Just wondering how much time people add on to quotes for work to incorporate the numerous bugs in Unity 5?
At the moment I add 20% but am thinking of increasing that as I seem to spend much more time looking for work arounds.
The current small job is about a weeks work but this time I think it will be two weeks due to constant Editor crashes, broken features etc.
I feel ya pal. I lose about 1/3rd of my time with broken features workarounds. Once i find one i avoid them totally next time. There miught even be fixed bugs i am working around. Been that way for six+ years. But when it worksā¦Shazam!
I donāt know, I just hit walls and work around them or break through them. Half the time Iām not even sure something is bugged or itās just us pushing the feature where itās not designed to go.
You should definitely switch engines/tools right away. Seriously, dump Unity ASAP. If you are actually spending 20% of your time dealing with bugs, you are fool to keep using it. Any tool that took that much time up dealing with its problems I would drop in heartbeat. There are tons of other options, switch immediately, at 20% of your time, the impact of switching is negligible.
And the options to Unity for realtime 3D visualization for a client wanting Unity based apps are??
switches to another engine
If had a client that wanted me to build a functional bicycle built out of cottage cheese, and couldnāt convince them there was a better medium, I would thank them for their consideration and find better clients.
Not a cogent argument.
Sure it is, right tool right, right job. If your tool fails to work 1 out 5 times you use it, itās the wrong tool for the application.
It is not one out of five, if you are attempting to formulate an argument. It is 1/5 of the time. Meaning that someone could successfully pull off 100 operations with no issues in 5 hours and then spend an hour on one operation and figuring a workaround. Knee jerking is not your style ZGā¦whassup?
Isnāt that the usual regardless of API, engine, and whatever else?
Since we have an API built upon API built upon API built upon API, thereās always a nuclear landmine somewhere inside all that, waiting for its moment.
The only way around it is probably only restricting yourself to one type of work, that has been proven to be āsafeā. This might not be very profitable, though.
It is the usual scenario when pushing software around. I even have a bug on PS 5,.5 where the left option key will not activate the clone tool. It took me two months to figure out the right one did because for three years i used the left. What broke it? OS upgrade? Java upgrade? I spent last week fighting hard crashes in Unity 9.6.9b with the only clue being a warning dialog that stated āfile.data != position fatal errorā. I could not save a scene I worked on for about an hour. I would work for ten minutes, get some trees combined and then hit save ad every second or so try it would crash hard. I did some things seven or ten times. I stripped some toolsets I no longer had use for and it stoppedā¦for nowā¦ I have been character modeling and admiring my massive vegetation at 250FPS since that phase was done as i am wore out from fighting it and being on edge as to whether i just lost my work again.
Itās just context. Same difference relatively speaking. If you are spending 20% of your time dealing with problems directly related to faults of any tool, you need a better (or more appropriate) tool. That is an insane amount of time. I find it completely mind boggling. Making games (and software/tech in general) is largely about solving problems. A 20% drop in productivity is a problem, and one that should be solved. I get pissed if I spend more than couple of hours in a month dealing with engine/editor bugs. If it ever even broached 10% of my time, I would redirect that effort into a solution.
I have been promised by Unity tech they would clear these up. They have been doing a steady job lately. It does get me pissed and frustratedā¦left me unable to pay rent more than once due to a hard wall being hit and inability to claim contract completion to get paid ( and donāt anybody come at me with BS about how i should know or I will put a metaphorical boot up their arse) .but i am not the only one in the boatā¦so i just suck it up, record what I should not go near and move on. I deal with every part of the pipeline myself so i am bound to run into more things than any specifically focused on a subsystem dev.
Itās a case of the devil you know and the devil you donāt. Maybe the new tool doesnāt even have the feature that takes too long in your existing tool. Maybe some other feature is broken in the new tool. It has a certain value to say āI know this project will take 20% longer on my existing tool,ā rather than āI bet this project would go faster on a new and unfamiliar tool.ā Sometimes, when you make a betā¦ you lose.
I hit infuriating bugs, API limitations, black-boxed functionality, undocumented shader and code in Unity constantly. I thought it was all just supposed to be a part of the adventureā¦
Having said that Unity beta 5.6 has run rather well, so farā¦
I hit unity bugs fairly regularly, but not all that many.
The single biggest problem I have is the profiler āout of samples for this frameā error, which I get whenever I open the profiler then close the window - and keep it closed. The short term fix for this is opening the profiler window again and keeping it open since the error only happens when the profiler is closed. In general, it means I need to restart Unity and avoid using the profiler window too much (which is a real pain in the ass). Iāve had this problem in multiple projects on multiple machines.
I corrupted a scene the other day by copy/pasting ui elements from an secondary scene into the original. I forget what this error was exactly, but it was some kind of lingering reference to the underlying canvas (which I unloaded after pasting). That was a real pain in the ass because it actually corrupted the scene. I ended up having to rebuild half the UI in a fresh scene.
I start to get editor errors after working heavily on UI for a while, I forget the details, but this is some failed assertion in like editor dock window. It also requires a restart but only happens maybe 1 in 5 days if Iām doing heavy UI work. No clue what triggers this, but itās annoying.
I used to hit a mecanim error that would wipe my āfrom anywhereā transitions every now and then (iirc, this was related to hitting āundoā at specific times). They fixed this around last year.
I have many complaints about UI performance under specific conditions, but it might be a stretch to call these bugs.
Unity isnāt flawless, but the above are the majority of the problems I tend to encounter. All in all, I consider the Unity Editor to be an absolute top tier piece of work and I consider these problems very minor in the grand scheme of things (although the profiler problem is super annoying).
Most of the time I think thereās a bug, itās me not understanding something. In general I have found myself fighting against Unityās design decisions far less than almost any other non trivial API Iāve ever encountered - (except for their UI design, which I really hope isnāt a harbinger of future design philosophy).
I am quite pleased with it and made some giant leaps forward with things previously frustrating me. Had one wierd hard crash bug that would not let me save a large scene but somehow it went away. Ahā¦sweet mysteries of dev.
I always suspect Iām the reason something isnāt working properly, and Iām usually right. 
Iāve not experienced any Unity crashes since 5.3, though Iām only working on mobile development. I suspect legitimate crashes ādoā happen to those who are working on heavy complex PC/VR content.