Installing Modules / Administrator Mode / UI-UX Issues

Unity Engine
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1

There are a number of issues that are buggy or provide very bad (or no) UI/UX/feedback that really need some love.

Bug 1: If you have the hub open in windows (Windows 11 Pro, Hub 3.7.0) normally, I am unable to install other versions of Unity or modules without restarting the hub in administrator mode. Many other forum posts have been made about this already. Why can’t I just install a new version? Why can’t the hub restart itself with elevated privileges if it needs to?

UI/UX Issue 2: Closing the hub doesn’t close it, it minimizes it to the tray. For a lightweight program that really doesn’t need to act like a service, this is problematic: trying to reopen the hub (to workaround Bug 1) gives no feedback that the hub is still open if windows hides the tray icon.

UI/UX Issue 3: Opening the hub in administrator mode while the hub is already open should either notify the user the hub is already open (in un-elevated mode) or reopen the hub in administrator mode.

UI/UX Issue 4: Opening a project from the hub in administrator mode gives me a warning dialog box without the ability to “never show this again”.

Bug 5: The warning dialog box does not have an option to cancel opening the project entirely - I can only “ignore” or “restart unity” - both of which are 5+ minute operations (I’m actually writing this post now because I tried to cancel this process). Clicking the “X” in the top right of this dialog chooses the “ignore warning” option, which is terrible design - closing a dialog box should always implicitly select the “cancel” or “don’t do this” option, not the “proceed anyway despite the warning you gave me”.

UI/UX Issue 6: Do you really need this dialog at all? I understand the risk from malicious packages, but in 99% of use cases, the packages are “known”, OSS, or even written by the team using them. If legal insists on this “feature”, the solution isn’t to slap a warning on opening the app (lazy) but instead to warn per-package or per-source-file once so I don’t have to click this stupid dialog box every time I open my own code.

Bug 7+: There are a number of bugs around installing the Android/JDK/NDK/SDK and getting this configuration into the project at hand. Depending on if I’m working in Unity 2021 or 2022, or which client I’m working for, I have to manually fiddle with these settings in the user-level preferences (Preferences/External Tools/Android). These are not user level settings, these are project level settings, and should live there.

As an aside, the state of the organization of Edit/Preferences, Edit/Project Settings and File/Build/Build Options is really confusing and a bit of a mess and the Unity Editor product team really ought to spend some time to consolidate and clean these up. Even after working in Unity every day for several years, I struggle to remember where “that one setting” is, and fumble through 3 separate places it might be (or more - maybe it’s Services/Services? Package Manager??) to find what is plaguing me.

2

Hey great suggestions !
We are working on 1.
This is the first I’ve heard of 2 – I’ll try to get us a preference for close vs minimize.
For 3, I completely agree, but it might not make it onto the roadmap since ideally we fix 1 and users don’t need to be opening hub in admin mode (which we don’t want)

For the rest of your suggestions be sure to also post them to unity editor forum or package manager forum. Agreed especially about the behavior on the x button. I actually had this same thought last night about the dialogue that warns you when you enter playmode while you are inspecting a prefab :confused:

3

4-7 are all (potentially?) Hub related - not sure they belong in the regular forum. I might not have been clear on #5 - I don’t mean “general dialog boxes” but instead, I meant the one that’s opened as a warning (from hub) when opening a project while hub is running in admin mode.

I’m not sure if 7 falls on the hub team or the unity team, but it’s been a real headache (have been trying to upgrade a project from 2021 to 2022 and have a lot of build-related and configuration-related issues). I think there’s something very broken about the “add modules” functionality from the hub. Android SDK licenses didn’t get prompted/installed (or copied over from other installations, which admittedly is harder); android dependencies didn’t resolve; cached .gradle settings appear to be breaking builds, etc. Lots of it is editor related, but I suspect that root cause is in failed module installations from the hub… Unfortunately, it’s crunch time for this project and I don’t have too much more information than that (nor time to help debug, sorry)… Hopefully you or someone else from Unity can capture this info and verify/action it accordingly…

4

This dialogue is actually opened by the editor – Hub does kind of cause this behaviour when it is in admin mode because any child process of an admin process is started in admin mode. I’m not sure if it would be possible to override that and in general I feel like overriding OS level behaviour is bad UX.

Do you want to be starting the editor in admin mode or is it just a byproduct of needing to use the hub that way ? If so what is the use case?

5

I have no need to ever start the editor in admin mode, the burden of starting unity hub in administrator mode is because hub fails to install modules (for me) unless it is in admin mode. Once I’m done installing modules, it seems silly to have to quit the hub (which in itself is not intuitive - see issue #2 above) only to restart it and then open up the project.

Becuase I do a lot of consulting, I have to install modules and manage different versions of unity every day (ie, I use the Hub maybe a bit more than most): 9613973--1364354--upload_2024-1-30_13-26-22.png

Having the Hub “behave” a bit more well-mannered would be great. :slight_smile:

6

Agreed - but why does Hub need to be elevated in order to install modules…? Or if “administrator access” is not generally required by the editor, shouldn’t the hub be able to restart itself (with a prompt to the user) before launching the editor process, if it’s detects it has elevated access?

7

Thanks for elaborating.

To be clear – The hub not prompting you for admin privileges is a known bug, and it is not intended that you would need to restart it. For the vast majority of users the experience is that when they go to install anything they are prompted for admin privileges and a smaller child process is then run with admin privileges which does the installations.

The requirement that you would need to restart the hub in admin mode is unintentional not only because it is a bad UX, but also because we don’t want the entire hub to run in admin mode unnecessarily (or the editor)

Why does hub need to be elevated in the first place ? In order to avoid permissions issues when writing files.