Unity needs to start thinking about its users

Target Platforms Mobile
1

Sorry for the rant, but I find the way Unity deals with customers more and more infuriating with every day that passes. A large proportion of this comes down to the way they handle releases. Since upgrading to Snow Leopard, development on my game has slowed to a crawl due to the number of bugs Unity has developed. After waiting weeks for a fix for the Unity renaming scripts problem, I finally decided to bite the bullet and go through my entire project manually and fixing it that way. Now, running Build Run from Unity doesn’t update my device with the latest version; another known issue that’s be around for weeks.

So for these two major issues that have affected a lot of people, let’s take a look at Unity’s responses…

The renaming issue appeared on the forum 2nd September. 1 month, 7 days and 4 pages of complaints later, still NO FIX. No word of a fix coming either.

The Build Run issue appeared on the forum 7th September. 1 month later, still no fix obviously, but there are some comments to go on…

“There should be improvement with next Unity iPhone minor release.”

Improvement? Not fixed completely? Ok, so when?

“Unity iPhone 1.5.1 is has entered the beta stage recently. So it is not far far away ;-)”

Not far far away? Phew, I thought I’d have to stop development on my game indefinitely, but now that there’s an exact time frame I’m happy. Also, the winky smiley has made decide that I’m wrong to be annoyed about these things and should calm down and devote all my time to charity work instead.

Here’s the way I see it. A large number of users are having problems with your application that they’ve paid a lot of money for. What do you do? Make your customers happy by fixing it and releasing it as a minor upgrade? Or stick your head in the sand and forget about it.

I really don’t get it. Unity isn’t a massive company, they should be able to stick out minor updates with minimum fuss. What was the point of jumping to 1.5 from 1.1?

Again sorry for the rant, but it just irks me when I’ve spent so much time and money on a product that refuses to give anything back.

2

Did you ever think of it twice before instantly installing the newest, coolest and brightest thing on your Mac (speaking of Snow Leo) ? It is one of the golden rules of any production, be it software development, feature film production or one guy in his flat show:
never change the major app versions in your production environment during ongoing production - or accept full responsibility

think of this again, it does not make any sense. Unity code is exactly the same, the OS changed (acually YOU changed the OS…). So before blaming Unity, would’nt it be fairer to take responsibility for not testing before changing ? Of course Unity can not take the risk (and thank god they do not) of releasing an untested, overhasty developed update just to please you, and on the other hand risk breaking unity code in hundreds of other areas…

That’s the reason those things take time to fix …

3

My personal view is that all these issues really have to do with upgrading to Snow Leopard. There is a reason it is called the ‘bleeding edge’. Unity is far from the only piece of software that has had to deal with Snow Leopard compatibility issues and I think that it is very important that if you are doing development on your computer and attempting to release software soon, you should freeze upgrading your tools. This is just common practice in the software development sector. These type of issues are a reoccurring thing, and come with the nature of the business. A professional developer should have another test system to upgrade tools and verify any problems before messing with a stable development environment. If you don’t have another computer, than you should wait awhile for other users who do, to test it and give feedback.

4

Umm, Snow Leopard was available to developers for a year before the reatil version came out. Unity had a year to get it working before it went mainstream. I’m not sure it’s my fault they didn’t.

5

sorry - if my post sounded a bit harsh or so , but i think the essence of what i said is just the thruth. Adding on top of that that dealing with long term app development on Apple beta OS’s seems to be a special risk by itself, Adobe’s CS dev team might be able to tell you some interesting storys about this…

And just by coincidence i just stumbled over this interseint thing about Snow Leo troubles…
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2181373&start=0&tstart=0

6

Many changes have taken place over the last year, and ultimately, the real issues involve XCode, which has changed significantly over the past few months.

Upgrading your entire OS is not trivial. I’m not sure what your background is, but upgrades have always been treated with the utmost caution at every place I’ve worked. It’s nothing new. There will always be hiccups and changes when new updates come out. Especially something as major as a completely new operating system.

7

Half of my art tools don’t work on Snow Leopard at all… most notably Maya. While I can’t say I’m happy about it, I’m not surprised either. Every time Apple forces developers to update their software for a new software or hardware generation, there are always stragglers, and its usually unwise to upgrade until the dust settles if you’re doing any kind of professional work. In fact, upgrading ANY software mid-project is pretty reckless, especially your OS.

8

So when Unity says that it will work on Snow Leopard I shouldn’t believe them? Also, the build run bug isn’t snow leopard only.

9

I feel for Kevin, when things that should work, don’t whatever the cause, it sucks. But companies like Unity that are in the midst of a user explosion can find turning on a dime for fixes and updates becomes more of a challenge. Anyone who has spent their career with Autodesk or Adobe products knows putting work on hold in anticipation of a fix are not going to be to happy too often.

That said, the other thing anyone in any type of development knows, or accepts as law, is during an active production cycle you never update or upgrade software on a production box. In many places this will get you fired. Of course, if the company instructs you to implement an update that’s different, but available or not, if you need to develop on a box, you should never upgrade/update it unless you have no choice. And always have the ability to fallback when things don’t work the way they should. Hang in there Kev, Team Unity will not let you down.

B.

10

Think this is a bit unfair on the OP.

While I agree it was a bit reckless to upgrade to a brand new OS (I held off for the very reason that I thought there may be problems), I think the thrust of his complaint is more about the level of support. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that Unity couldn’t put together a quickfix patch to fix these pretty serious bugs.

I love Unity as a product, but I do feel that often there is a Unity rep around to chip in on threads that don’t really matter, whereas if there is a serious issue there is often an absence of Unity posts.

Personally, my biggest gripe is the vague hints around releases (1.5 is coming soon, we can’t tell you when, etc). I know release dates can be hard to hit, and understand their reluctance, but people have paid hundreds of dollars for software, and need better information than that.

So while installing a new OS might be a mistake, it’s a bit off to suggest that Unity couldn’t mitigate these pretty serious issues by providing better support.

11

They did
And actually, even if you don’t read it, they also state that Unity 2.5 is not 10.6 targeted for example and that Unity 2.6 will adress that.
I’ve no problems with Unity iphone at all on SL 10.6.1 aside from the unitron problem. But I doubt that Unitron is actually even planned to be used much longer as the application behind it is no longer beeing driven further and MonoDevelop is much stronger than unitron (so is the windows scripter basing on scintilla)
But all these information naturally require that a dev does what he is meant to do before deciding anything: research on a given topic.

Above that, if apple throws out stuff 3 weeks before going gold that never existed before (safari 64 that broke all plugins out of the nowhere), then its really apple to blame as well as the users that upgrade to it without confirming that their software of choice is compatible to it.

UT does not hide the compatibility and incompatibility and its apple to blame for breaking backward compatibility on every damned release. if microsoft was so plain stupid, Windows wouldn’t rule the market as it does. I sometimes wonder how it comes that apple was able to survive with their way of forcing users to buy software upgrades all 18 months to further continue using their software, but I guess thats the reason why there are still many 10.4 users

12

That’s overstating it more than a little…99% of my software survived 10.3 → 10.4 with no issues. The only thing that actually broke was a game, and a quite old one at that (was made during the 10.0 days). It’s true that breakage does occur, and that it’s frustrating, but let’s keep some perspective here. Vista had a huge amount of bad press for incompatibilities, and 70% of Windows users are still on XP (compared to only 20% of OS X users still on 10.4). Neither Microsoft nor Apple are saints in this department. I’m still using a PPC Mac, so upgrading past 10.4 isn’t compelling…I’ll get 10.6 with my next Mac.

–Eric

13

First off, let me be clear in saying that I can understand your frustration, when things don’t work as expected and it puts a crimp in your ability to get work done that sucks. With that in mind I still think you’re being a bit unfair in your assessment of how we do business and how we handle our customers. Read on…

We’ve been around a few years now selling software and I think that over our still relatively short life we’ve done an excellent job of “thinking about our customers”. Whether that’s the huge number of new features found in the Unity 2.x family of products which have all been free for existing license holders, or our high level of customer support including lots of participation here on the forums (and on other forums, IRC, by email, etc.) or how we’ve responded to community feedback and used that to change the ways we communicate and do business. Sure, we’ve not been perfect and we’ve had some snags along the way, but through it all I firmly believe that we’ve done a great job of thinking about our users (our life blood!).

This is a new issue with a new operating system that isn’t even six weeks old (using its release date in late August). If you think that developer access to beta OS builds means everything should be ready, then look at things like Apple breaking plug-in hosting in 64-bit Safari with little to no notice near the end of their development cycle. So access doesn’t mean access to a stable and not-moving platform, and we need to juggle development against in-beta OSes against our need to create shipping software. That doesn’t always tip in the favor of supporting the latest and greatest OS and all the idiosyncrasies it introduces. We’re going to address issues and do so on as fast a schedule as we can reasonably handle. I know to you folks outside you wonder why we can just pump out builds whenever you feel like we should, but we can’t. No matter what though, we’ll work on the issues, we’ll get the bugs fixed and we’ll put out the (free) updates.

We have always have thought of our users, a lot. As I said up top, I can understand the frustration as it’s not been a smooth path for you, I think all of us has been there at least once. But despite that frustration I think you’ve offered an unfair assessment of our commitment to our customers and it bums me out that all of our efforts have been thrown out the door so quickly in this case. I think that if you take a step back from all of this you’ll see that we’re doing quite a good job with respect to serving our customers. Perhaps you’ll also step back and still see ways for us to improve, and if that’s the case then we’re all ears so let us know (post here, drop me a PM, send me an email, etc.).

No matter what though, please hang in there and we’ll get things sorted!

14

If you upgraded any hardware or software in the middle of an important project, you’re an idiot.

If you weren’t in the middle of an important project, you’re a whiner. Take your pick.

15

10.3 to 10.4 actually was more or less the exception
10.1 to 10.2, especially 10.2 to 10.3 and then again 10.4 to 10.5 has broken several applications.
Basically any time apple feels like:

  1. Touch the UI
  2. Touch the core management

it means it breaks a larger amount of applications …
With 10.6 it was up to a given point to be assumed due to OpenCL and GCD, though the unitron issue puzzles me as apple must have broken with common dev standard again as they did with audiosession in OS3 (by that I mean: don’t take the same constant but a new meaning in an update. Either get a new const for the new meaning or an all new lib)

especially apple kind of should decide if OSX now is a case sensitive OS or not looking at Unitron, Unity and a few other apps

UT definitely did a great job. There would be many more potential issues one could run up.
They commonly even catch driver level crap and prevent the stuff from going bogus by telling you that for a specific reason something was disabled (opengl drivers … a world of its own pain and terror)

16

At the risk of fanning some negativity, I’ve got to go with JTBentley on this one. Lesson learned, I hope?

All anyone had to do with Snow Leopard was wait a day or two and do some research on the forums to know that there were issues. As for the other stuff, ranting about “weeks” of waiting is not very convincing.

That said, frustration is frustration and venting can help. I’d just suggest making the venting as constructive as possible. Let’s just all do as much as we can do on our end to help alleviate it.

I’ve been around Unity from early on and these guys aren’t just letting things slip because they’re lazy or don’t care about their customers, if that’s the fear. It’s not their MO.

17

There’s a reason large companies are still using Windows XP and haven’t jumped to Vista on day one.

Installing Snow Leopard on a machine used for development is a rather bad judgement call. At least without a Time Machine backup to roll back to the day it becomes clear new bugs are present in the workflow.

It makes more sense to blame someone for jumping into a brand new OS that is touting new technologies, at that, than it does for blaming Unity for not being able to address all the issues caused by all the things getting shuffled under its feet in a quick manner.

18

I can understand your frustration (though I don’t understand why to upgrade OS), however we’re not that lazy as we might seem from the first glance. It can literally take weeks to identify problems and find workarounds for strange behavior in the software that we didn’t write (Snow Leo, XCode).

Now, why don’t we say the release dates ahead? Well, it is not because we like to keep secrets. We get no satisfaction or profit from secrets. We actually do not know.

What we know is - we have released a version to the beta list this Thursday and it will take time for beta testers to test and report problems. If there are serious issues, then it takes longer to fix and polish, more releases to beta list etc. If everything is fine, we just release it. As simple as that, no more tricks in the hat.

19

Well, I bought my 1st Mac for devving for the iPhone and it came with the Snow Leopard already installed. So rolling back isn’t really an option I think. So it’s not that everybody who is complainign about these issues have upgraded their OS :slight_smile:

I think UT is doing a good job :slight_smile: Some sticker on the box saying that snow leopard isn’t fully supported might be good warning though.

20

If you read carefully you will see that i directly replied to the OP who actually did update without even thinking about possible problems. That was the point of my post.
Of course it’s a problem if you recently bought a fresh Apple, but as it should have become clear all through the thread, is that Unity is already working on a fix for those issues.