairs. This is so useful for mass changing gameobjects. Here is a link: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/wiki/Vu...ding_Scenes/Editing_Objects/Replacing_Objects

 

I'm completely fine how it is now, but what I see the most is people going to unreal engine directly only for the blueprints, working with nodes are a lot more easy and attractive for newcomers and they see coding too hard to start. I think Unity personal edition should have a blueprints system as unreal has.

On the other hand, I see so difficult to make cinematics when you have all set, the scenery, characters animations and you want to change camera focus, translation and rotation, when you are animating camera, you can't see at that frame what will be the characters animations position because you only animate the camera, so you have to create a virtual camera on a 3D application and then use that coordinates to move the unity camera, but then, you have to adjust focusing on unity, because, as far as I know, I cant use any kind of camera focusing camera changes from a 3d application as Blender to a Unity camera (An example would be, camera rotates around 2 characters speaking, characters focused and background blurred, then, one of them raises a sword, I would focus that sword on that precise moment, but I cant know when will be, yeah I could calculate on the total animation time, but is so tedious to create events on the camera to focus an object that I dont know on what coordinates will be and that time etc etc)

 

Have you tried cinemachine? It's free in the asset store and provided by unity

 

Use Cinemachine + Timeline. Ultimate combination for cutscenes. Free. You can even throw the post processing stack into that to control image effects during the cutscenes. Also, free.

 

As an animator, I absolutely *love* the Cinemachine + Timeline features BTW-- That's the kind of animator-focused toolsets I'm talking about when I say Unity needs better support for us animators!!

We bring art to life!!

We animators just need a few things now to do this better:

1) better cloth support
2) facial mocap and lipsync support!!
3) Generic retargeting of skeletons

 

Edit, Project Settings, Script Execution Order, Add... AT LEAST SORT THAT LIST!
And let us filter it by name!
I do everything possible not to go there and lose 10 minutes looking for some script.

 

I'd love something like the Dynamic bone asset, or better something like Lumberjack's way to handle animating appendages. To quickly give tails, hats, hair tufts, etc some movement through physics. Something like that, native in the engine, would be really cool.

 

Hi,

one thing i just noticed - it might or might not be related to Unity but you still may want to be aware of, in case it is not by chance happening to the system i am working on only.
6 core AMD CPU, nVidia GYX 750TI, 8 GB ram and a 64 bit Windows 10

I am developing a racing game and i always have this non smooth movement of the camera even at like 400-500 draw calls and 300k vertices. There are always stutters every few seconds and the camera jitters so bad and annoying that you can get sick. NOTE that you get such stutter, when the GC is cleaning up memory, but in this case the memory allocation is almost rezo ( a few bytes only ).

Actually, there are two tings that were causing that jerky camera movement in this case:
* first the vSync, when enabled in editor makes the camera stutter every few seconds... In build it is not a problem unless you keep your scene simple. Otherwise it is noticeable as well.
* the terrain object in the scene i had was i don't know -> culling, pre-culling or preparing some data, not sure... ws taking 20 ms every few seconds. Probably it is a normal stuff but was causing that stutter as well...

The game is able to run at 70-80 FPS even with the image effects, with vSync disabled.

However, as i was wondering what to do in order to fix these issues that was bothering me for so long, i just thought i can try to switch the feature of windows which manages the CPU frequency from Balanced to High Performance, and believe it or not the stuttering was almost gone ( STILL THERE BUT MUCH BETTER, probably because of some GC )...

Will be good if someone who suffers the camera stutter issue can test on some heavy project and share if switching to High-Performance profile helps reducing it.

As we all know AMD cpus are not that good like Intel cpus but i did try before to compare a couple of them...
A Core 2 Duo Intel CPU running 2 cores at 1.86 GHz (10-12 years old) compared to the same CPU i am using now running 6 cores at 3.36 GHz which is like 6 years old. The intel cpu gave me a much smoother gameplay...

By that said, it seems to me that Unity doesn't like AMD cpus or just likes much more Intel cpus !

 

I think SwingBone is not terribly bad for just $2 on the Asset Store to make due in the meantime -- BUT the key point here is "NATIVE in the engine" -- and the fact that Unity has gone "subscription-based" means they no longer have the poor-man's out that "nobody buys my software so I can't afford to add great-but-trivial features!!"

Gonna rant "purposefully" for a sec, so bear with me please:

The fact that SwingBone has outsold DynamicBone just proves how much features like these matter to regular folks on a budget -- the amount of power and bang for the buck ($2 to create great responsive animations!) is worth a couple of dollars to most indies who don't know how (or don't have time!) to create a script like that for themselves!

Adding to the pain points here -- the "Vote" system is totally broken and features like these get canned or back-burnered indefinitely for high-profile stylish features (I'll elaborate more on this in my next post), leaving the base/core system a broken/tedious mess as long as that high-profile feature gets shipped as on-time as possible, creating tons of time-sink and focus issues, both for large-scale "high-profile" and "trivial" features alike.


See my next post for more of my thoughts on this.



Disclaimer:
(I'm in no way affiliated with the author of any assets mentioned here -- these particular assets were mentioned only because they were useful to illustrate my point effectively!)

 

I just wanted to separate my previous post into more focused bits:



Examples of *some* high-profile "feature-focusing" time-sink issues Unity is plagued with:

Fig. 1-1:
Cinemachine/Timeline were released while also missing Animation-window-style Events for script-execution, while still being billed as being "gameplay-driven"!

Fig. 1-2:
Mecanim, a generic system about retargeting animations (that intended to replace the old animation system entirely), was released without a generic bones retargeting system, and the length of time it has been missing indicates this "feature-focus" problem has been going on a while.

Fig. 1-3:
A 'new' UGUI system intended to replace the "Legacy" GUI system pre-4.6 was never fully-implemented as an "out-of-the-box" solution as was implied, leaving assets like NGUI to fill its shoes once again, and probably hundreds of hours of development work pretty-much wasted on a feature that never came to fruition.

Fig. 1-4:
This thread (hopefully not a fruitless time-sink, but a feature-based time-sink nonetheless) was created most-likely because there was a huge debate about what the hell to focus on for future Unity versions (because the vote system is broken when it comes to regular users vs. power-users). To clarify the development and task-assignment timelines for the internal teams, Unity needs to finally come to understand what areas of the program specifically need focus -- so at least they're actually trying now!


My suggestion on how to fix this glaring time-sink-feature-focusing/shipping issue:

Unity needs engineers devoted specifically to "trivial" features -- features that have TONS of power, but are trivial to implement~! -- These types of features are anything that enhances the power and general "experience" of the overall engine as it relates to its core of "complex-featureset" users (i.e. animators, designers) and free up the "high-profile" shippable-features team to work solely on those.

Implementing power that costs very little to implement is a great business strategy overall anyhow. To ensure this strategy works properly, the "trivial-feature" engineer needs to be totally detached from any "high-profile" shipping-features teams. He needs to be able to rate items he accepts in terms of just how much power does a feature give a general user NOW to utilize the engine, and how straightforward the feature is to produce without a solid design architecture (this design can be developed as it goes if it becomes necessary).



A voting system **might** be useful to help sort the feature requests, but votes for the simpleness-to-straightforwardness aspects or the ratio (using a 1-100 point system at minimum) instead of *only* the feature itself would be immensely more clear about what to focus on than the current voting system for high-profile features allows.

SwingBone, as mentioned in my previous post, is a great example of a "simple-but-powerful-and-straightforward" feature to implement and could be used as a measuring stick for features like this due to its "simple-to-straightforward-and-powerfulness-to-usefulness" ratio. Let users vote on a feature's power and usefulness ratio as well -- why not, right?



Let's indeed "Democratize game development." once and for all -- because, right now, it feels like Unity is a Dictatorship.

 

Hidpi support for the Windows editor is a must. Unity is the only thing in my tool chain without it.

 

Also, please fix the sceneView camera PAN speed to be constant AND relative to a single adjustable scene scale!


Skip the voting (for already well-established pain points like these) -- and just fix it please?

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/scene-view-camera-speed.479526/
https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/editor-camera-speed-must-be-configurable


...or just google how much everyone hates it if you must -- and THEN fix it:

https://www.google.com/search?q=unity+editor+zoom+speed&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

NOBODY really likes its design ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

Hi guys.

So since I started using Unity on and off in a casual capacity around a year and a half ago this one has bugged me.



The thumbnail mode of your project view doesn't indicate prefabs vs imports. The list view does. I think this is one reason I don't remember to use this feature as often as I would.

Hope it doesn't get buried / gets noticed. I think it's reasonable, and trivial to "fix." Maybe you'll agree.

Thanks for your time. Other than that having a great time with a flexible game engine.

Edit: I tried.

 

I don't know, it behaves like my 3D modelling application, which is good because I usually use them in close tandem. What's the perceived issue with the pan?

I'm not trying to be a jerk I just want to reproduce what you're seeing. Could you give me an example, like camera settings and some objects of different sizes arranged in a simple scene?

I just don't totally understand why the PAN speed would be relative to scene scale...? Sounds like a recipe for me struggling to view and arrange the 30m^3 objects in my 2km^2 floorplan?

 

The pan/zoom/whatever speed is in regards to the last thing focused. Which is nice when you're working with the last thing you focused!

But when the last thing I was working with was an overlay canvas, that's 10.000x10.000 units, and now I want to look at something in the scene so I can click it, it's annoying that a single tick of the scroll wheel moves me straight through the scene.

It'd be a lot better if we could manually adjust the scene camera speed when needed. some combination of alt/crtl/shift and the scroll wheel.

 

No worries dude -- my issue is exactly what @Baste mentioned above -- it has nothing to do with any particular setting, only that it's (internally and un-modifiably!) based off of what you edited last (supposedly) or perhaps it's based on your current zoom level, which is very hard to gauge anyway with any real kind of precision, and either way, for those of us who have lots of tiny gameobjects on a large scene -- or even an N64 scene like Kakariko Village from the 3DS N64 Zelda remake! Moving around a scene like that one in particular, for example, say between the village and Death Mountain in the distant BG area can be a major ass-pain if you're trying to get up to something on top of the Death Mountain (say it was a plateau in your own game and you had enemy units up there or something.) Get the model from The Model's Resource if you don't believe me, set its scale factor to 0.1 so you can see it -- then try moving your camera around that level comfortably and precision-place your gameobjects between the two areas.

Now just imagine if you needed to get a line-of-sight between the two areas to be sure certain geometry was occluded by the crevice's walls or rooftops or mountain peaks, etc., and referencing the two areas (back and forth, back and forth) would be killer-tedious for you with the current camera pan/zoom relationship.

It may sound like I'm reaching, but I work with large scenes like that all the time -- most of the time much larger and more geometry- and gamobject- heavy -- and I need better precision on my cameras across large and small scales alike! It may be fine as-is for mobile games, but for serious desktop games with much higher draw-distance, it can be a strain on people's sanity.


On a positive note:


To rectify this issue, I found a suggestion that's even better than my own idea:

In one of those links I posted, a guy mentions Unreal had a single slider to control zoom-level/pan-speed/move-speed scales in the scene. I think that's an excellent feature suggestion -- one that's easy to implement -- and right-on-par with what @Baste suggests above about having control over the scale, but I also suggest taking this one step further and opening these up to the Unity scripting API as well, due to it being such a user-experience-affecting problem, and the fact that others might want to implement their own interfaces to control these settings. I myself am one of those people.

 

I uploaded an asset to the Asset Store for review, "Snapcam", which is meant to help alleviate *some* of the scene scale issues, but because the scene manipulation tools' code is locked under the hood, I can't fix it all to make a perfectly smooth scene viewing experience...


I love the hell out of the Unity platform, but "little" (huge on the day-to-day level!) design quirks like this zoom/scale issue is what keeps the core userbase uneasy about Unity sometimes...

 

I think everything is fine. Some people, who complains, just don't want to work))) Keep it as it is))

 

This thread was created for "user-feedback" -- the whole thread is devoted to feedback from artists and designers about both positive and negative issues with Unity from "actual users" -- and if you think "everything is fine" then you apparently either don't use Unity enough to know there are issues with it, or if you do use it, you don't even agree with Unity themselves that "everything is NOT fine" and thus they felt the need for this topic. Unity themselves created this explicitly for us to tell them both what stuff and why or why NOT we feel that stuff specifically works or doesn't work, not to just say, unhelpfully, "great job! keep up the good wurk!" or even "this feature sux - fix it!!" because, even though the first is nice to hear, they also want to hear some actual -- specific -- feedback as to what it is that exactly IS great (rather than shrug-off people with specific workflow issues or concerns about certain areas of Unity).

Casting blanket-statements that assume everyone else is lazy or unappreciative just because they voice their concerns -- and once again, voicing these concerns are exactly what this topic was created for! -- doesn't help you OR Unity, or anyone else for that matter, to see what's both really broken and really great about Unity.


Trolls aside:

I love that stuff like Mecanim, Timeline, and Cinemachine are a core part of Unity. These are the kinds of things that make Unity one hell of a tool -- so props to all involved that helped make them happen! -- but Unity is not perfect, and my whole intention (as well as the intentions of most others posting here!) is to get Unity at least as close to "practical" as possible, for everyday work, without asking them to do something unrealistic or impossible!

Mentioning issues (even with amazing tools like those!) requires stepping up and voicing your opinion! -- if not, just keep trucking along waiting for amazing features to appear that are brought about only by people who DO voice their opinions and concerns -- and it seems those are getting fewer and farther between these days...

 

Seems the GPU profiler stops working very often at some point and you can not make it work anymore...

In a new projects seems to always work... but currently in an old project ( DX11 latest Unity 2017.1.1p1, but was started in some 2017.1.0 beta ) when i try to run it, it always says that the GPU is not supported and the driver needs to be upgraded or something like that... As reading the forums this is happening to many people... One thing about the project is that the active platform was changed multiple times in order to test it... Android, iOS and windows DX11, DX12, Vulkan. Now only DX11 is left and all other platforms are removed...

Can this be addressed as well, as it's a very old issue !?
Thank You !

 

For me, that message always goes away when I start running the game after enabling gpu profiling. It seems like the profiler interprets "there's no gpu frames here" as "the graphics card must not be supported", instead of the sensible "no frames has been recorded yet".

 

I was just told that "Graphics Jobs" when enabled, the GPU profiler will not work.
I was not aware of this and it was the case !

 

One of the biggest issues that I have with Unity at this point is the fact that it's not accessible for individuals who have disabilities. As someone who has a visual impairment I am constantly struggling to do the things I need to do because first, I can't change the colors of the unity Editor in the free version, and I know that was a business choice that was made at Unity's conception, but now that business choice is keeping people away from their product. Not only can you not change the color, but you can't adjust the font sizes and or fonts of any of the editors UI components. and it is this point here that is really preventing me from getting in to using Unity to it's fullest potential. and then you add in the fact that the UI color choices are hard coded so things like Windows High Contrast Mode have no effect what so ever.

Another point that another person brought up is that there are a lot of assets on the asset store that are actually design tools and not actual game assets, such as audio, video, shared or models. And I do agree that it's those design tools should be integrated in to the editor more like a plugin and or extension, that way they are there no matter what project you're using and it also creates a more unified development platform when anyone on the design team can sit down and know that they're going to have the tools that they need. But also dramatically reduces the clutter that is in your project folders themselves by having to import commonly used design tools.

 

Editor history would be nice - or something like back button to return inspector to prev object

 

At the moment, there is no way for an artist to do this. or if there is, is hiding in the editor section.

• Ability to "F" focus close to the object by default
  it is missing the distance parameter in the Preference section:
  Unity>Edit>Preferences>Keys add a Focus parameter and float distance value
• Ability to focus pressing middle the mouse button
• Ability to focus cycle by pressing "F" or "middle mouse button" between different pre configurable distances near, middle [actual] and far. So is I press three times F in my keyboard it will focus the game object and I will look it from far away.
• Ability in preferences: Unity>Edit>Preferences>Keys to select the zooming speed of my middle mouse wheel.
  

About visual scripting: We artist are not stupid. We all try at some point to use simple visual scripting for coding and as the exception for shaders and audio, we all finish using code. why...?

 

I know I speak for MANY here and it’s probably been mentioned hundreds of times previous (I’m sorry if it has), but please fix your terrain system. I have been making games for many, many years, used many editors and I have to say it is quite bad (I’m holding back). I have recently diverted a project to Unreal because it requires a terrain based system, lots of foliage, and lighting is really important for the mechanics – so Unreal was the choice for those reasons. The problem does not lie in creating the terrain itself, that’s not too bad, although the sensitivity of the sliders impact on the terrain could do with some work. And the texture layering system is pretty good too. It’s everything that goes on top of it where the problems really begin. Trees, grass and any type foliage is a real struggle to get it to look decent. Currently I have to use the ‘Nature/Soft Occlusion’ shader to use the tree painting system. If I don’t use that shader, I have to do it manually, but then I can’t use any type of wind on my foliage. It’s a mess. The tree creation tool is AWFUL, and the trees that come out of it look really bad for today’s standards. My scenes are compositionally designed and have structure, so I build my own trees. I also want to give them character, and I want to position and rotate them exactly where I want them.

In my current project, I’m using the standard shader on the bark and it looks awesome. Yeah… I don’t get wind, but for this project, it’s not important. Why isn’t that an option for trees generally? The leaves on the other hand are a nightmare. If I don’t use the Nature/Soft Occlusion shader I don’t get double sided polygons. I have ivy that sits against a wall so you can’t see the back polys, and I’ve used the standard shader for them, and they look great too, but I can’t get them to use the wind either. Don’t even get me started on detail meshes. Why on earth don’t they cast shadows? If they do, you’ve hidden it away, because I can’t find it. It all feels choppy and hacked in.

I just want the option to drop in my own trees, bushes, grass, rock clusters etc. onto the terrain, use wind and shadows, so they look awesome with normal maps etc. Is that difficult to do?

Purely from an artist’s perspective, please make it consistent and give us the ability to make it look great. Separate the functionality from the shader / rendering i.e. I should be able to put global wind on ANY object with a tick box, type of object (vertex or bone based – or both), and a mass value. For example, if I have a group of objects hanging on a line; a metal lamp; some cloth; bunch of herbs; a hanging cable; a hanging plant basket etc. I should be able to tell Unity to make the wind affect them all, through choice. Freeze them if they’re not rendered on screen. If rendering them becomes a problem, then we, as artists, should have the ability to dial it back or turn it off, but it’s our decision based on the project and platform.

I know there is Speedtree (and other products / downloads), but not everybody can afford to spend $20 a month for trees in their game. Speedtree also locks you into their system, which is not good. This functionality should be standard. I know there is a mobile community too, so dialling back the geometry / texture detail is important, but not to the point it restricts the high end users. Let the user decide on detail. Give us the maximum potential. Fix it.

 

I'm doing some thread bans where people are banned from replying to this specific thread. Mostly, the common offenders were arguing with other people. This is not acceptable in an official feedback thread.

 

please fix the pull-down for selecting animation event functions in Mechanim.. perhaps a nice heiarchy tree window that spans recognizable things instead of dumping everything imaginable into a single scroll list?

 

First off after using both Unity and Unreal I will say that the animation system in Unity is far superior. Unreal animations must be seperate one at a time or you spend many hours finding keyframes and doing tedious tasks. Where in unity they can be all together, seperate upside down or backwords as long as your bones are right they work hehe. So great work on Mechanim system!

One thing I find about unity is it tends to be much quicker for prototyping as well as much more lightweight. However Unreal offers something just by default already downloaded with the Engine which I think Unity should do as well. A default, dummy, blank, useless for a project but great for prototyping dummy, animated, controllers set up and ready to rock and roll, as well as several different really basic default example scenes. I mean its like a room with a ramp and some text, or a couple chairs on a platform, but it is really useful for getting your act together. Walking into Unreal with no experience what so ever, and being able to just click that and boom, instant examples to look at, high quality nice and shiney, it is a real turn on, please consider doing similar for Unity. I know we can get Unity essentials and blah blah, but that takes going through the asset store finding the ones we want, extra workflow. Just really basic dummy starters to roll with makes a world of difference. 1 dummy 8-10 basic animations (walk, run, jump, idle, heck thats even enough) basic char controller all set up with scenes we can pick when we create a new project.

Workflow for modeling/animations....Importing premade asset packages (example protofactor chickens just off my head) boom done, drop in scene ready to rock. Much easier workflow on that part than the other engines. I wish you would however either pick back up the backing/support for UMA so they can polish it off and maybe put a character customization/player creation system with it, cause let's face it Morph 3D is nice, if you wanna get 15-30$ to death for 1-2 clothing items a pop, broken compiled proprietary code, and the team moving focus to their new pet project, lets get back on the UMA train, it is far superior, was a wonderful idea, was great when you were backing it. Community has kept it going, lots of improvements, but a bit of Unity official support could launch the definitive model pack for any game engine, which would be a massive selling point! NPC's easy, make a model, one skin color, 1 hair, 1 set of clothes, you know the npc is what it is, but player character systems are extremely time consuming and tedious. All the importing of the same models just to get the different skin textures and eye textures and then theres the rigging of the equipement. I at this point believe a good player customization system is the most time consuming, expensive, and aggrivating part of a project. I find no enjoyment in it. UMA could solve most of that with a push! Granted still gotta do equipment rigging but hey, artists gotta eat too. Now with Miximo being bought by adobe, then turned to fuse, then shut down....choices are limited or extremely expensive just to get a base model now.

Blueprints smuprints. I played with them, is amusing I did the equal amount of game framework that would take me around 8-10k lines of c# code, and never wrote a line of code. However some of us like to code, and enjoy that control. If anything I would suggest more language options maybe c++ or perhaps you are planning on F# replacing Uscript? just some alternative. I would say one of those new kid hybrids but they all use jvm ><. Perhaps some native extendability languages like built in json, schema etc that would be cool for workflow, and fit right in with Unet improvements!

I would agree with the guy earlier speaking of accessability options. I am getting older, not quite fully there yet, but I have Unity spanned across 2 42" monitors and its still not enough space for all the tabs I want to see. However I will admit that could be one of those old, get more screen space find more use for more screen space things. But the Unity plus dark scheme, I love it, that is not what I am paying 30$ for though, it really is easier on the eyes, and should be a default option, maybe give plus users the ability to make their own color schemes and let the dark format be free, would be the humanitarian thing. Keyboard shortcuts to maximize and minimize a tab (unless they exist already?) would be another good accessability option for people, along with when it maximizes the fonts getting a bit bigger. Say cntrl+someKeyHere toggle that makes it go from tab to maximize and back to tab. Heck I can see and would enjoy that!

Gonna keep this to workflow cause I already have a book on that subject here, last thing I wan't to mention is... If you lose a key dev on a project, or announce a planned feature and it gets sidetracked, and it is a High Level API function, just give us the source, let us help. Keep the source available, don't go patching, breaking fixes we made and hiding the source (gonna target HLAPI for UNET here) Seriously we had it improved (still work to do on it) but then you make a couple changes and hide the source, and broke our fixes, not cool guys, not cool. You pretty much abandoned that for over a year, ignoring bug reports and suggestions now you hammer our head like that haha. I don't want to be bitter but it is little things like that which tarnishes Unity. I get you go with the business model of closed source, with fee access, but you have started and sidetracked so many things and it has hurt you, where we could have backed up up and helped you on the higher level api stuff if you would just let us at it. Another example here, trees, come on man you aggrivate speedtree and then don't deliver.... ok enough I am stopping here.

Hope you don't get too upset at my terrible spelling and grammar. I have been reading/writing {!@}#div longer than I was ever in school, and it shows

Edit: subnote but a big one.... Updates, like help->update always says up to date, even though it is not, and a for real patching system maybe so we don't have to download the entire client every single time.

 

1. example project (available if you tick it in the installer)
2. standard assets (available at any moment by going in the menu)

 

Modern Skin, Hair and clothing shaders

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/i-fixed-unitys-home-page-p.481869/page-3#post-3138238
https://forum.unity.com/threads/i-fixed-unitys-home-page-p.481869/page-3#post-3138924

 

Thank you for your points. However I thought I mentioned the things can be gotten for unity but as this is a workflow thread I was pointing out a flaw in new developer experience workflow. Unreal has 11 example projects to pick from as soon as you finish installing, it was a wonderful new user experience and I feel Unity can benefit from it. When you first get Unity it is a thank goodness for the community because otherwise Unity is a fumble and stumble fest.

 

But that's the reason why I mentioned the standard asset, they are readily available and are small contain project to start, and that's what everyone has been doing already, and they have made a thread to ask for more. I mean there is the standard asset with a full racing track, the one where you run and jump in grayboxing land with ramp and all, it's all there. Just in the menu, which mean you can invoke it at any given time. In fact entire game were flip... I mean made with just that

 

Yes the tools are there, once you are familiar with getting around the asset store, finding them, downloading them 1 by 1. Great part about Unity in comparison is those packages are created to go along side a wonderful tutorial for free on the Unity Learn page. I hope you don't think I am knocking unities content availability. However the new user goes oh yeah, got me some unity, yep click example project....oh thats all I got, now what. Go to asset store, yep in editor easy to find, but what they are hit with is high priced assets on the front page, with the unity stuff burried in the corner..... Unreal is in your face with the super stuff the moment you begin to download it with the Epic Games Launcher. You open that small download (kinda like unities install manager) but instead of a white screen you have all the fancy AAA style nvidia supported uber stuff in your face before you even open it.

So example I am a new dev, maybe did some hello world, got me a windows form that does something and thats it. Ready to make my game!

Ok I decide everyone has bashed unity (and yes, totally dooing so without understanding at all. Sure a crapload of really junk games with the made with unity spash screen, that is not the engines fault), however its there, the rep is bad, and everyone is harping about unreal, so I go there. (BTW even nvidia gameworks has 3 things they talk about Unreal land partnering with Unreal without a single Unity mention. Nvidia Faceworks, Apex Cloth, and Hairworks).

Now I go to the site, I would say comparable as far as graphics. Heck if you just base it on the home page both sites look like the same guy made them. I go get my un real download button. I get that little file that sets up the download launcher.... This is what is in my face first thing...


Where if I did the same in Unity, again the home pages look about the same, easy to find the download buttons (unless you want a patch release), but this is what I get in Unity


Now Unreal when you click install has a lightbox style popup that has install folder choice, and such, and you can choose to just grab the editor and build targets, but they do it the right way, most of the common build targets are selected, the editor is selected, the standard assets and the example scenes all that stuff is selected. If you want to opt out you have to hit an options button to go where you can uncheck things. it is a more modern and much cleaner design as well. One problem almost everything in the world has, just think about your gamers, same thing. Oh pfft ima skip the tutorial, then they are asking a bajillion questions they coulda had answered by just doing the tutorial. Think new devs are any different? Most not graduating from college, grabbing these engines are just gamers that wanna make one themselves, so yep skip that tutorial, limit my download, ima check editor and windows target lets go! BAD, make it harder but not hard to get to those options. Default should be everything. Continuing on to why.

Ok now in Unity once I start downloading .... Oh wow a lovely white page with a couple of green bars. Yay uhh.... This is a multimedia product of the highest order, do it justice, we aren't installing notepad ++ here. In unreal it downloads in the background and you get left with looking at all those fancy things I pictured earlier. Unities download in progress page imo should look more like this:

And why not, that is a screen shot from scrolling down must a little bit on the made with unity website game page. Now look im a new dev getting excited over unity cause wow I can do that! Most things people preconceive about Unity is well rollerball clones....

Ok now we got it all downloaded, ready to rock, gonna launch this badboy and make a game. Over to my Unreal experience, lauch, I get this:


Cause remember, the options to disable common core content and examples were not right in your face going hey remove me itll download faster, and tbh 3 or 4 years ago the first time I tried Unity, I started to get it all, but watching those green bars I canceled and went back and unchecked. Anyway, so i eagerly wanted to make that game in Unity so I got the barebones...Launch it, this is what I get:


Actually I bit the bullet and got the sample assets, but you see my point, that would just be blank with a new or open. My account doesn't even have my name or my avatar yyyaaaawwwn. Oh and where are my build settings like desktop or mobile, Maximum quality or scalable. With starter content or without starter content. 3 very intuitive easy to use modern interface buttons. Hit new in unity you get a big name it, wheres it go, and a tiny button off to the right to add asset packages. Now I am on the fense about that part. While I think it needs those basic choices to get your editor set up ready to roll, Unreal does not have an add asset packages option! Unity wins that! (If you have assets to use).

Finally we got starter content, we all set up, time to hit that go button and make a game! This is the funny part of it all. Unreal had a great modern beautiful and engaging experience up to this point. All the while driving the developer to make the correct install choices, and right back to getting them engaged in the community and features, and marketplace while they waited on download. Unity had you look at some green bars and made it really easy for you to not get basic tools to get started with...but after all thats done, if both devs made the right choices and got their starter content and are finally ready to start making that game....

Unreal
vs
Unity


Meh Unreal has some pretty ui buttons, but essentially its and IDE now, you can move panels make tabs open windows, however Unreal is default dark...you gotta get plus for Unity, this is a silly thing. If people are paying for subscriptions just to get that dark editor i can't even... I do it for the few extra useful tools I get myself.

It is scientifically proven that dark text on a white background is better for your eyes. However we all know those all night code sessions all that white can seriously get to you. I really think the basic white and the "professional" dark options should be free. If you want to give plus and pro something, let us customize it with whatever colors we want, make our own editor themes. Anyway, asside from that, editor itself, both about on par, and guess what.

That is where it stops for Unreal​

The trick here is Unreal already has you hooked in, you think you got the solution, and look you got fancy blueprints. I did a lot with blueprints, they are fun don't get me wrong. However the purpose of them is for level designers and character developers to be able to quickly hook up logic. You still run into walls where you need a coder to make new nodes for those designers to use! They are basically just ifs, ands, combines, and returns that you tie up together, if you try to actually do code with it, you get a big bowl of ugly spegghetti that hurts performance. The other downfall for Unreal. C++ well maybe not a downfall, certainly a great language, but we are talking new dev here. Now you just threw some poor gamer trying to make his dream game into a language where you have to manage your own garbage collection, it is more difficult to use and master, edit: Unreal has a rudamentary garbage collection system they built, but you have to manually make sure the engine is aware of everything it should be looking to collect, personally I prefer the c# way of get your stuff working, then optimize the garbage issue when polishing, end edit: all the while Unreal has a much smaller and less helpful community than Unity. Don't get me wrong, nice folks, but most of them are very savvy coders that just don't have time to bother. Where Unity experts tend to be people who started from nothing just like the guy asking the question, so they feel the pain.

Now I can go into all kinds of why I think Unity is better, not only for new devs, but even seasoned companies. Unity has everything you need, you might just have to make part of it yourself. Unreal asset store is lacking, too.

Now back to workflow. Thats it you got it Unity I swear, I mean you can always improve anything. However.... that standard pack for unity, this is what you get:


Look at the scrollbar, I could not even get it all on the screen. That Unreal project has this



Got all that on less than a screen with bigger icons lol. Now granted if you put everything together they probably have roughly the same standard install with the editor stuff. But, WORKFLOW AGAIN, Unity wins bigtime, Asset store in editor, download right there, import right there, all together now JUST CLICK DONE. Unreal, you seriously have to make a new project for every asset you get, or if you want to use stuff from one of the other example packages, then merge the scenes together the workflow is terrible. Unity mechanim wins hands down, and the in progress improvements to some of that stuff as well as a few assets that launched recently for unity, just fix bugs guys you got this.

Also Unity has a better editor workflow as well with the dropdown menus open a new window type locking it in and squeezing them around. Unreal has quite a bit of you get this one window, and thats that. Also many of them can't even be docked you have to just float them wherever its not in the way (the animation/skeletal mesh flow is just retarded in Unreal).

What needs to be done, is to get those new devs to Unity, and fix the bad reputation it has gained. Work on marketing and UI/UX experience for those new guys, fix the website link system it is not very intuitive. Of course keep improving but take the time to show people what Unity is and what it is really capable of in a more Aggressive way!

So I hope that clears up your confusion, that I am not knocking Unity, quite the opposite. I think unity needs to have a more access able front end. If you really wan't to polish off work flow, give us a 3d modeling full integration, make a big lump offer to the Script Inspector 3 dev and Incorporate that gem so we have one editor work process (I mean really the only reason to use an IDE was for profiling and debugging, welp thats working pretty well in Unity needs some polish), then finally that new uMotion just go ahead and buy that.

Take your favorite out of mapmagic workflow, or gaia workflow all the way out to megasplat, make an offer put it in.

You are finally getting rid of that poop of a joke outdated mono with half done manual updates and getting some real c# going on really soon, so thats checked off. I know that was hugely microsofts fault, making a buncha silly loose libraries instead of a common core.

I mean whats left if you do those things? Fix Unet, yep networking. Meanwhile you can evolve in parallel with the VR/AR experience because if you just play it smart you can make Unreal look like a joke, have the best collab/workflow/one stop game dev shop system bar none, you aren't far away from it seriously. Instead of paying people to fiddle with things just for experimentation, then calling it research, pay these community devs to integrate the missing pieces, maybe hire them on contract to maintain it. Don't get me wrong, research is great, and I have seen some interesting things float in and out of your githubs. However, theres plenty to do with reported bugs that have been around for a few years now. Documentation pages that are wrong, and never fixed, one page in particular same issue for 4 years, js code, that never worked, copied to the c# example. Unity seems to me to be a huge company with people everywhere, less q learning more fixit

Anyway if you don't want to go the make a deal route, those are the missing parts to the best system ever with an amazing workflow. IMHO.

edit: Since Nvidia and I love Nvidia but they crawled up Unreal's backside and are supporting them hard/helping them integrate the Nvidia gameworks tech, maybe you should fight back and try to hit up Radeon for some support, or take some serious example cases over to Nvidia and show them why they should at least be equally as involved with Unity. Idea, forget the graphics, go talk to AMD about support for making an easy to use, safe multithreading system to show off those beasty new Threadrippers.

 

Great post, @Xype! -- I concur with almost all of that! -- Unity really needs to consider a new approach to much of its existing introduction- workflow- and marketing/dev/partnership- priorities.

And yes, as you stated, even the very first introduction to the application's UI is a serious marketing opportunity!!

That's the reason you see really creative scripts and editor-workflow packages sell so well! -- They can sell Unity too!

In fact, the very reason I first braved the world of Unity was based solely on a cool (cheap!) 2D editor package (Ferr2D) on the Asset Store! -- and when I learned I could (near-effortlessly!) make my own rudimentary developer UI tools by simply exposing gameplay variables (a major feature for game development imo!), I was totally sold!

As I stuck around though, I realized major features were advertised with great fanfare (with usually less-than-bare-minimum feature-sets unfortunately) that were just as abruptly abandoned without word (i.e. Mecanim [generic animation-retargeting] or UGUI [out-of-the-box GUI solution meant to replace IMGUI]) so the vision sold to users never came to fruition.

I think Unity gets a bad rep because of oversights like these more than anything.
Unity is a huge system, so it's understandable there are oversights. Yet, when you're the end-user using a system with oversights (oversights that seem pretty glaring to you, the very one the system was supposedly designed for!) -- it's hard to remember how huge a beast Unity is sometimes -- especially when some of those things that stand in your way are as fundamental as the movement speed of the camera in the editor that is Unity itself to most users!

Unity is an excellent platform -- the BEST platform, imho -- but it's hindered by loads of usability quirks and long-standing bugs in seemingly tiny things (like the cursor or tooltips' visibility, etc.) that haven't fully been sorted or addressed, or have been labeled "features" instead -- and to advanced users, the Asset Store has become a mess in so many ways (for example, I cant even upload a small publisher image to my publisher account, although it's labeled as part of the process to create one! I spent almost an entire night trying to figure out why it wouldn't accept my image.) It's stuff like this that makes Unity bittersweet to most developers. We love it so much, but we hate some stuff about it too -- and the things we hate are not stuff like "it doesn't look as pretty as Unreal" or "it doesn't support x/y/z new graphics features" but instead, the things we hate are seemingly TINY things like what I mentioned above.

This.

This is exactly where Unity stands with the average gamedev newbie (artist or programmer) in a nutshell.

And unfortunately, if the newbie sticks with Unreal, they likely won't seek to learn another engine for years (and they eventually become the 'experts' in the industry, who in turn tell other newbies to use what they use themselves)!! That's why Unreal pretty much still has the better PR, despite being lackluster compared to Unity in so many ways (including some kinds of graphics too believe it or not!) -- The reason for this is because almost any professional artist on Polycount uses Unreal due to its perceived graphical prowess (case in point: Nvidia partnership) and its use by many in-house devs that have been in the industry forever (i.e. Nintendo) -- and for someone like Nintendo to switch (lol pun) over to Unreal instead of their own frameworks, that says a lot to newbies wanting to either work for, aspire to be, or compete with, those companies. Artists included, since they need to know the capabilities of the 'software of choice' for the industry.

That being said....



@Unity



Everyone already knows about Unity. Why advertise like a small business with mandatory splash-screens?

I think you guys should actually charge money for people to use a splash-screen instead.

No longer would players think before they even look at the game: "aww, this was made in Unity, this game is probably gonna be crap". This thinking is real, and it is due to all the hobbyists using it for gamejams or other simple projects, giving players of professionally-made games a false sense of Unity's capabilities (Unreal, on the other hand is a lot more painful to use for something like a simple gamejam, since most games are 1 gig+, so their engine does not have this problem).

If, on the other hand, I could make players think "Wow! This game was made in Unity! It's gonna be great!" before they ever laid eyes on the title screen, I personally would spend up to $1,000 for the logo myself to separate me from the hobbyists and show to my customers, in no uncertain terms, that I am a seasoned Unity developer serious about making the kind of games people should pay for, and in turn, the game they're about to play is going to be great. And this would be possible if only the most serious of devs (the devs willing to invest in themselves and their game!) were allowed to advertise "Made in Unity" in the game itself.

Something like this could have the power to change the whole playing field in a single swoop, depending on how you did it, because then, even people using Unreal would eventually begin to ask -- "Hey, did something change in Unity? I only see really high quality games being made in it these days!" -- and sure enough, they'd give it another shot and find out for themselves how great Unity is.

I wont go into details, but you could have the "Unity Certified" be part of the whole thing too. This would make for some real good PR for the entire Unity games market with this one move, and serious developers would love you for it even more.

Now, if you guys want more advice like this, feel free to hire me as your new marketing strategy guy! -- I'll deliver.

- A

 

I'm just saying you don't need the asset store at all to access them
Menu: assets>Import Package
You do have a point in that it's a bit "hidden" in term of presentation

 

Totally agree with the bad advertisement crappy games with splash screen gives Unity, but not sure if this would work now, after all those years.

But if Unity used it (a different splash) as a badge of honor, like Vimeo's Staff Pick, that could be really good for the brand. And instead of paying, the developer could get some perks to make the game better, like services boost, free assets, more direct support access, blog mentions, app store recommendation, etc.

 

Yeah, I definitely agree, though I didn't mean to sound like I was suggesting using the exact same splash screen, only that removing it from circulation from those who didn't pay (or earn the privilege) to use it would be good for business all around. Not all advertisement is good advertisement -- and by them not remembering this, Unity is inadvertently hurting its developers.

But I do agree that a perks option would be great for the poor-man dev (which is quite a lot of us actually, including myself!), except I think Unity already does a similar thing with the Asset Store review, and that vetting process is taking close to one month on average these days (for a single asset!) -- so I can just imagine the approval time it would take for games AND the asset store at the same time. So, unfortunately, I don't see a way to do it without funding it first from developers.

That said, I do agree that something needs to be done about the negative advertising soon, and finding a way for the customer to separate the serious dev from the hobbyist without the dev being a billion-dollar-a-year company needs to happen -- and a fancy badge of honor with Unity's logo on it would be a great way to go about it (as long as they remove the splashscreen from regular Unity apps and revoke users' rights to use it anymore on their games or websites. The sad thing is, nowadays just being created in Unreal is usually enough for players to say "oh, this is gonna be great!" because the players expect great graphics at the very least, and because Unity is so obsessed with the splash-screen-to-new-user drunkenness, graphics are the first thing to suffer since new devs rarely know how to develop game graphics and bug-free, polished games simultaneously, and things are only going to get worse for everyone the longer Unity delays, so if they ignore this, the negative reputation may never be reversible.

Most new devs are hobbyists these days, so the amount of throwaway games is only getting larger -- and hurting us serious, paying, devs (and Unity!) worse each day because we can't afford to put more effort or resources into our games for fear of not being able to break even in the end due to players not being drawn to our stuff because they have to question its quality simply for the engine it was developed in!

Unfortunately all of the things that were mentioned as an alternative to a paid splash-screen's "badge of honor" would require a lot of resources and logistics Unity clearly does not have at its disposal currently.

In addition to that, even if Unity vetted its games for quality somehow, it would still suffer that there is nothing being done to put its new image of "high-quality" games in players' faces en-mass, but in that case, I really do agree some sort of perks or reward system is still useful, for example, for those types of games that get great scores on quality review sites or something. Perhaps these sites could be voted on by developers?

Just something to think about.

 

One thing I was thinking about, and I have come to realize that this is a real area where Unity has dropped the ball. that comes with the import of assets. Sure a texture or and audio clip is pretty much straight forward. but when it comes to fully realized models complete with texturing and possible shaders, Unity fails here. Importing FBX models can be hit or miss. What Unity really needs is their own model format and exporters and importers for major modeling packages. By doing this artists can then get more of what the artist envisioned in to the project instead of we will see what we get once it imports.

I know we can't expect it, but what would most likely be best would be to have a fully functional modeler inside of the Unity editor itself. but also why reinvent the wheel seeing as how there are several good packages out there. the only problem is, without a format of their own that lays things out in a format that Unity actually understands artists have to start worrying about what can unity import compared to... how creative can I be.