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Official Unity wants your feedback on usability and artist workflows!

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Nevin, Apr 25, 2017.

  1. rsodre

    rsodre

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    Editor:
    - Don't let the Editor fall into infinite loops when in Play mode ! Play the game in a different thread.
    - Disable auto import when the Editor is in Play mode! If we edit and save a script the in-Editor playing game crashes. Often Unity crashes too. (edited for clarity)
    - Inspector navigation! Remember selected objects and add a Back/Forward button. I know Undo does that, but it also UNDO, and often I just want to go back to the previous object, not undo.

    Audio Clips:
    - Audio Clip importer: Let us set IN/OUT points!
    - Audio Clip importer: Let us set LOOP point. Play() starts it form IN point, but loops starts from LOOP point.
    - Audio Clip importer: BETTER: Make it like the Animation importer, let us set make several clips from one audio file, each with it's in/out/loop points.
    - Same for video importer

    Audio/Video inspector:
    - AudioSource: Display it's status in the Inspector when playing. Tell us if it's playing or not, and current position. Be nice and draw the wave too ;)
    - VideoPlayer: Same! Display the status in the inspector when playing. With a little preview ;)
     
    Last edited: Jul 6, 2017
  2. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    This is a bug I'd imagine. If you edit media, this shouldn't corrupt anything... Please file a bug. If it's just code then you are not corrupting anything. It should just crash if you do not handle repairing references etc (hardly ever worth doing).

    In any case if script changes in playmode were corrupting as you say, then we would have the *entire* forum on fire so I have say you're probably wrong, or experiencing a bug which needs reporting.

    Or do you think "corrupt" means crash? Changing a script in playmode crashing Unity is perfectly normal actually and AFAIK supported because you can get these to not crash with a bit of work.
     
  3. Baste

    Baste

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    I'm guessing "corrupted" as in all the fields you set in Awake/Start is now null, everything in the scene null references at the same time, it gets too much for Unity to print that much red to the console, Unity crashes. Worst case scenario, of course, but it's annoying even if you just have to restart play mode.

    @rsodre: It's solvable! I wrote a forum post way back on how to do it, it's here. Essentially, auto imports are based on the editorprefs variable "kAutoRefresh", so if you turn that false in play mode, the reimports won't happen before you leave play mode.
     
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  4. rsodre

    rsodre

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    Sorry, corrupt is indeed the wrong word to describe the problem.

    If I'm playing in Editor, edit any script and saves it, when I go back to Unity, it tries to compile the script and breaks the game execution, I have to stop and play again. Sometimes Unity crashes.

    Pardon me, but normal? Is Unity supposed to recompile and use the new code, like in live coding? If I just add an empty line, it breaks the game, ofter crashes Unity. That can't be considered normal. It's been like this since Unity 3.

    The solution is very simple: If in play mode, halt auto import.
     
  5. rsodre

    rsodre

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    Great, I'll try that!
    But Unity should still fix this, because 99% of users that don't know about that workaround are wasting time re-playing, re-debugging and re-lauching Unity.
     
  6. 5argon

    5argon

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    Please let us nest AnimationClip to any controller in the Project panel by dragging to it, like the Animator generated from Unity Button (with Press, Disabled, etc.) My project is very dirty when I have animations of similar names everywhere and they sort themselves together despite not related to each other. (Notably "Show__" "Hide___" where I have to prefix it with something to make it sort alphabetically together)

    I once wanted this too and made my own solution Introloop. It can't make several clips from an audio but it can loop in a manner like you said. (No OUT point though, just loops from LOOP point to IN point.)
    https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/51095
     
  7. loanxinhgai

    loanxinhgai

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    why can not i edit my avatar?
     
  8. Mehrdad995

    Mehrdad995

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    1)
    imagine having two audio sources attached to gameobject A,
    and an script with audio source field attached to gameobject B,
    its a pain to assign the wanted audio source from object A to the script of object B.
    u cant simply drag object A to the object B field because object A has two audio sources
    thus you have to use multiple inspectors and lock one of them on script which is in my opinion painful,
    2)
    changing scripts while you are in play mode will stop coroutines.

    thanks.
     
  9. Xaon

    Xaon

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    Sorry for digging out the topic but I just have to.
    I've once wrote an asset processor script. It ended of hanging lightmap building because I didn't understand all possible outcomes. Two day figuring why I cannot bake my lights.
    A GUI based build in the editor by default option to change the default import settings is a must have! Especially that it's a few freaking windows to do on top the functionality it's already there! But we devs often oversight some possible outcome and in the end decide that improving the editor for our project is simply too risky.
    Also why 3D models without animations aren't marked as lightmap static by default? Just too many times I saw artists putting their model to the scene, trying to compose lights, hitting bake button and swearing on the Unity for poor performance. The same with lights itself. And those are little things that turns off junior artists which means that in order to hire an artist or level designer for a Unity team I have to spend my time on educating them. Where - in the other engine - the default produce nice things so they toy around the engine, start to like the engine and only after time time they get used to they hit the internet with question "why my animation on my light doesn't work" and they get short and easy answer.
    I love Unity and I won't switch in nearly future. But I have constantly complains from artists "why we are using Unity, Unity sucks" and I have to come and tell them "no, Unity is great (also other engines won't work in our case) but you must be aware that default settings sucks and you must understand every single parameter, and also hit the Asset Store for Postprocessing Stack".

    I'm not an artists but a programmer, manager and a teacher. And especially because I'm teacher I'm hitting complaining juniors constantly.
     
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  10. lunaticCoder

    lunaticCoder

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    Well there's a problem I encounter with my 2D projects and its just that the sprites disappear when I load the projects from the start menu, when I zoom out in ortho view they all appear again but it becomes quite hard to design or select anything, It doesn't happen often, as far as I know, this bug has been there since Unity4.5.

    But all goes back to normal when I press the letter " F " or double click anything present in the Hierarchy panel.
    Its not a big problem tho, but why hasn't it been fixed for soo long.

    Also the ability to import grayscale's is some thing I'd love.
     
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2017
  11. lunaticCoder

    lunaticCoder

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    I have a Mac Pro and I can't open more than one editor window unless it is of an older version of unity.
    Simply clicking on the icon, I don't get the options that you mentioned.
    Why isn't it possible ona Mac?
     
  12. AutoFire-II

    AutoFire-II

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    I have base component type called FXHandler, and I have a bunch of components that inherit from the FXHandler class. I occasionally have multiple different FXHandlers on one GameObject. If I have a component on another object that has a FXHandler field, I cannot easily select which FXHandler to use. (The only solution seems to have to Inspectors open, and lock one onto one object while I go select another object. Then I can directly drag'n'drop the FXHandler component I want.)

    My current workaround is to have a single FXHandler per GameObject, and have my extra FXHandlers on child objects. However, I'm afraid that all of these child objects will increase memory usage, especially because it is a 3D game, and many of these things with multiple FXHandlers happen to be enemies.

    TL;DR: Please make a way to select a specific component if a GameObject has multiple components of that type, even if the inspector is not showing the GameObject in question.

    Also, a way to edit prefabs without dragging them into the scene would be awesome. For my game, almost all entities are spawned at run-time, meaning that I can't just go into a scene with the enemies already in place and do my tinkering there. I understand that this is something that has been turned down in the past, but please, please consider it. (Maybe make a setting to enable it, or make a dedicated prefab editor.)
     
  13. rsodre

    rsodre

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    There's something else that would really really accelerate development and debugging, just 2 new features to the console:
    - Filter results by some string. Search the console!
    - Make a link in every source in the console. Clicking takes you to that line in Monodevelop or Visual Studio. Double-clicking works, very often we want to go to another source, not the top one. And sometimes the top of the stack is not a source file, and it does nothing instead of going to the top available source.
     

    Attached Files:

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  14. terry_drain

    terry_drain

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    As a level designer/artist I have 4 things that has me burning with anger everytime I use unity:

    1. Implement a (hightrez) screenshot function, please. If an artist starts using your engine, they can't show it of unless they learn some coding. You don't expect programmers to go into maya to get a cube, so it feels unfair.

    2. Be able to see post procces (gameview) in scene view and be able to interact with it.

    3. Proper grouping tool like UE4. If I press CTRL-G, the objects, when selected should be in a group, moved together etc without having to use an empty game object.

    4. If I click something in the scene, it should be selected. This is not always the case (i dont know why) but something behind it might get selected. I got the response "use the hirachy" but I have 10000 rocks named rock_0000 so that could take me 20 minutes.

    Until these are fixed I can't say unity is even ok to use within my skillset (I feel like I have to be a programmer to do anything).
     
  15. laurentlavigne

    laurentlavigne

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    Yes selection is very broken and whenever I return to 4.7 it feels like I upgraded my machine.
     
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  16. Vagabond_

    Vagabond_

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    I provided a video with this issue ( Scene selection even in 2017.1 is broken ) so the devs should be aware of it... !
    I hope it will be fixed really soon because it is real pain selecting objects !
     
  17. chilton

    chilton

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    This would be FANTASTIC. The same can be said for duplicating objects. If I duplicate an object, keep it in the hierarchy next to the source object. Don't put the duplicate at the bottom of the damn list where I have to scroll down to find it.
     
  18. vinnygombici

    vinnygombici

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    Hello, I'm trying to figure out how to export from the dialog system with a different order, anyone had this issue before? Sine I did a lot of manipulation on all the text boxes in every dialog, all the ID are not in the right order anymore (so, basically, when I export a dialog, the sentences are not in the correct order). I've tried changing the ID of the dialog boxes without any success. Can any1 tell me how to export all the dialog in the order that they appear in the conversation screen (although the boxes don't have correct ID)? thanks!
     
  19. Xaon

    Xaon

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    Hi. I don't want to be rude but your question seams to be way out off topic. If you're using some dialog system from asset store and you find it hard to find a good place to ask your question, please send me a private message and I'll try to help you.
     
  20. TonyLi

    TonyLi

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    @vinnygombici - I emailed you a solution. I'm guessing you just accidentally misposted here instead of the Dialogue System forum thread.
     
  21. laurentlavigne

    laurentlavigne

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    Yes and keep the transform gizmo at the same position.
     
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  22. Deleted User

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    Do something about the basic transform component... When you're trying to line stuff it, it takes nothing to make it go into the 8 decimal marks and it's a terrible experience to work with. This didn't use to be an issue back in 4.x, and I remember the vertex snapping tool ALWAYS snapping perfectly into place. Now it seems to increase vertex snapping accuracy the closer you are to the snap you're trying to make, but it always leaves tiny gaps. This is especially annoying when working with assets that you've built to be snappable and modular, when Unity manages to create tiiiiiny cracks everywhere because of it being off by 0,0003847e-5...

    It's really teadious to work with.
     
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  23. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    My recent work this week with joints and physics:

    Absolutely horrific physics joint visualisation makes me cringe. It's the single biggest productivity killer for anyone working in physics with Unity in any serious way with joints.

    Sorry I said visualisation but that's a lie, there isn't any for joints. You're supposed use the power of guesswork.

    I dare any Unity staff who doesn't work with Physics source code to make anything useful with configurable joints and not mutter an expletive along the lines of "well this is rubbish". And I'm pretty sure I know why Unity never bothered: it's a horrible job.

    I guess Morten was working on it before he left. Please find someone else to finish the work he didn't :)

    Laughably, I wasn't even able to find an asset on asset store to deal with it.
     
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  24. laurentlavigne

    laurentlavigne

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    Morten left? ouch.
     
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  25. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Yep but a bit off topic, he did the Physics vis stuff but sadly it wasn't finished before he got around to joints!

    2017 gives us an arc disc widget thing so here's hoping Unity makes quick work and throws that in.
     
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  26. shadowsora

    shadowsora

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    Nested prefabs.. why is this not a thing? How do you even work around this? I'm struggling trying to find a good third party tool for it too
     
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  27. jrackley

    jrackley

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    Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but a multibrush tool for grass would be awesome. Typically, I use a minimum of three grass textures when building my terrains, and it would sure be nice to grab three at once, rather than one at a time.
     
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  28. jrackley

    jrackley

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    Yes, on number 4. This happens all the time with us. I am simply trying to click rock A (which is right here in front), but for some reason it clicks on every object behind rock A (and there can be 100 or more depending on the area im working with) before it finally goes "did you mean to actually click on the object right HERE in the foreground?". Very annoying.
     
  29. Moonjump

    Moonjump

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    Please keep the legacy particle system!

    I've just been testing moving my mobile project to Shuriken from the legacy particle system. I've got to do some coding to compensate for the lack of the Systematic option, which I can cope with, but the performance difference might be insurmountable. Even 1 particle with a mobile shader is enough to spin up the fans on my MacBook Pro, which never happens to me in Unity. The advice I found online was to write my own particle system. I would much rather that the legacy particle system was kept around for mobile developers (there are a lot of us using Unity).
     
    Last edited: Jul 26, 2017
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  30. Lethn

    Lethn

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    I don't know if this has been mentioned before but I would really love if there were more ways to debug stuff like cone of vision code for AI detection and so on. One thing I've found frustrating about dealing with that is there seems to be very little visual debugging available, you can check the raycast sure and the collider but with the actual equation you use there's a big empty gap where you have to guess where your AI is actually seeing a player or not.

    It would be nice to have a feature added for this from an art perspective because it means you can create really accurate cone of vision textures and so on that line up exactly with the amount of degrees an enemy can see like in Deus Ex for example.
     
  31. Chrisasan

    Chrisasan

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    Ability to apply scale and rotation on an imported object. This would be helpful when exporting an FBX from blender.
     
  32. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    Being able to adjust the FoV in the scene view natively would be pretty keen for a lot of camera stuff. Right now I have to rely on a third party tool that is finicky to say the least.
     
  33. awesomedata

    awesomedata

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    It's really lame that UV/vert animation as well as texture-swapping or blendshape animation can't be done in the native Unity Animator window directly.

    This is lame because it really does require a separate tool to be written for things everyone is already doing for various effects, etc., and to have a solid design for a tool that incorporates keyframing everything (the Unity Animator), you'd think they'd make it able to keyframe stuff like that too for facial animation, etc.

    Why toss us poor animators aside, Unity?
     
  34. varfare

    varfare

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    I am lacking the editor window camera controls. I'd like to see these:
    • FOV control; you want to adjust that to mach your in-game FOV value. FOV can change perception drastically so having an option to see the same what in-game camera sees is essential. And sometimes working on a level with different FOV is helpful.
    • Movement Speed; Very often I am dealing with massive-scale levels so the default movement speed is too low. I need to use the camera focus to get to the other side of the level and this is very tedious. On the other hand, when I am fine-tuning location of object in the scene I really want to zoom in and the default movement speed is too high for that. This should be exposed as a slider somewhere very close to the Editor Window as you want to adjust this very often. Cryengine has this option and it is a life changer.
    • Close/Far clipping; Sometimes you want to use orto camera but this makes everything in the same plane so if you want to see the insides of a room, you will see a wall instead. I use min/max clipping in 3ds max for that. The same issue applies in persp. view but not as often.
     
  35. Moonjump

    Moonjump

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    The ability to add our own images for mip maps. It is currently possible by using tools in other software to create a .dds file, but artist usability would be much better if they could be done in Unity using standard png, bmp, etc.
     
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  36. vonpixel

    vonpixel

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    Smarter Selection Sets - lets say I want to change the light map resolution across all my background geo - but those meshes are inside a few different empties and what not. It would be nice of when I select all the children- instead of telling me "components that are only on some of the selected objects cannont be multi-edited" - give me a little list of what I have selected and way to pair that down quickly. "36 game objects - 156 meshes - 3 lights". Click "meshes" and then only those are left in my selection set.

    (there isn't anything like that and im missing it is there?)
     
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  37. Chrisasan

    Chrisasan

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    This would make unity much more usable.
    The ability to export into blender.

    You buy an asset from the unity3d asset store. You download it and load it in unity3d. Now you need to make edits inside blender, as blender is the only 3d software that is affordable for you. The file will not load in blender...
     
  38. xeleh

    xeleh

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    You can solve that limitation with the Component Selector included in my free asset XT Utilities.
     
  39. awesomedata

    awesomedata

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    Useful for artist based 3d assets:
    • pen/stylus input in editor and in game
    • drawing tablet pressure sensitivity on pc and where available

    Important:
    • GLOBAL editor tooltips
    • GLOBAL editor shortcuts that allow execution of a function and don't require a particular window to be selected first!! (*very* tedious handling all the other potential window input cases!!)
     
    Last edited: Jul 26, 2017
  40. Alverik

    Alverik

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    It's a little sad that third party are doing more advancements on Terrain and vegetation than Unity itself (Terrafirma, Vegetation Studio), Unity themselves should be the ones doing these stuff... I just hope they can catch up eventually (or at least hire those devs to work on Unity). Terrain and vegetation are both a really important part in tons of games.
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2017
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  41. DDaddySupreme

    DDaddySupreme

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    I've made a lot of custom prefabs using [CreateAssetMenu], but I can't find any easy way to set their thumbnail in the inspector.
    A simple way to set their preview to a sprite in script would be extremely helpful for seeing what they are at first glance.

    Also, being able to change C# dictionaries in the inspector. It's really weird how they aren't serialized, given how easy it seems like it would be, but custom classes are.
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2017
  42. Aaron_Wacker

    Aaron_Wacker

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    Timeline is certainly working great. Thanks for that addition. One of the biggest issues I see is aspect ratio of images, video, etc. Trying to get it right for multiple deployment projects or getting pixel perfect accuracy is really a challenge. It limits some design capabilities. File size computation might help too since once you are resource heavy, its difficult to know what to exclude and optimize. Making shader testing and integration easier may be valuable as well.
     
  43. Vagabond_

    Vagabond_

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    Hey guys, hopefully you are still watching the thread... I mentioned about the flying glitchy behavior of the Rigidbodies and now i can show you a video where you can see it in action... Is this normal or needs optimizations from your side ?
    The car has around 1200 kg mass and the cone is 1 kg mass, both with interpolation enabled...

    This is actually happening to me on every possible project i tried - FPS, racing etc... Character controllers are flying in the sky as well...

    Here is a video of driving a car and throwing cones everywhere plus the car gets flipped when hits the wall ...

     
  44. WarpZone

    WarpZone

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    How about if "Create New Project" didn't cause the editor to crash 100% of the time without creating a new project? That would literally infinitely improve my workflow, which currently consists of swearing at my monitor, submitting support tickets, and depression-fueled alcoholism.
     
  45. Alverik

    Alverik

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    Weird, I've never seen that issue myself. Have you double checked you don't have any bad settings? Try to uninstall unity, then clear Unity's appdata folders (since configuration is usually kept there even when reinstalling, clearing those may help).
     
  46. Lethn

    Lethn

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    To be honest, it doesn't happen when I make new projects but I've been experiencing quite a few crashes in monodevelop lately which has been a major irritation for me.
     
  47. WarpZone

    WarpZone

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    What do "bad settings" look like and how do I check whether or not I have them? I am not going to uninstall an older version of Unity or delete any part of the old installs. Are you crazy? If I did that, I would have no Unity at all right now! As things stand, at least the old version still works. Multiple concurrent installs are just a fact of life when you can't trust the latest version not to break everything.

    Also, I keep certain old installs to use with assets I've purchased. Danmaku Engine, Pixel Camera, and some others.

    And you can have the older version I paid full price for when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
     
  48. Alverik

    Alverik

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    I'm not crazy, any software you install will generally keep settings in either of a few ways: they may create a folder in your Documents folder, use the windows registry, or an internal folder in the same installation folder. Others like Unity or visual studio etc, tend to keep your configs in you C drive, usually inside one of the folders in the Appdata folder ("User/your username/appdata") like local or roaming (you can usually google for the exact locations). Problem with this is that even if you uninstall unity all your configuration files don't get deleted and are reused by the next installation, so any conflicting settings or corrupted files remain. Hence sometimes the solution is to uninstall, clear old config files left, then reinstall (obviously)... and by the way, Unity keeps all the old version installers if you didn't notice.

    Anyway, since you don't seem to be very savvy about software, then you are probably right, it's better not to do anything since you are liable to screw up.
     
  49. thelebaron

    thelebaron

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    So I have an asset that is now deprecated but I recall it did this(it was called custom handles, by candelight). Anyway after checking out their support forums I came across
    "FWIW I now work for Unity and have been integrating many of these handles into the product (shape handles in 5.6.0, a new ArcHandle will be in 2017.1, and I have new joint handles ready which I expect will make 2017.2)."


    edit - no idea why that arrow image got attached but deleted it
     
    Last edited: Aug 7, 2017
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  50. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Awesome! yes, he has been improving that, so I can't wait to upgrade to 2017.2 :)