I’d like to request Unity invest more resources in quality assurance and stabilizing existing features of the Unity Editor (not only the runtime).
In the past months (I’m working full-time in a team of 10 developers), we’ve encountered dozens of issues, mainly with the Unity Editor, especially with prefabs and serialization in general. I understand that not all issues are important or time-critical, but no matter how insignificant it may seem when looking at a single issue, they all add up and all together Unity feels more and more unpolished.
Since May this year I’ve reported close to 50 issues. Most of them are being worked on and some of them are still open, which is fine for specific issues. However, I find it concerning when some of these issues are simply closed because they cannot easily be reproduced by QA.
For example, case 1195283: I’ve reported that a prefab keeps setting our scene dirty. I’ve sent a small part of our project including the broken prefab and a video demonstrating the issue. Reply from QA was that they were able to initially reproduce the issue I’m showing, but that they cannot recreate it in a new project. So they closed the issue. But why? The issue is still there, my video and project demonstrate that there’s a defect. Even if this is considered non-critical for the moment, it needs to be fixed at some point. Rejecting existing issues really sends the wrong message and makes Unity feel unreliable.
I will admit that we’ve seen very few bugs in the built player, running on our platforms, so this is a good sign, however I believe that the editor environment should be of equal importance, because small annoyances in our daily workflow add up and slow down production.
Here’s to a better editor future and keeping a focus on quality! I don’t need as many of the new features every year if some of this time could be spent on improving basic stability. Thank you!
Thank you! I’ve previously had a very positive experience with a specific bug report being rejected but after Joachim got to know about it, the issue was addressed, so I always think that the intentions are good and I’m only complaining because I want to help improve Unity. Same with this thread, I believe there is opportunity to push for a more polished editor, but first Unity staff needs to be aware of it.
I don’t want to be ranting about things all day, but just to confirm why I posted this thread: I lost another 30 minutes of my workday again today, because one of the prefabs in our project was broken on only my machine. I had to ask my team member for help checking that it was indeed working on all other computers, but on my system, Unity threw warnings when importing a new script and then all prefabs where this script was attached were reset back to default. Together, we double-checked history in our version control system and confirmed that everything should be alright (script names etc all correct), only to find, that deleting my local library folder and reimporting the project fixes the issue. I’d love to report this as a bug, but it’s probably one of those things that only happen once every few months and then disappear.
Sometimes doing the dreaded Delete Library Folder can clear random crashes, for what it’s worth. Specially if it’s caching something that Unity missed with upgraders.
Unity doesn’t like to recommend doing that for a variety of reasons, and I’m sure one of them is finding out where auto upgrading breaks, but that’s not really the problem for someone struggling in the trenches. So if it still happens, nuke that Lib folder as a last resort.
2019.1.7 to 2019.2.6. However, my point is, that most of these issues are not fixed in LTS either and lots of them are issues only related to editor-code, so naturally they are lower priority, but they keep piling up.
Yea, that’s always a good tip. I try it from time to time with success. Sometimes our build won’t start on Switch, but after deleting the library it works again. Strange things like that cost time and we usually can’t create a repro case.
For consoles, you an get a whole bunch of permission issues crop up from time to time. I can’t obviously specify which console or when or why, but permissions are generally a something. Also I noticed less problems when I wasn’t using collaborate, FWIW, maybe because its random errors sometimes interrupt my builds, so worth sharing.
And finally (recently) it was a dodgy USB port causing Unity build failures, and Unity likes to give any error rather than none at all, and they were wrong about the cause (but that one was for an android based device). Worth sharing anyway.
Ahh, I was asking to check that it was a rather recent version which has had a full release. Occasionally people complain publicly like this and it turns out they were using an alpha version of Unity where you should actually expect that number of issues, or something extremely old where bugs may not have been fixed because the features they were using were entirely replaced in later versions. (I noticed you commented in the 2020.1 alpha forum recently)
Yeah hitting that number of issues would definitely be frustrating.
(but that one was for an android based device). Worth sharing anyway.