UT Your bug feedback emails suck...

UT Your bug feedback emails suck and here's why...

I am an indie game developer and have at least 9 projects that I have used with various betas, over the past few months.

You send me a two paragraph email, with only a case reference, and basically a paragraph that says closing bug as cannot reproduce with current build.

Which is great if you have accidentally fixed the bug, a complete crash of the IDE.

But how the flip can I go back to the right project and test this myself, no links to the project files I uploaded or other pertinent information/data/links that allows me to quickly and easily re-download the uploaded project or find it's name and file location on my system (all information your uploader probably captures).

I get it you're working hard and probably struggling under load or crunch trying to get the numbers down before release. But if you system does not make it easy for us to help you make Unity better then...

 

I don't know if we should rely on Unity for project bookkeeping. Why don't you make a list that links the bug IDs to the path to the project or git branch in something like Evernote?

It's always a good idea to keep a journal about your projects anyway, especially when you are working on multiple projects at the same time.

 

I create a zip file of every project I submit as bug-report. I keep the bug-report text as a txt file inside the Assets directory, so I know what error the project shows and how I can reproduce it when I get back to it a couple of weeks or months later.

Most of my bug-reports contain a stripped-down version of the game, that only show a particular issue. It's really time consuming to create these projects, but chances are a lot higher that UT is able to reproduce and fix the issue with smaller projects, from my experience.

When I submitted the bug-report, I wait for the confirmation email and then prefix my zip file with that case number from the email.

This allows me to quickly find the bug-report project on my hard-drive. When UT sends me an email that the issue has been fixed, I start to test my archived project with upcoming Unity betas and re-open the bug if necessary.

This workflow adds quite some work on my end, but it works really well for me.

Having download-links to attached files in fogbugz would most likely cause headache for developers that don't want anyone but Unity to have access to these files and that's probably most non-hobby devs.

 

OK great but couldn't Unity make that an option in the Unity IDE, build in debug archiving and debug feedback?

 

@Peter77 Wow. That's pretty awesome you do that. Very much appreciated.

In any case, @Arowx, feedback received. We've been having some work being done on the various bug reporter bits to improve things, and we know there's a lot of room for improvement there. There was some groups at this past-week's hack week addressing a number of bug reporting things in fact. So, I'm hoping that those projects get polished up and brought out for users! (Granted, some of them probably will come in 5.5....)