Unity Assets -- Now worse than ever, WHY??!?!

Unity Engine
1

I know you are no doubt trying to improve the Unity Asset Download portion of the product, but these latest changes have made this COMPLETELY unusable. I am losing 10+ minutes every time I go in to import things I bought.

Firstly, that it is hitting your incredible slow website every transaction is ridiculous. I have all this data on my machine, why am I a slave to your web server speeds?

Second, the new UX is just awful. You always messed with my searches, but now almost ALL UX is messing with my searches. Double click? It highlights, but I cant type, only single click works.

After all searches, you delete what I typed, so I have to type it again, and again as I refine the search, instead of making corrections.

Now, when I click Download of an asset, it refreshes the page, so I have to wait 15 seconds to click on anything else as it refreshes (Im on an incredibly fast connection at the moment, this is not my performance issue). The page refreshes are completely out of control at the moment.

Things went from bad-but-managemeable to so-incredible-bad-I-needed-to-come-post-about-it.

PLEASE prioritize this as you have now made dealing with just importing assets the absolute worst part of Unity, and I previously had considered the asset store one of the best things about it. But the more I buy, the worse my experience becomes.

It’s currently intolerable. Im going to have to write my own system to just stop using yours, if it isnt fixed soon, as its destroying my productivity in setting up new scenes.

1 Like
2

That’s interesting. Everything you say here is the completely oposite for me. I don’t use the asset store to get things much. HOWEVER I use it for prototyping and programmer’s art. For example: If I need a weapon just to test how a weapon will work and I have none in store, I’d go to the Asset Store and get a free one for temporary use. And every time I go it’s never slow. And your navigation with the searches just deem you possibly don’t know too much on how it works to make it just right for you. So this definitely isn’t my problem. And it’s odd but maybe it’s just you?

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Theres no way it’s just me on multiple computers in multiple locations. I have several hundred assets in my Asset Store Download section, and it has always been a pain once it got bigger, but with the latest release of this page that includes tags and moves the Download and Import buttons to opposite position the workflow has changed to be unusable.

The things Im stating are simply facts:

  • When you click on the download button, the page reloads. It’s implemented as a web page in the Unity window, and makes external calls. I have hundreds of assets, it’s slow.

  • The filter box is broken in almost all use cases, you click to select, and yet cannot type, it clears any time the page reloads, losing what you typed. There are about 3 new broken states in this latest change, on top of what was already poor functionality.

There are lots of previous problems I had accepted, and learned to work around, but this latest version breaks all my work arounds.

I use this software extensively, I have no idea why this would be “my problem” when the features have absolutely just been changed, and now they don’t work the same way, and it’s significantly less optimal.

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It’s definitely not just him.

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I agree. It used to show the version numbers of the assets, so I can compare against my offline downloads. Now I can’t see it without downloading it. Some of the files are GBs and author just changed the text description so it bumps up as changed.

6

More:

  • Importing after downloading a new asset is now broken in new ways. I just downloaded new assets, and it’s been 3 minutes and I cant import them yet. All clicks are being ignored. Last time this happened, it then processed all my clicks minutes later, and went to re-import the package once per click afterwards.

I had to close the asset tab, and re-open it so I could import what I just downloaded. Completely broken.

I really hate having to detail these, but I’ll do a full analysis of all the failures of this part of Unity if no one responds that they are aware and are going to fix it. If it no one from Unity posts about fixing it, I’ll start writing my own asset management system to import the assets I have bought from you, since it is now completely broken and unworkable.

Sitting around and waiting to import assets or fighting with the terrible search and reload problems are wasting my time, and are not worth using any more. Writing my own system is a better use of my time, as it is almost completely breaking how I used Unity, since I am doing a lot of short scene set-ups from assets.

7

If the current is such a big problem, just downgrade? Maybe it’s the version of Unity connecting to the Asset Store?

8

Most likely not. Switching Unity version will not get you a different Asset Store (of which the download manager is a part).

Does it happen consistently? I can’t reproduce this reliably.

Is that like gone permanent? Or just gone while the page is reloading and the it reappears? The latter is what I’m seeing.

Bug. Fixed. There is at least one more extraneous page reload that I’m aware of. Will try to get it fixed ASAP.

You sound like a good test case. Please DM me the email address of your Asset Store account.

Try giving the tags a shot. They were implemented so people like you who have a lot of stuff would have a way to organise things. But equally important, they also let you not load everything when the page loads.

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One more thing… You mentioned:

Is this the entire Asset Store window becoming unresponsive? I.e. does it scroll smoothly or can you go to other pages without delay?

I’ve seen it go unresponsive once with the new download manager but I have no idea how to reproduce it.

10

Huh? We didn’t move any buttons…? Did you make the Asset Store window really narrow or something? Screenshot plz.

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Oh, and the most important part: What’s your Unity version and OS?

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I’m also spending a much longer time in downloading and importing assets. It used to be that if I downloaded an asset, it stayed downloaded. All I’d have to click on is the import button. Now if I download and import an asset, it never stays downloaded. If I want to import that asset into a different project the next day, I have to download it again. For big assets, and many of my assets are big assets, this is a very wasteful, time-consuming process. I don’t know when exactly this changed but now I’ve gotten to the point where I export any asset I download into a project and export it onto my hard drive. This is on both Windows 10 and Mac El Capitan. Any version of Unity from 4.7.1 to 5.3.4.

It also is a few minutes before the asset downloads and I can import it. There seems to be a routine delay.

13

I just bought a new asset. In the download manager, I downloaded it and when it was 100 percent downloaded, I hit import. Nothing happened. I hit import about ten times after waiting a bit. Nothing happened.

So,I clicked on the name of the asset in download manager which took me to the asset in the Home area. I clicked on import there and it worked. Maybe there’s a problem in download manager. Didn’t buy the asset to test this but because I really wanted it. :slight_smile:

Using Windows 10 PC and Unity 5.3.4.

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That sounds like a different issue. Could you DM me the email address you use for logging into the store, so I can look into this, please?

There is no need to do that. All the downloaded packages are cached in C:/Users/$USERNAME/AppData/Roaming/Unity/Asset Store-5.x/ on Windows or ~/Library/Unity/Asset Store-5.x/ on Mac. You can just import them from there. Though the Asset Store download manager should obviously just work.

Can you clarify; is the delay between clicking download and the download starting to progress or between progress hitting 100% and the import button becoming available? If the latter, that’s probably the package being decrypted after download. In recent Unity versions, there should be a progress bar showing that though.

15

Edit: I dm’d you my signin for the asset store.
This is what happens-

I buy the asset. Go to download manager.
Click on the download button.
Download time depends on size of asset.
I used to see get a little message that x product has finished downloading. Not recently.
I see that the download is complete.
I click on the import button. Nothing happens. I keep clicking on the import button. Nothing happens. Click. Nothing.
So desperate I click on the product name in download manager which brings me to the home page for the product.
I click on import there and everything works fine.
I realize you are all trying to make Unity better so I’ve had patience with this but when I saw someone else’s post here about this, decided to mention it’s happening to me too.

16

I haven’t actually looked in Unity 5, but does it still use like random guid looking strings for the folder names? Or is it using package names now? I actually do the same process of exporting the downloaded packages to my own local copies because previously the cached download folder names were undecipherable.

17

I don’t know if this still relevant, since this was started over a week ago, but from my own experience I can confirm the thread starters’ complaints.
I think a lot of what he refers to can be traced back to the fact that the store page seems to go through multiple refreshes, even if you think the window is done. For example, you can start typing in the search field, but then a refresh will eat the signs you entered and you can type again.

Another little annoyance is that when you browse a category and set a “sort by” that settings does not survive browsing around. It does survive the back button. But when you go from a product to it’s category the setting is gone and you have to click “Updated” again, if that is what you want.

I can also confirm that while the downloads themselves have always been fast for me, the building of new pages after clicking a link is usually really slow. It got faster with 5.0 compared to 4.6 though.

My biggest complaint however is that the Asset Store is now always embedded where the Scene View is. I am baffled that this is not resolved yet. The Asset Store needs to display a lot of into and that window just isn’t enough. The target size is 960x400 px? Problem is you can’t drag it somewhere else. You can maximize it by right-clicking the tab but then you can’t close it. The only way to get working again is to change the window layout by chosing a layout set. You can drag it to a second screen and enlarge it but 1) not everybody has a second monitor, 2) the window bar buttons behave nonconformantly and 3) when you close the window and re-open the Store again opens in the Scene view.

This has started with 5.0 and plagues me ever since. Somehow I am the only one complaining so I guess I am doing something wrong.

Unity 5.3.x on El Capitan.

18

Just one suggestion–right now if you go to home in the asset store and search for an asset like say terrain composer, it shows a hodgepodge of the package and list views. If you filter it to show just the package view the asset store doesn’t “remember” that was your filter and you have to filter everything again the next time you search even if your search is a few minutes from the last time you searched.

If you’re doing a lot of searches this can really get tedious.

And you must know how awful the asset store looks when both packages and lists show up.

I don’t see the advantage really of list view. Please enlighten me if I’m missing something.

19

Thanks for the feedback everyone. We’re looking into the issues brought up. Most of the team is on vacation this week but we’ll try to get some fixes out there ASAP. Some of the extraneous refreshes were fixed last week. I’ll try to get the rest of them Within Soon [TM].

I’ll look into this. I haven’t been able to reproduce it myself for some reason but will keep digging.

You can drag the header of the Asset Store window (or any other editor window) to detach it and make it a floating window like it was by default in 4.x. It doesn’t seem to remember its position and state when closing and reopening it though. That smells like a bug. I’ll check up on it.

As for the search page (not DL manager search) feedback. We hear you. We’ll swing back and do another iteration on that after the download manager is sorted.

1 Like
20

The tags system is interesting but could you add a compact view option to hide that extra visual clutter which also reduces the visible number of assets? (5.3.3)