Has anyone heard anything recently about a time frame for the Unity iPhone update? It’s been nearly six months now. I for one had much higher expectations for support/updates. I’m sorry for the long rant, but I just need to get it out.
I’m growing tired of all this secrecy and indirectness. I thought this was supposed to be a professional tool. I’d expect to be treated like a professional, rather than just be kept in the dark. This is a big issue. I know I’m not alone in being an independent developer who makes their living off iPhone development. A little more openness as far as what is going on, and a basic roadmap would make my day. At a minimum we should at least get timely hot fixes for critical bugs. How about making information about known defects publicly available? That way we don’t our waste with them.
When I first decided to write games for the iPhone, I was deciding between the open source SIO2, Shiva and Unity. At $3000 (usd), Unity is the most costly solution, but I figured the cost of the engine becomes negligible over the long haul, and that getting top notch support is really the most important thing, as this is a business, not hobby. I expected that having a strong company developing this engine, it would see features and updates that far surpass the competition. So I jumped on Unity iPhone the day it was released.
But here we are 6 months later, and I was completely off. SIO2 has really developed into a quality project. The author is very active and continues to make updates at a fast pace. Critical bugs are fixed within days. Shiva has been getting major updates, and critical bugs get fixed within days. With Unity, it took over a month to get some of the initial critical bugs fixed. There are still plenty more bugs that have been outstanding since the beginning, and we’ve received 0 in the way of any new features.
This is the type of support I would have expected if iPhone publishing was a free value added feature of Unity Pro. I’m not saying that Unity iPhone is a piece of crap, or that these other engines are better. But they are definitely being better supported by their authors. That you cannot argue with.
I’ll be watching closely when the new Torque for the iphone is released. I’ve lost faith that UT has the ability to support this product. Perhaps they’ve spread themselves too thin with 2.5. Maybe they just aren’t seriously committed to providing ‘Professional’ level service. They seem to still be stuck in the Indie tool mindset.
I don’t want to belittle your position because I empathize with you, but major corporations don’t normally release their plans for updates and this is especially true in the subculture of Apple development. You couldn’t even ask Apple if a feature was going to exist even if you had stolen the documents of Steve’s desk.
I do agree that it is unfortunate to know so little about the roadmap of the product that it becomes easier to adopt 3rd party mechanisms for adding functionality to Unity, but I certainly wouldn’t say that has anything to do with professionalism. Most companies are incredibly secretive about their plans going forward and as you state, you are waiting to see what is going to happen with a competing product yourself. Unity has been around for a long time and is being used by a considerable number of developers on a large number of platforms.
So while I wish that they would just put out a roadmap that would give us some idea of where they were headed, I accept that within certain communities this doesn’t happen. I used to be a professional game developer and even for us, tool vendors would at best make us (generally) empty promises about features they were going to include.
Hopefully you make the right decision that works for you though. I would suggest you sit tight and wait myself.
That’s not true at all, especially with Apple. When you get a professional license to development tools, they almost always send you information about upcoming updates or publish a roadmap as so developers know what to expect. Even apple has released a public beta of their 3.0 api. They have published each release ahead of time for developers to preview so they know what to expect long before it goes public. So, yes, they do release information for developers. And if you are part of development programs for Apple or Microsoft, you will get information about upcoming OS features. This is standard in the industry.
However, this is just one of my gripes. I could live without a roadmap or information about pending updates, if bugs were at least patched in a timely manor. As it stands, we are completely in the dark.
The bugfixing part is actually not holding back projects.
UT has mentioned several times that if there is a game breaking bug that they have fixed in the internal version, you could contact them which will potentially grant you a specifially built version that solves the problem.
UT isn’t like some other developers that throw out weekly builds just to throw out another one 5 days later to fix half the trash that was just released.
Any company that has weekly releases with a considerable expansion on feature end etc is worlds away from beeing an option actually as it is not possible to push that much stuff in within that timeframe and test it correctly.
I agree that the bughotfixes would have been nice if they happened in a 1.0.2 (1.0.1 has already happened) in january.
Also a general not too specific developer diary / blog would be very welcome to me.
I feel your pain brother…
unity iphone is a joke…
there isn’t one tutorial for unity iphone…
I repeat…
there is not one tutorial for unity iphone
has a newbie just starting game programing
you are going to get frustrated real fast…
trying to reverse engineer the iphone examples is
frustrating…
unity is a good product with solid documentation
unity iphone is a joke…
no tutorials, little documentation, no support
(from unity or the forum…)
the only people that have had success with unity iphone are people that been doing it for a long time
or teams that are not new to developing mobile games…
look at the post count of the people that are always defending this inferior product(unity iphone)
they all have at least a couple hundred post…
I should have gone with the torque 2D iphone engine…
torque is harder but it has much better documentation…
torque has 2 books on the market you can download to learn the engine…
unity has a couple tutorials
at this point I’m getting nothing done with unity iphone
because I don’t know where to start…
I was suckered in by the unity trial…
like I said many times on this forum…
unity is a solid product…
with good documentation and examples…
unity iphone is a joke
no tutorials, no documentation , no support…
How do you know for sure if there are bugs holding back a project or not? I’m completely aware that Unity works, as I’ve published 4 Unity based projects to the appstore. As I said, it’s a great product. Even with the bugs that exist. And I agree that there aren’t any bugs that would completely keep you from making games, but there are bugs that will limit you to a certain degree. My issue is two fold. I expected more at this point. It’s not a cheap product. I was sold on the fact that they have a full time development staff specifically for iphone, working to create the best iPhone game engine that money can buy. I’m just not seeing the the results. But I’m seeing other products that are continuing to evolve, and Unity has been stagnant for a long time. My other issue is that everything is so vague. When you use software to earn a living, it’s good to know about what direction it’s going in, what’s coming up. Every professional development tool I’ve used has kept it’s users informed so that they can be prepared. They notify their users of defects… Basically keep an open relationship with their users. UT does this to some degree, and I think Higgy does a good job of being a product liaison. But the information that’s given out isn’t substantial.
[quote=“dreamora”
UT isn’t like some other developers that throw out weekly builds just to throw out another one 5 days later to fix half the trash that was just released.
[/quote]
Who said anything about weekly updates. I’m just saying that 4 - 5 month to fix bugs isn’t cutting it. And who knows how long it’ll actually be before the next update comes out. It could tomorrow it could be in another 6 months. Major bugs (memory leak… broken sockets) should be fixed quickly. The features page still says socket support, but in the officially release version, it doesn’t work. That bug was documented back in december, it’s April now. Either say it’s no longer supported, or fix it.
I have to agree with Kevin on this. I’m fairly new here but I find the lack of patches rather alarming. I’m not going to rant but I have one thing to say:
It is a really, really bad idea to hold bug fixes for new updates. Not only is it silly to have to wait that long but all new updates introduce new bugs. So, by doing this, at what point do we have a really stable development environment that’s relatively bug-free? Answer: Never.
Seriously guys, buy some patch generating software and use it. Your price point is too high to not be offering this kind of support.
Hmmm, I must be using a different product because I’ve been pretty happy so far. Can I ask though, what is it that you are waiting for? If you want an update, then there must be something you need in that update. Have you let the developers know?
Also, I came from iTGB land. If you’re upset that you don’t get any updates over here, you’ll feel the same frustration over there. In fact, I find it more frustrating since the current iTGB build needs some serious optimization work. I spent a lot of time working on a game only to finally realize that it just wouldn’t work due to being too slow (and yes, I was coding C++ rather than script). The books you are talking about may help, but not much. For decent performance, torque script doesn’t cut it. You need to code in the engine itself. So those books you talk about won’t do you much good (plus I think the books were written pre-behaviors though I could be wrong).
Oh, and to the person that said that its only people with hundreds of posts that support Unity…check my number out
As mentioned, I fully agree that a hotfix release (1.0.2) should have happened in January / February when different things were mentioned to be fixed (especially the memory leaks). I do not see why bugfix releases are beeing pushed out together with the feature expansion releases.
But I do not know enough about the Unity development cycle to be able to comment on such decisions in any qualified way.
The comment on the weekly updates was focused on your layout of how competing developers are handling it. I prefer waiting months and have a stable product instead of having to push back updates of my own products because a new version of the technology I use breaks existing functionality to a degree where the product can no longer be used in a production environment.
It’s ok to say the dev’s have been focused on 2.5 and at the GDC but like Kevin I understood that there were dev’s that were solely focused on the iPhone and I am yet to be convinced that is the case.
Kevin makes a lot of good points and I hope Unity will ‘get around’ to providing some answers and at the very least a timetable and not just 6 or 8 weeks ‘maybe’. A list of what will be fixed and any new up coming features will also be very useful and allow users of iPhone Unity to plan.
IMHO serious bugs should be fixed ASAP as a hot fix, you should not wait for a next big release.
This is what we do with our financial software and we have thousands of customers. Regarding of braking your code while fixing it, well that’s what QA is for.
Btw, I have nothing against Unity as such as I haven’t used it enough to discover any serious bugs.
I like the approach where developers fixes the bug and gives you a special build if you really need it.
We have this relationship with DevExpress guys and it is awesome - I report a bug one day and next they send me a file with a fix!
Edit:
In this case I don’t see a problem at all, if you can have this close relationship with developers, what else do you really need?
That’s the first time I’ve heard this as the ‘official policy’. But I still think this is unacceptable. Just because ‘I’ don’t know there is a bug, doesn’t mean there isn’t a bug that’s already fixed, that I may encounter later, or in production. So a now a known memory leak gets fixed. I could have had the opportunity to submit an update to my application (or released it without this defect) instead of waiting around till users started complaining about crashing. Meanwhile I’m waiting 2 weeks for Apple to approve the update. The whole time, more and more users continue to complain and submit negative reviews. I’m not making this up, as it actually happened to me, and I guarantee that it had a major impact on my sales. Why does this ‘special’ build get shrouded in secrecy? Should I be sending a weekly email to make sure that I have the latest in fixes.
However bad the bug may be, I’d rather have UT step forward and let us know what it is, and that it’s fixed, rather than just try and hide it. Maybe the company gets to save face on a buggy release. But everyone accepted the fact that there would be bugs. It was understood that Unity iPhone was released in a hurry so that it could get into the hands of users as soon as possible… So it’s about how things are handled after the release that matter, and I really don’t think it’s been handled at all.
As iPhone developers we have unique needs that are not the same as traditional game selling over the internet or distributing a Web Player. We can’t just find a bug and fix it immediately. We are tied up by Apple, waiting on an approval process. Every negative aspect of our game is going to be recorded in the review system, so it’s important that we can try and fix issues before they become known by our users. The lack of forward support is a huge drawback to this product. As it can have a major impact financially. I think this is what UT doesn’t get. This isn’t just for fun anymore, this is about lively hood.
Perhaps UT needs to rethink this policy as times have changed. With regular Unity for desktop publishing, the statistics of people purchasing a license that go on to actually sell a game commercially, has got to be something less than 1%. With iPhone publishing, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was closer to 90%. So where as before bugs weren’t really a critical thing, because there were much less commercially successful games written on the platform, now as a community we have tons of games/apps in production.
While I’m fairly new to unity myself, only just discovering it late last year, I have to say Kevinr raises some valid points. Being close to releasing my first iPhone game I would like to see some serious responses from the iPhone unity dev team in regards to this thread.
I moved away from another development environment last year after many years of use due to poor handling within the development team. While I’m not saying I am close to considering this again with unity, I am concerned that there are some people getting irritated and bringing up points that seem valid to me.
We stated this before and I’ll restate it now: we have a Unity iPhone update in the works and we’ll be releasing it in the coming weeks. We noted this before the 2.5 launch when prompted on this topic and it’s the same now. We’re even discussing two releases, one in the nearest term to address memory leak issues, then another that offers more substantive upgrades and fixes.
None of this has been kept in a black box, we’ve spoken about it publicly on multiple occasions. Additionally anyone facing critical issues can in fact get in touch with us for those builds. So while you might want a different plan I’m confused as to the assertions that we’ve not offered information about the “when” question.
Doing rapid hot-fix releases isn’t always the best way to go. There is a certain cost with any “official release” and that can be a bit prohibitive if you do lots of small updates, so instead we’re going with more periodic updates. And let’s be fair on the time line as we have done a 1.0.1 update, so it’s not been six months with zero updates.
I’ll now read the complete thread for other thoughts, concerns and comments, but I wanted to immediately reply to the question of when folks might expect an update and the timing issues.
Rapid bug fixes aren’t always the best way to go? for who? Higgy, I appreciate your comments, but I’m going to have to assume that you do not develop games or have commercial Unity releases to support. I think we come from different perspectives. As you need to evangelize this product, and I need to use it. I also had to pay for it. I think if you had to use it on a regular basis and were dependent on it’s performance as a source of income, you may understand the gripes. I would expect that type bottom basement level of support from a cheap product. Not a $3500 ‘professional’ tool. Right now it’s an indie tool with a professional price. When you pay for a professional product like that, you expect rapid support. Not semi annual updates for critical bugs.
I’m not just making this stuff up. Before entering the world of game development I was on the architecture team for a popular software company. It was my responsibility to evaluate software, development tools, middleware, etc and ultimately decide whether or not we would purchase them to use internally. Development tools/middleware are extremely mission critical. Not getting bug fixes would be completely unacceptable.
Yes there was a 1.0.1 update that fixed some bugs. That was still 4 - 5 months ago, as I said. And yes I understand that a few months ago it was stated that another release would be around the corner some time after 2.5 was released. However, in the meantime, more bugs and memory leaks have been made public. There is a very slow reaction time, and a lack of clear communication. This is a very concerning problem.
Notice that I said “they’re not always the right way to go”, I did NOT say “they are never the right way to go”. There’s an important difference there that I want to be sure is understood. The memory leak issues are already driving conversation internally about a faster release with those and a “slower” release with more (features + bugs). I specifically noted this above as that’s part of trying to be responsive to the comments we’ve been hearing as of late (“we need it sooner, not later UT!”).
I think having fast, small, updates that fix the engine are important. It is known (although not to everyone who doesn’t browse the forum very often, I guess) that we can contact UT in order to have a special/custom build.
Maybe it would be interesting for UT to have a webpage that updates what has already been fixed so that we know what does not work and could ask for a custom build if we really need this fix.
I think Kevin had a very valid point about the possibility of having a big bug/memory leak that we are not aware of but still needs to be fixed…
My game is about to be released pretty soon and so far I didn’t experience any engine bugs but I don’t know, it is something to have the game tested by a couple of your friends and another thing to release it to thousands of people.
But I’m glad UT is internally talking about this issue.
