Why is there very little help?

Reading all of the unanswered posts on here, are there no Unity alarm bells ringing with concern that they may be missing out on some potential big money earners!
We all have to start somewhere and I have found that examples tutorials are by far the best way to get creating quickly!
There appears to be a serious lack of help on this forum, Youtube search engines relating to a number of recurring problems/questions!
Come on guys there must be potential for the next huge game waiting to be developed only to be halted by a lack of help!

 

What? I have almost always been helped within a few hours on these forums. If people don't get answers they probably have:

1. Bad questions that are hard to understand or are simply asking for someone to do the work for them.
2. Have not posted in the correct format.
3. Their questions are above the heads of the average Unity user.

This community is great.

 

I'm assuming you posted this thread because your other thread didn't get any replies. You didn't get any help because you posted a vague question with no code and no specific error messages.

Typically, "show me how to do this" posts don't get many replies.

 

Tutorials and code examples:
http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Main_Page

Other open forums for Unity developers:
http://answers.unity3d.com/index.html
http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/unity
http://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/

 

From all the engines I've used (Torque, UDK, CryEngine, Source) Unity's community is the most helpful and better documented by FAR. You just need to ask specific questions not overly generic ones like OMG CAN YOU MAKE ME A GAME?!

 

I think I know a tiny bit where the OP is coming from. Using the prerequisites posted by Fluzing, my question that I posted a few days ago should've been answered. Now, granted, I did manage to fix the problems before anyone replied, but I fixed them at least an hour after I posted about them, with the script, what I was trying to accomplish and everything. By his logic, I should've gotten an answer or 2. I think sometimes coders don't help because the topic doesn't interest them. My advice is if you want a coder to help you, use fancy words like 'float,' 'line x,' 'vector3' and other bs words that programmers like to hear. If you use these types of phrases instead of 'somethings wrong wit my shootzing script! Help me PLZZZ!' you might possibly get more answers.

 

That's a pretty good overview. I help people a fair bit, but 1 and 2 there are instant turnoffs for me. There are more people to help than time to help them in, so why spend that time on the ones who aren't making the most of the resources available to them - including the time of people who are willing to help?

 

I was just gonna post 'Because the documentation is so thorough, and 9 times out of ten the answer is pebkac', but then I saw all these amazing, jaded responses.

 

An hour is nothing. The knowledgeable people here aren't all just hanging around waiting for people to ask questions so we can jump on them. We're all busy doing our own stuff (that's how we got knowledgeable, you know) and we pop on here in in-between times. There are multiple forum sections each of which typically have multiple people asking for assistance at any one time, plus there are other non-help threads which may take our interest (because discussing stuff is another important aspect of becoming and remaining knowledgeable). So the fact that one thread doesn't get an answer in one hour really isn't anything to complain about.

As for only helping with stuff that interests us... well, yeah, if I have to pick between something that's interesting and something that's not, why shouldn't I pick the thing that I find interesting to get involved with? It's my (limited) time, I get to pick how I spend it.

And also, the un-interesting questions are also typically ones where there are plenty of answers or other help abundantly available. I would much rather help someone who's experiencing strange behaviour with interactive cloth than someone who's asking how to optimise their scene. One of those I'll learn from, the other... not so much.

 

I wouldn't say jaded, but if you are suggesting that people don't want to spend a lot of time and energy answering obscure or pedestrian questions... Yeah.

 

Add to that almost all questions have already been asked and could be answered with a quick google.

If people dont want to help themselves, why should anyone else?

 

Oh, and to add a point to Fluzing's list, non-descriptive thread titles don't even get a look in from me. "HELP PLZ!" tells me nothing. "Strange behaviour with interactive cloth" is better. "Interactive cloth disappears at high velocities" is better yet.

 

thats also a problem i don't like to see. people are jumping on the forum without trying properly for themselfes. i interpret it as kind of lazyness. let some people in the forum think about the problem to avoid doing it themselfes. if you would do it yourself your would also learn some stuff what you don't do with a copy + paste solution. so i in general try to avoid answering questions which show no proper effort.

thats true. i look in 1 out of 10 threads. i only read where i think i can learn something from (from other posters). having tenthousand threads about how to instantiate a prefab yields nothing for me. so if the people would type their question in the forum search or google they would have their answer instantly instead of waiting and complaining that they get no answer.

when you can't properly formulate a question how will you apply an answer?

in the end reading a thread and trying to help costs "precious" time. why should i spend some time on someone who is not willing to spend some time for his own question? if you want help you need to make it as convenient as possible for the helpers to help you (posting everything related). i always wonder when people say they get an error message but refuse to tell what error they get.

there are many other reasons and issues named here. the people in the forum are not payed by UT to help others so they help on a voluntary base. you cannot be "forced" to help someone you have a problem with. when you don't get an answer to your thread you can assume this is intentional and you did something wrong. and having some demands to forum quality is nothing the helpers can be blamed for. in the end it should improve the experience for all users (also those who read your thread years later). so when people refuse to stick to forum "rules" and nettiquette this is kind of "evolutionary selection". these people will either adapt to the suggestions they get or go away because they don't get their problems fixed. unfortunately there is a constant inflow of such people.

 

Unity Answers will get you a response in a few hours, it's what most people should go to.
http://answers.unity3d.com/index.html

 

+1

 

Help me to help you.


If that doesn't make sense, it's unlikely you'll ever get any help in general.

 

The biggest two offenders of all of the problems that I tend to see over and over are:

Duplicate Questions - People are asking questions that have been answered over and over and over before. I will defend this somewhat though because after awhile the answers do get stale and things change with Unity releases. On top of this, the forum Search feature sucks. For me when I search for some reason it doesn't return content newer than 2009.

The breadth of the questions is too great - People are asking for solutions to very hard problems. This kind of goes along with the "write the code for me" scenario... but essentially, solving the puzzles is one of the things that makes programming so great and rewarding. If you absolutely can't solve it... break it into smaller problems and get help for those... don't just ask for a whole solution.

You also have to understand that there will be no "alarm bells" here. This is a community support forum, driven by and contributed to by the community. Feel fortunate that Unity folks actually post here. That's far more than you'll get with most product forums. If you feel like you need support, there are official channels for that.

 

Another thought... scripting should be treated a place to fix snippets of code.

Some people like to post 3 pages of script and say its not working.

Some people like to ask questions like how would I make my character get into my car.

 

It doesn't have to be snippets. I've had great discussions here about design approaches, patterns, algorithms... actually I'd say that most of my best conversations here have had little or no code. I usually learn the most from discussions with people who've also advanced enough that we can talk about code and software design without requiring specific code examples, because it's the approach or design that matters rather than the specifics of how it's written.

 

Well, I see sadly the same as OP does. I'm a complete beginner here, I've left the business about 10 years ago and now I feel some interest to get back. Unity seems pretty decent to use but it's so complex and so much different from what I had 10 years ago... I have no clues where to start.
In my time if a beginner asked how to solve something like this: "Some people like to ask questions like how would I make my character get into my car." I didn't feel offended and put a little sample together as it took half an hour for me, and gave some link where can he find direct help to move on. Now on most dev forums like this the only way to get help if you are already deep in the development and you can't find something special.
Even now with 0 knowledge of unity I help if I can like here: http://answers.unity3d.com/answers/585268/view.html. It was even fun finding it out for myself and didn't take more than half an hour. Could I say something like this: Ohh man, it's in the primary school physics... Yes I could, but I didn't.
What I see ppl are so jealous to give out their knowledge it's incredible (also lazy, or simply can't understand that start working on something new is a lot easier if you get some direct instructions than reading through 999999 pages of unity tutorials)

 

So those of us who spend some of our spare/gap time helping others are lazy because we don't spend more of our time doing so?

 

Exactly, finally you understand.
/sarcasm

 

then why not start with tutorials? unity has a very "special" workflow. it cannot be explained by a forum user for every question of a new user. thats what tutorials are for to show the general usage of a tool. also when someone answers here he expects that you have a general and basic understanding of the concepts. if you don't have it its even more complicated to help. one can't do everything as a step by step explanation as it takes even more time and when something does not work he comes back "crying". would you like to explain how to repair a car when the other one knows nothing about cars? when you must explain very basic concepts like how to open the door, starting it or filling in oil. would you like it to explain to such person how to make a very complicated repair where to disamble the motor? thats what new people here are doing often. they have no clue but want to start with their project and want to get their information as quickly and narrow as possible. thats why they ask the forum because they are to "lazy" to go through the information which is already out there themself.
so when there is a new forum user, stating that he have no clue about programming and no clue about unity and asking how to create an infinite minecraft like terrain i can only have a laugh. for such people i'm even to lazy to respond at al.

when you have the spare time its your decision how to spend it. most people don't have this time.
and also often it is a "waste" of time. have a look how many threads from new users has been startet and they are now inactive. i doubt that they have succeeded and made their dream game. i think they simply gave up not because they got too little help but because they recognized that its a huge task to make a game (even a simple one). i don't like to waste my time.
anyway, you are welcome to learn unity and turn the forum into a beginners paradise where you create a complete example for all questions the other people avoid.

every user here (with exception of renman3000) has his knowledge because he is reading tutorials, documentations blogs etc.. i read the forum since i started to use unity simply because i can learn so much just by reading (not by asking alot). with time comes knowledge and experience. why do you want to omit this step and get what you want instantly? such a solution is very narrow and when you want to change it or do something else you have no clue and start asking again. when you collect knowledge by yourself you don't need all of it right away but it helps you in the long run. i see no valid reason why to omit this step and asking EVERYTHING you need to know in the forums. and complain when people don't want to repeat what has been written thousend times already.

from the the experienced users point of view the people asking here are lazy (and sometimes even arrogant). we know how long it takes and how "hard" it is to collect the knowledge. and we also know that we don't really help one when posting a ready fit solution as the inexperienced users don't learn anything from it because they don't understand it because all the base knowledge is missing. so actually preventing someone to collect the base knowledge is not in his favor. not everyone starting with unity can succeed with it. and the own effort is the main difference between those who do and those who don't succeed. its not missing help what prevents you from making your game because some people create a game with no help at all.

vargata. you may not like how things are handled here (and from your remark in whole dev community). but when you have read hundreds of such "beginner" threads you may change your mind (still knowing how it was to begin). this is not jealous, lazy or bitchy. its just a form of self protection.

 

i think most resources about building games (questions/issues/performance tips) covers up all beginner needs..
what is left is exploring new tricks and solving challenges in making games that are very specific to a game idea..

beginners must learn gradually and learn to solve issues on their own, they need to learn step by step.. try Enjoy it, don't rush..
i do not recommend copy paste ready-made codes unless you are 100% sure why the code is written in that way..

 

Yeah, the above two posts are driving at something really important - the key to learning game development, or programming in general, is learning how to solve problems for yourself.

The people who are good at this aren't good because other people told them the answers. They're good because they figured things out for themselves that either nobody else had tried yet or where the answers weren't readily known. They learned to explore the theoretical space between what they already knew and where they thought a solution might be. Nobody else could give them a solution because they were pioneers in the area, and you need to be a little bit of a pioneer too.

Regardless of how good a development community is, if you rely on them to get you going then you won't get anywhere new. If you do anything even remotely original or different then you are almost certainly going to face a unique problem along the way, and if you never learn to work out your own solutions then that will roadblock you forever.

 

Sick burn

 

ohhh, guys, seriously... its sick. when did you see a question last time like "i wanna make the doom 10, how to start it?" do you really think those are asking beginner questions don't read the faqs and searching for solved topics? yes we do, any hard to believe it. otherwise I wouldnt even get close to ask anything. the problem comes when i hit a wall and I cant find any specific help. like here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/213603-simple-ripple-effect-on-objectsurface. All I have found, the helpful stuff is from 2009 and every snippet and tutorial link is broken. After 5 hours googling and topic reading (all the energy shield/shield/ripple effect etc) I see only unanswered or completely ignored topics. why? probably cos i cant find the right words to search. I bet most of the experienced guys here could solve a simple shader effect or pixel opacity in minutes but nobody even takes the time to say hell there is a link use this. and its not about my topic but all the topics in this theme back in the past 4 years. all i can read since is to buy this or that asset.

 

All this entitlement makes me mad. I just want to take a second and thank all the guys who sacrifice their free time to help others both here and on UA constantly.

 

you may be an exception but in general this is the impression i get.

there is still a chance that noone reading your thread knows it. i for example had not read your thread in the beginning and i don't know how i would aproach your problem. but i have very few experience with shaders. but i wonder why you post your topic in the scripting forum when you ask for a shader effect. maybe someone active in the shader subforum could help you. thats another "problem" not much mentioned yet here. people are posting in the wrong sections and wonder why they get no proper response.

this is a valid help why do you complain? when i know someone has achieved what you want why not hint you there? do you prefer when i ignore your question. do you ecpect me to work out a solution when there is already one? purchase the asset and look how it is done. if you don't want to ask the author about it. if he does not tell you why should i spend my time to reinvent the wheel for you? i can't understand why people refuse to purchase assets. even if you have no money go to work in the time you try to figure out (5 hours of wasted search?) and spend that money. the assets in the store are mostly cheap and safe you often hours or even days of own work. have a look at opportunity costs.

i have the impression that many active and helpfull users have left or got inactive in the last years. such discussions come up from time to time and this is the consent (more or less). there had been discussions wether to make a beginner (newbie) section but then "noone" reads it. there have been thoughts about a kharma system where users can block threads which do not meet "quality requirements". but UT will hardly do anything what could drive potential users (not automatically customers!) away. thats why the quality is deteriorating and why people simply give up. and from my point of view this is not the fault of the "helpers". some newbies are demanding, even arrogant and often not even thankfull. i had also the case of beeing insulted for trying to help. there are posts like "i solved it" but no word how it was solved for other readers with the same problem (those few who conduct a forum serach). this is very dissatisfying and demotivating in the long run. and as i said there is a constant inflow (or should i say onrush?) of those people. if you want to deny me the right to choose whom to help and whom not i'd rather give it up completely. it is not easy to judge the "character" of someone who is asking but a certain "quality level" is the only criterion we have.
in the end who is asking for help should be showing a little respect for the time others shall spend on his problem. if this respect is not shown (by ignoring code tags for example) why one should bother?

 

well, I understand this all, what makes me sick is this:
"That's the job of the coder. To look through the refs/his memory find the required components and implement the required code to make this happen. If I do it for you I would want to get paid"
what the guy asked before this answer would take about 2 lines of code calculating an offset on an UV.
and no, paying 5-200 pounds per problems what can be solved by a link to a tutorial or a snippet is not an option for those are just playing with unity. As said my problem is not with that nobody answered mu topic, but that i've read through about a hundred similar topics and the best was the above answer back in the past 4 years...

 

I'm sorry, what's wrong with a topic from 2009 if it solves the issue? Just an off topic question.

 

As I wrote above: "every snippet and tutorial link is broken" so it can't solve the issue.

 

1. It took me about 3 hours to figure out how to use Unity. How you might ask? I did the lerpz tutorial. Its in the asset store if you cant find it. It covers a lot of the basics and explains things nicely.

2. How long do I spend trying to fix my problems before asking here... DAYS. I use the forum as a last resort to solving my coding problems when I get them.

3. Am I not being helpful because I'm jealous? Jealous of what? You're in-ability to figure sh1t out for yourself. sure. why not

4. Have I written pages of code on here to help others, yes I have. Are they always grateful, some yes, some just complain that the code didnt compile (tried the code at home and it works perfectly). Some dont even post in the thread again, so its impossible to know if they even saw the solution.

5. Do I try to help people understand the code. Sometimes.

6. Do I post entire solutions for people. Sometimes I merely post a link to the function they need to use.

7. Do I assume you have basic Unity knowledge. Yes I do. Im not here to walk you step by step on how to create a script, attach a rigidbody, set up some colliders. Thats what tutorials are for. If you havnt got the basics, you're probably not ready to ask scripting questions.

 

Surely this has to be some sort of troll attempt.

 

Why does that make you sick?

Someone else has spent years honing their skill, and it makes you sick because you can't come in and reap the benefits of his investment for free?

Learn to break your problem down into smaller sub-problems. Explore each one of those - read any relevant docs, look up articles, write some experimental code, understand that piece of the problem and come up with a potential solution to that part of the whole. Repeat for each other sub part. Repeat again to combine each of the parts back into a whole, accepting that it may mean changing some or all of them.

That may sound daunting, but it's a process that software developers are constantly repeating. If you do it, you'll get fast at it. You'll see a problem and immediately break it down and start thinking about its parts. Solutions to some parts will pop into your mind immediately because you've solved things like that before. You'll better know where to find information and answers on the parts that are still murky. You'll write experimental code more quickly. You'll learn to better adapt your higher level design to suit new solutions. You'll learn to make better overarching designs that take into account the unknowns that you'll have to fit into them later.

You won't do any of that if you just want answers on solver platters. You'll never learn to navigate from where you are to where you want to be on your own.

 

omg... did u miss this line?
"what the guy asked before this answer would take about 2 lines of code calculating an offset on an UV."

 

@JamesLeeNZ : you are an a**e man. switch off write only mode before post something stupid

 

I might be an ass, but at least I'm not a dumb ass.

 

Yeah, I am sorry I helped you before. Won't make that mistake again.

 

So? It's not at all about the lines of code.

Very little of a professional programmer's time is spent writing code compared to doing all of the other things that enable the writing of code. Yes, we could just give you some code and be done with it, but in the long run that doesn't actually help either of us.

 

My number one turn-off is when I take the time to write up a detailed response to an issue and never get a reply. Seriously? I wasted my time fixing the issue and they can't even check back on the thread. That just pisses me off.

I usually then take a few days off from the Scripting thread.

 

I find the opposite problem I so far have been able to figure out absolutely every question I've had about unity by going to Google and typing Unity3d then the problem I'm having. In fact it's so infrequently that I need to post to the forum for help that when I do need it my lack of posting and interacting works to my detriment because I haven't really needed to be that active as everything has been readily solvable via search?

 

Haha, don't let that worry you. People will know from the questions you ask whether you're new looking because you're inexperience or because you haven't had to ask much.

Still, you could always jump in and help others if you've got that level of experience, or jump in discussions with other experienced people to just broaden your horizons.

 

Its all thats needed tbh. I very rarely need to ask an 'original' question.

Post number means nothing if you ask the right thing

 

i sense the same issue as above. i am not exactly new to game development. i'm by no way a pro. having help with certain issues would help me fast track. i have a really high iq, so once i know something. i can quickly discover many ways to use the code. but some info i just cant find. for example, howto access a single script on all objects in an self resizing array,such as one created through GameObject.FindGameObjectsWithTag("tag name");
this bit of info would go a long way in improving performance, by allowing me to disable function calls and even entire objects based on distance from them

 

That's the type of thing that's always good for design decision type discussions.

Personal Opinion: The best way to do that sort of thing is via managers... a central point where you register a script that can be accessed globally if need be. If your managers have references to all the scripts you want to manipulate, its easy to write a function that loops through and does the changes you require, or returns the list (note returning a new list is bad, returning a reference is better).


My personal preference is using hashtables that use the unique id as the key.

 

That's genuinely worth a whole thread in and of itself. For starters, why a Hashtable in this use case?

Anyway, to answer the specific question, I'd suggest looking at FindObjectsOfType(...) in the scripting reference. However, note that this does not return a "self resizing array", and nor does FindGameObjectsWithTag(...), they're just normal flat arrays. This means there's some allocation, and it's also pretty slow, so it's not something you want to do each frame.

 

Without creating multiple test scenes to prove the validity of one over the other, I went and looked at non-unity interweb stuff that had been done to prove what was fastest/etc for read/write between hashtables/dictionaries/lists/etc

Decided to go with hashtables... is it the best... hard to say, but hashtables had the functionality I needed, and from memory offered the best read performance.

The differences are probably trivial, but tbh, im kind of over optimising and re-optimising my code, so its hashtables ftw, unless you can give me a reason to change

 

Dictionaries do everything hashtables do and then some, plus you can't use obsolete collections like hashtables or arraylists in Windows Store stuff. Even if you don't care about that yourself, if you write code that someone else might use then you need to keep that in mind.

--Eric

 

Ill keep that in mind if I decide to write something for the asset store.

Any idea why they got rid of hashtables for windows store?