I havent got any anwsers or atleast replys in these forums in a few last years. And 90% of the topics stay at 0 replys
So whats up with that? Only the very basic ones get replyed…
Unity is developing in a great direction, all the new GFX features that are coming in U5 are superb. But the comunity is falling apart?
Few years ago there were cases where you got 5 replys when refreshing the page, now you can wait days and noone really cares about your topic. Searching the forum results in outdated anwsers back from unity 2.6 or 3.0.
So are there some new places where people are visiting for unity suport thesedays, or are people really abandoning Unity, or helping is not an option anymore?
If the support forums are dead I sugest the forums get archived. Because for newcomers the support forums are the first place where they look and if they dont get any help from there …well they most likely loose interests in unity quite fast.
Unity is a great product, but the support forums really arent any use.
No, the forums are not dead. The signal to noise ratio has changed. I can see you have two threads from recent days which have not been answered. That’s maybe not enough data to declare death of the community. If your posts get no replies, assume it’s because the question isn’t understood.
Well those posts are the latest, but I’ve got unanwsered posts from half a year ago aswell.
And the questions should be understood, because they are really specific to the subforum (GUI for my example). But if I have a overall look at other forums, I see that alot of posts are unawsered. Take the Animation sub forum as an example, I count 17 unawsered posts for only the first page. This really shouldnt happen with a product that has a huge community.
Maybe the forums need a little change? Like a more categorized setup, posts for experienced users and posts for beginners.
Like cplusplus forums, they got a category for beginners. If I remember correctly the same was done with PhysX forums (but it was atleast 5 yers ago when I last visited it and it seems theyr forums are changed)
Anyway I’d suggest to have sub forums for lets say beginners/experienced etc.
so that both will have the same sub categorys, scripting/gui/animation etc.
But dont get me wrong, I’m not jodging or anything, its just that this way there would be a better way of getting information. And the basic questions would be asked in beginners sub forum.
Actually, I’ve never had any problems with getting replies… I do post questions and check a lot the Scripting, 2d and Android sub-forums. But there are actually quite a big amount of questions which doesn’t have replies… The very active part of forums is this – Unity Gossip --… come on) A lot of experts (those who have 1k+ posts) reply on threads here in Unity Gossip.
I do have a suggestion, to make a shift for Unity Devs, so every official Unity Dev will come to the forums and at least will spend an hour to reply, or to hire few great unity expert which will reply in forums. It will not take a big amount of time for an expert to reply…
I’m thankful for everything that you do here, so don’t get me wrong.
Once it’s more than three days old it’s unlikely that anyone’s going to look that far back to see it. Which is actually a sign of an active community, not a dead one. There’s too much new stuff stopping us to get to things once they slip off the front page.
Both of your questions required a fair bit of thought effort before I could answer them. One was really broad and was about what seemed to be a misguided attempt at optimisation. Where do I start? The other was about a bug in code where I’m pretty sure the code was incomplete (a key variable wasn’t declared or assigned), which means we have to guess what it’s doing.
Also, for what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s a great idea to split the beginners from the experienced users. Why keep them apart? You want the beginners to learn from the more experienced people, so keeping them together is a good thing.
I answer questions in the forums that I feel confident in my answers. I answer the questions that are clearly written (easy to understand and use proper formatting), provide enough information, appear to have tried to figure out and/or find the answer, and that I think I have a good answer for.
Most questions I see failed at least 1 of those criteria, and often more than 1. If they don’t have the time to write out their question in a way that it can be answered, I don’t have time to answer it.
And despite my post count, I am far from expert at Unity. Don’t assume that someone who chats a lot or answers a lot of questions is an expert, and don’t assume someone with single-digit posts is a newcomer to Unity.
Yeah… Answers portal is great, I mean it has so many questions/answers… even same questions asked in every way possible, I personally just Google my unity questions, 90% I get the answer I needed. 10% I gotta ask at the forums, sometime sI get answers, but sometimes I don’t… but tbh sometimes I ask weird questions.
Well I do the same, dogzerx2, I google for questions, but when It gets to specific I decide to post here (support) but it seems like my questions get to specific or I cant explain it that good. Anyway currently my problems are GUI related, mostly after I did some matrix changing to get a better optimized gui I got a bunch of problems, mostly because the pivot gets messed up.
Anyway this is not the right place to discuss my problem. I posted my problems/questions to the support sub forum, now after creating this post I got some anwsers. But as someone pointed out, if my question gets 2/3 days old, I can forget about it. So it seems like one way would be "bump"ing my thread so that someone would awser it, wich wouldnt be a good way at all…
I also asked my question from “Anwsers” ill wait and see if it gets anwsered.
The whole ideal of googling/answering your way to productivity is pretty much a waste. You’d be better served honing in on the correct tutorials in the Unity Learn section and do those to learn how to do what you want to do in Unity.
And if you’re doing a car physics model(s) I’m supposing you have a strong background in math and the patience to learn arcane and rather arbitrary choices of a symbolic language so the Unity Learn area should do you a lot of good.
First off, it means you won’t ever solve anything new, because you’re only ever using existing solutions. Being able to create new solutions to your unique problems is where the real value to being a programmer is.
Secondly, a lot of the stuff in tutes and online answers is actually a load of crud, misleading or useless. If you can’t figure stuff out for yourself how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? If you don’t know what you’re doing in your own right the “help” you get from others is as dangerous as it is helpful.
Generally speaking I agree with you both. With a slight conditional. I do think googling is a very powerful resource when used as reference and augmenting. For instance if you are an experienced programmer/game developer, and wanting to learn how do things in Unity, it is great. I learned pretty much learned most of what I need from google (answers/forums). But if you are trying to learn how to “program” or how to build a game with no previous background, you guys are on the money, googling can’t replace real knowledge/skill/understanding.
This has actually become a problem for us. We are pretty much building all our upcoming games in Unity. As such we have a ton of artists/developers who are just starting to ramp up using Unity. I give classes in Unity about once a week and consult with several of the other teams helping them out. I have gotten to the point where I simply start by telling them to not use the Internet for answers. Go though the stuff on the Learn section of Unity or check with me or one of the experienced devs here, but ignore everything else. It is easier for me to just teach/show them, than to try and correct all the crap information that is floating around. It is simply amazing how many kids who have never shipped or even completed a game at all, manage to create tons of tutorials.
It’s absolutely an awesome resource. It’s just not the whole solution on its own. New solutions come from prior knowledge + new innovation. The prior knowledge part can definitely come from the Internet, but the new innovation part can’t. I mean, if someone had already done it then it’s not new innovation in the first place… it’s prior knowledge.
It’s way easier to make a tute than it is to make a game.
I also tell people not to look at tutes aside from the ones in the Learn section. And whenever people tell me they got something from a tute I openly groan.
Well my math knowledge isnt the case here. The problem mostly is that while using unitys standard components I’ve reach certain limits, and I wanted confiramtion that ive done so. The whole point was that I was trying to create a simple but optimized gui for my systems, tho in the half way I discovered some bugs/limits where math was not usefull at all.
In my case
The bug was that unity matrix gets really messed up if you move a GUI pivot inside a matrix wich is gropued with unity GUI commands.
The limit was that DrawTexture gets a a draw call every time its called. While I hoped its more optimized, so that a bunch of textures are batched together for a render.
So my math knowledge is really not the case in my situation.
Anyway after creating this thread my questions got anwsered and mind cleared. Wich is good.
About googling, imo its a good way to find solutions to problems, tho you need to “detect” wich solutions is a rather hack and poorly developed.
