Comment on Unity tutorial contents

I wish to point out some issues I’ve found about the Unity tutorial website. Whilst programmers and moderators of this website may reply or comment, I honestly don’t expect them to as they don’t hold any responsibility towards the website. I hope moderators and experienced programmers can pass this message if any have the chance to do so.

  • i found a basic youtube tutorials which are easier to understand. Examples include 3D movement of cubes since the real world is in 3D. I feel these these examples are far more realistic than having to go through all the technical contents (concepts, principles etc.) and then trying to understand what is happening. Let’s be honest, unless they happen to be very academic minded, the unity team probably wasted their time designing it despite whatever effort made.

  • These tutorials (meaning those not in unity forum) are complete and independent - meaning that you can write an app immediately. With reference to this, why bother checking the unity forum?

  • Those responsible for the unity tutorials made the very bad mistake of focusing too much time by explaining concepts and principles. Let’s be honest again - why bother reading all the concepts and principles when my desktop / mobile app can work perfectly well?

  • For beginners, all the concepts and principles isn’t very useful. Unless you are able to apply these concepts and principles, what you learn remains entirely academic, theory and not of much use. Beginners probably won’t understand it well as there’s too much to learn anyway.

If the unity team reads this, I really hope you all can really try to improve the situation. For now, the youtube videos I can find are seriously much better. Whilst I’m not an expert, I am learning more things than the unity forum tutorials. That’s the sad, terrible part.

2 Likes

Your post is interesting because I have been into the Unity Learn tutorials lately and I have been wishing they were more focused on concepts and principles.

I don’t want to spit out a game as fast as possible. I want to understand how to make a game and why thing are done they way they are and how/why it all works. In the end I think I’ll be far better at innovating if I truly understand what I’m doing. Therefore, I am looking for anything and everything that will get me there.

I think you’re shooting yourself in the foot in the long run by wanting results immediately without caring about how it all works and why it works.

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Imagine you’re making a stealth game and want to make all enemies on the map run to the player’s position after they were detected.

In some script somewhere, you add this bit of code to do so:

void Update() {
   Enemy[] allEnemies = FindObjectsOfType<Enemy>();

   foreach(Enemy enemy in allEnemies) {
       enemy.MoveToPlayer(GameObject.Find("Player").transform.position);
   }
}

Now if you just wanted to make this feature work, then you might stop right there, because it’s done.
However, if you understand the concepts and principles of Unity development, you will realize that this is a terribly inefficient script, and if you were to be writing similar code throughout the entire game, you’d run into performance problems constantly and probably wouldn’t know why or how to fix them.

I understand your point. All I’m saying is that I find too little examples in the unity learn forum. Bear in mind that not everyone understands things the same way. Perhaps my contents gave the bad impression that I think concepts and principles are useless. All I’m asking is for more examples or different examples. And I’m getting them from youtube. So I’m saying that the unity learn forum is not providing these examples.

What @DauntlessVerbosity says is very wrong and quite stupid. If he did read my information carefully, I did not say I skipped the unity forum when I started learning. I only mentioned that they are for those who are very academic minded. You also can’t expect everyone to understand things the same way.

For the record, I’m still referring to the unity forum after I learn something to see if the unity forum explains things properly. And I don’t fully understand everything there. Bear in mind that there are different ways of explaining things.

Glad to be of service.

1 Like

@DauntlessVerbosity . I did not put this post to start a fight or argue with people like you. If you are an academic person, then good for you. Some people prefer examples. If you can, try to be more friendly by pointing out websites where perhaps better examples of the concepts and principles can be explained or shown. As I stated, I will go to the unity forum once I feel I understand what I’m doing.

You called them stupid. Don’t try and claim a high ground here.

6 Likes

ok. In that case, go to the youtube videos and tell them that their approach is wrong. I see lots of good reviews so I don’t it’s wrong for me to understand examples before understanding concepts, principles. What’s your comment for this?

You said earlier to @DauntlessVerbosity :

You telling someone they should be more friendly after you insulted them by referring to their comments as “quite stupid” is kind of hilarious. It is this apparent lack of self-awareness that I think @Murgilod is responding to in their post. And then you respond talking about YT videos as if that has anything to do with what or why they said what they said. Maybe you’re having a bad day and are thus more likely to take innocuous things like @DauntlessVerbosity 's post as insulting to your intelligence - it happens. Maybe just try and hold off posting until your attitude is less gratuitously confrontational.

Agreed, but with the caveat that your goal is to become a game developer. If your goal is to just make a game for giggles or to see if you will enjoy the process I don’t see anything wrong with using a tutorial series that doesn’t teach you anything in the process.

@ here’s an analogy:

Person 1 learns the piano by going to youtube video for a song working through replicating the steps of the youtube teacher and learning the song. Once they get it, they can repeat the same process and learn another song and so on.

Person 2 goes to lessons where you learn to read music, learn proper fingering technique, music theory, and so on.

After three months Person 1 can play 4 or 5 really cool songs and is a hit at the party, woo! Person 2 can play some scales and doesn’t really know any popular or impressive songs.

After two years Person 1 can play 24 songs. Person 2 can put up a sheet of music and play any song.


The learn site isn’t great, but not for the reasons you suggest.

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ok I understand your point. So do I send feedback asking for more examples? Would this be a good idea? Perhaps those using the youtube videos would also benefit? Let me know.

The issue is that writing scripts has a high learning curve. Compare to art: if you want to draw a muscular troll but aren’t good enough, people will figure out what it’s suppose to be. They may think it’s quirky. But if you want to make a combo system and aren’t a good enough scripter, you don’t have a quirky combo system — you’ve got a non-working bunch of bugs.

As a result, scripting lessons come in 5 flavors: !) learn it for real. That takes months, 2) learn how to paste a script and use the Inspector. This gives the most immediate satisfaction for beginners making a very simple game, 3) follow steps to create a script. That’s is just a longer version of item 2, but some people really enjoy the paint-by-numbers feeling, 4) learn scripting, but only the easiest parts. This lets you use pre-made scripts, and maybe change them to do something new. The problems with that are you won’t know if something is easy enough to do until you try it; and if you decide you want to learn scripting for real you’ll have to start over. Finally, 5) the author got confused and wrote a mix of 1-4. That’s probably the most common.

1 Like

You say the unity forum is not great. Can you help on this? If no reply, I consider this thread done.

He meant the learning subsection linked below.

I already know about this. In that case I don’t think this thread is of any further help. Since anything else is outside this website, I should be able find it.

I look forward when you have a bad day. Then you’ll know how it feels when someone insults you.

Agreed. If you can’t understand the posts people make there’s no point continuing with a discussion.

How one can say this after insulting someone else beforehand is beyond me.

I didn’t say my understanding is at 0. It’s anywhere below 50. It depends on the articles I read.