The current process that requires an example project in order to submit bugs is causing many bugs to go unreported and this leads to multiple community members needing to spend time identifying and working around the same bugs.
Unity Goals
- I would assume your goal is to get feedback from the community on how to make the Unity better
- I’d assume you do not want to spend engineering time on non-issues and user errors.
My Goals
- solve issues that effect my teams products or workflows
- to evaluate the feasibility of using new pre-release features for my company
- be a good community member that contributes back to the community.
The problem
Creating test projects / or uploading ours is time consuming and problematic. We have tons of proprietary work flows and even stripping a project out of our custom dev environment is hugely problematic
Our Reaction
We only submit the issue if it is a showstopper or we have extra non-product critical time to contribute to the community. If a bug isn’t a show stopper for us we often don’t submit it as it will be closed no-repro without a test project even if we provide code examples that demonstrate how to make it happen. Even if we can tell you how to make it happen by copying our code into one of your own demos.
Effect on the community
The community members will spend time finding, identifying, and working around the same issues we found previously.
Example
Case 1419941 is a great example of an issue that is in pre-release. The issue was created in an attempt to be a “good community member”. The code sample and explanation I provided should be enough to evaluate the issue. This is an issue that multiple users have reported:
NOTE: in this case the multiplayer team has a separate process to evaluate things on “git” and this was resolved in that way. However this would not have been resolved through the normal process and as it is not effecting one of our products and we can not justify spending the time required to create an example project to help you repro the issue. In fact I didn’t know this would be evaluated through the git process and have failed to get this looked at with unity’s official process without attaching an example project.
Suggestion
Evaluate the likelihood of an issues and have a team who has the technical chops to evaluate the problems without always putting it on your community to do the work of creating an example project for you. I understand you probably get countless bogus issues. That you often cannot repro an issue without a test project. The current process however just leaves us not submitting bugs.
When simple code samples are provided with a clear description of an issue that should be enough Case 1419941 is a great example of something unity should be able to evaluate without the community creating an example product for them.
Creating example projects wouldn’t be an issue if we were finding a bug a month, but sadly the cadence is much higher and whenever we do a major upgrade (version 2021-2022) we find multiple bugs daily. We simply don’t have the time.
I’d very much like to see unity move to a single official process that was like the multiplayer teams response in git where the issues are evaluated without example projects.
My Experience with Unity:
My team spends a huge amount of time working around bugs within unity. Our last cross platform project shipped on four different versions of Unity. Different versions for each platform as each version had different bugs we could not work around. We completely stopped sending in bugs as we neared ship, we would have needed a dedicated head to create all the test projects.
My Background:
- I am a studio head that manages a internal game studio and two external game studios.
- I have a background in publishing/firefighting where my job was to learn and evaluate tools, pipelines, and processes. I still spend time personally evaluating new Unity features for my studios.
- I have used Unity to ship AAA product
- I have shipped product with unity on every major platform.
Hopefully these thoughts help improve the process.
Thanks.