Is it me or are the support forums dead? I’ve posted questions on the answers.unity and the support forum but it seems that nobody’s answering questions anymore…
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IDK. I did ask a question pretty recently and it didn’t get much attention or replies either.
Sometimes people just don’t bother to answer if the questions are not clear enough or sometimes there are just too many threads. I tried to answer both of em now.
The forums get many hundreds of posts every day, so if that’s what counts as “dead”, then yes, they are dead. Or, more realistically, with that much activity, you have to expect that sometimes things will just get buried. Nobody’s being paid to answer questions, so if those questions are unclear or about stuff that’s been answered many times, they may get ignored. Do a search first, since it’s highly likely that something similar has already been answered.
–Eric
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Whenever someone comes here to question why their posts aren’t being answered the automatic and often correct answer is: you didn’t ask the right question.
There are probably a thousand questions posted across the support outlets daily; like anywhere with much competition, you must make yourself attractive to these volunteers by having a unique question that can benefit both parties. Make sure you do thorough research into your issues and do your own (a lot) R&D before asking here. A lot of knowledgeable people only pop into these interesting questions, while ignoring the flood of basic ones seen everyday. Be patient; but most importantly be thankful for people like @Ostwind who volunteer their time on a daily basis. 
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If on the other hand your question is more mundane you might have a better chance asking in Getting Started. Very rarely does a thread fail to receive a response in that section of the forums and those who frequently assist do so less for the challenge and more for the enjoyment of assisting others.
Yep. They are totaly dead. They have been dead for years though so I doubt anything is going to change. Remember, if you need support you can always pay…
Ugh, so much stuff has me so annoyed at Unity today. They need to learn how to fix issues that have existed for damn years. No one even seems to realise or acknowledge the amount of shit that’s broken and say BS like “People want new features and bug fixes, what entitled jerks”.
Nobody says that. You might want to calm down and examine what you wrote rationally, since it doesn’t actually make sense.
–Eric
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Ok, it’s not an exact quote but it’s paraphrasing a Unity developer who was annoyed that people ask for features and when they deliver features people complain about bugs(When clearly people want features that actually are functional)
I actually think it’s relatively clear the only part that could be misinterpreted is “No one” where it is talking about people from Unity and not people using Unity.
It’s pretty clear that Unity has gone through massive growing pains in the past year or two. The issue is that they haven’t really done anything to resolve these issues for a year or so… the closest thing is when John Riccitiello said that they will focus on releasing versions that are more stable, I’ll admit that 5.4 beta and the most recent version of 5.3 are the most stable versions in 5.X. But that’s something that should be taken for granted not something that needs to be announced at GDC.
Anyone using Unity knows not to update to a new version for ages because things get broken and bugs persist for months or years before they are fixed(Like the 2D/3D buttons that have never worked but are in every version?)
These issues persist throughout every part of Unity from engine to services to asset store to forum and no one is willing to take any responsibility and actually fix these issues.
Really currently by my estimate there are 753 people viewing these forums right now with most of them in support sections. Unity offers a total of no support to these people. With something like 900 employees can Unity really not just have a few junior developers answering questions and servicing those 753 users?
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Lol.
In the 4.X cycle Unity was constantly not launching features because they still had bugs, or they weren’t yet ready. There was plenty of complaining about this, and people saying release anyway. In the end Unity produced the road map and put a stake in the ground and said these features will be released on these dates.
This lead to the early 5.x cycle where a bunch of features were released on time, but still with bugs. Which lead to people complaining that Unity should stop introducing new features and focus on bug fixing. And complaints that Unity should take as much time as was needed to get the feature right, rather then sticking to a date.
Moral of the story? People are going to complain no matter what. UT should just do whatever they feel like doing.
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Agreed, @Kiwasi , completely.
he-he, he-he, he said servicing users
Even if you wrote the perfect, most well worded question in the world, and provided a sample project, screen shots and an animated gif of your problem in your ORIGINAL question, it would probably still take a Unity rep a lot of time to figure out what your issue is and respond. Unity is a free product, and you can expect to get the level of support that you pay for.
I read through answers.unity every once in a while because I feel like I have a pretty high level of knowledge and the best way to learn is to teach. I think I answered one question and my answer was never accepted. All of the other questions either made no sense or pertained to things that I do not have knowledge of.
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People want features that are released in reasonable timeframes. The 3.5 UI that didn’t come out until 4.6 is not good enough. I don’t care if Unity says that a feature will come out in one version and they say “oh it was crap, we’ll refactor it and release it at some point(In the reasonable future)”, but that should NEVER EVER EVER happen. As soon as that happens(The UI) it’s an issue that needed to be resolved in the very bones of the corporate culture of Unity and it should never happen again.
The development schedule should be refined, I’m not a CEO of a software company but on smaller projects like I work on something like this works:
- Identify issue
- Design solution (Design team, use paper!)
- Test compatibility and robustness.(Especially important in something like Unity that’s used by a massive amount of developers)
- Technical design(How it actually needs to be made and how it can interact with user code)
- Actually implement it.
- Evaluate function and make sure it actually accomplishes everything it needs to.(Internal Alpha)
7.Repeat untill it seems to work for everything. - Refactor(Make sure it’s as neat as possible)
- Release external Beta.
- If it’s not good jump back to whatever step is necessary to fix the issues.
- Release.
You’ve probably noted that out of those 11 steps only step 5 and 8 are actually implementing any code. It’s actually probably only a third of development spent making the thing the rest is peripheral. While this would mean that best case scenario is pushed back significantly(If they just started programming it day one and it turned out great) it also means that worst case scenario is pulled in significantly(If the teams are competent the design should work within two iterations of internal Alpha). It also means that details on why decisions were made and how the system was designed are saved and this allows for development in the future to more easily dissect the issue and work out a solution.
Just releasing something is not actually what people want/wanted. People want features and people want fixes… as is clear by other software companies and UE4 this is possible and something that Unity needs to get right. TBH the stake in the ground was probably an experienced CEO who ran one of the largest game companies in the world saying “we need to do better” but the underlying issues of the company meant that while the roadmap was a good idea it ended up not working because all the teams are dysfunctional.
Again people want features delivered on time, as stable and as robust as possible. Unity doing things like releasing a update to Shuriken that spews errors constantly or PBR that gives inaccurate results (Due to a clamping error) is just not good enough. Even something as dodgy as having terrains not being affected by lighting. Why didn’t the QA team find these issues(Both widely experienced) and stop the release? Why did the developers not see these issues before that?
No, loads of developers are moving away from Unity to UE4 because of these issues. Unity needs to identify developer needs and fix them.
When ever I have questions I just ask my colleagues or friends, these answers are never available on the internet. No one in there right mind would ask here because the quality of answers sucks. People don’t have the technical know how to do pretty much anything.
I’m not saying Unity needs to answer every question but having someone who knows or can get the information, put up a detailed answer and refer on to the docs/learn teams that more needs to done for some questions would be great.
Unity is also not a charity just because they have a free option does not mean that users are worthless.
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Hey @TylerPerry I know you’re in a tough place right now and that things aren’t going very easily for you on the development side, and that really sucks. I’m sorry to hear it. I know very well what that feeling is like. When you run into one of Unity’s limitations, it’s very easy to personalize it and get upset with UT. My suggestion would be to wait a while and cool off. Take it from me, whenever these issues are fresh in your mind, it doesn’t make for a very good conversation starter.
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Revive with vivarin