I think Asset Store is great, I have spent over $2000 now on Asset Store, but it is also one of the worst part of Unity - it is often buggy, crashes, not loading, and whole host of problems that comes with it. The instabilities that cause these problems are almost always server-side problems as it often clears up after a few hours.
But there are a few problems (or features) that are not server side - and I would like to see UT to address it:
Tabbed browsing - THIS IS 2015 PEOPLE! Not 1995! Not able to tab browsing or mult-page browsing seriously ruin the shopping experience. I can’t compare or quickly browse multiple assets inside Asset Store’s own browser. I am forced to use a standard browser to do this externally. WTF BBQ !!!
Unity/Asset Store not remembering User Login and Password - this is highly inconvenient - very often users are forced to input login again (especially when you have a very long password).
Asset Store does not remember user browsing history reliably - when you click on several assets whiling browsing, it doesn’t go back to the asset you just browse - it jumps back 5 PAGES or more sometimes. It is very annoying as you can’t reliably go back to the results or items you just searched.
Asset Store Download Manager doesn’t remember anything every time you click on download manager - this is also highly inconvenient - as Download Manager page doesnt seem to store anything locally so every time you click on it (which can be quite often as you browse asset and jumps between what you have and check what’s avaliable or vice versa, or just want to check changelogs of assets you own) it takes up to a minute or more to load, if you click back to Asset Store and click back for Download Manager it is another minute or more wait! UT seriously needs a more capable coder that know how to STORE USER ASSET INFORMATIONLOCALLY (or even temporarily per session!!!). This is probably more of the biggest time waster on the Unity UI when you have to click on Download Manager every time.
In fact, come to think of it, NONE OF THE ASSET STORE PAGE SEEM TO BE STORE LOCALLY! Every time you click on a page or Asset Store home page, it takes a while to load (or download), instead of just fetching up local copy that was downloaded few minutes ago. This is 2015 now people, why can’t UT just store Asset Store pages locally like normal browser do (and update only when the pages are updated)?? Its not like Asset Store home pages or other pages under category are changed very often (I checked - at most it change only once a day - as there aren’t that many submissions per day).
I’ve probably spent about $2000 and maybe $3000!
If does seem there is no cache for what you’ve already browsed and if I had a tab with a list of my local assets with radio buttons that told the asset store browser whether to hide or show my local assets in the tab that gets updated you can bet 75% or more of all previous assets I bought would be hidden. Ideally the same local tab would include another radio button that could be configured to point to a local path and that radio button says to both hide the asset in the other tab as if you never bought it, archive the asset to a remote path and delete the asset from the local path. Optional would be to create a tab for exclusively archived assets that you could still check to see if they have updates but less frequently.
And we need maturity ratings system to get rid of having to browse through so many genres a lot of us have no interest in developing games or apps for.
I miss the one feature that is broken for almost a year: sort order for the wish list.
It was so much useful before to track update of assets you want to buy.
Agreed that is is crap. Sort by Purchase is reported to be buggy since first U5, it adds Free items to that list too (was not so in U4). And the new change they did in 5.2 is to change behavior open in a tab.Fixed what is not broken, ignore what is broken.
I preferred it when one could look at one’s purchases online. It is pretty rubbish especially if one has a lot of assets, I wait twenty minutes for the asset list to come up, finding stuff is ridiculously hard. The asset packages are saved under various names that give no indication what the hell they are unless using the asset store plugin and even then they are often wrongly categorised. Plus Unity generally freezes when the asset window is open. Admittedly, I may have a lot more assets than they envisioned people having, but still.
It is nearly impossible to track what one has already as well, it’s a real mess this system, not to mention importing assets often breaks stuff. It can be pretty infuriating when it’s a large project.
I’m not sure how much I’ve spent, but I’m sure it would have been an even scarier number if the browsing experience was up to 21st century standards. Even in a real web browser it’s inconsistent (sort by age only available in some cases) and slow. Actually, keep the store as it is, and I’ll save money!
It wouldn’t hurt if the wish list could be grouped by category though.
I think Asset Store’s core system uses a complicated hard-coded design which makes it hard, if not impossible, to modify to match today’s needs. Apart from all the things said above, I think Asset Store also lacks the SEO required by today’s standard to feed the first search results on Google. It can greatly benefits customers, developers and Unity itself if they do something about it.
Amen to that… The whole wish list is pretty much useless atm. I have so much stuff in there, it is cumbersome to go through it all. Sale notifications would really make it a bit more useful.
