I’m a professional Unity user, working with that engine since Unity 2. I choose it because it was a great tool making game development more and more easy as it matured. But these last months, I notice a drop in the service quality.
Some features like Unityplayer.dll have been added even though they clearly make our work harder, and legitimate concerns from users are ignored.
I submitted a bug and had a “it’s not a bug it’s a feature” as an answer, even though the so called feature is an arbitrary limitation that doesn’t make sense and has no upside. Worse, they provided a lousy workaround as a solution.
I also had bug reports closed because “you stopped reporting it so we consider it closed” despite the fact this is a known bug many have reported for months. What am I supposed to do, spam fogbugz with the same reports? Is it not obvious I’m busy and shouldn’t have to insist on a serious bug to be solved?
When Unity went for the subscription licence instead of selling perpetual, I had my concerns because I didn’t want to lose my financial leverage over them doing their jobs, but I only had a good expérience with them at that point so I took Unity Plus. Recently Unity insisted on me taking an offer for a cheaper Pro licence that I considered but didn’t take because of a loss of quality in latest Unity versions. Now I’m worried because my business grew very well lately and Unity can fuck things up with unilateral random decisions like unityplayer.dll.
So I have to ask the community, do I have a strike of bad luck or if you also noticed the same thing?
I also would like Unity’s people opinion about all this. There are a lot a extra feature I’d be glad to pay for, as my asset store account can demonstrate, but that’s not going to be an option if I have to spend resources into working around bugs and absurd “features”.
There’s always been issues, and I’ve seen my share of “not a bug” responses even after it was reproduced and escalated but just work around it like everybody else in most programming fields.
However lately there has been a huge influx of incomplete features and changes to core systems that are not thoroughly tested enough to justify being released. Lots of cool things they blog about are abandoned online and yeah, at least they’re out there but why is so much stuff going out the door that has very low QC quality, if any QC at all?
Not trying to jump on any hype train and I don’t think it’s right to start one, but there’s been a lot of common trend threads about the same issue lately mainly focusing on how the new release cycle plan seems to be definitely not working out at all for end users. I think it’s very unlikely that people at UT aren’t at least seeing something along the same lines - they get the bug reports and see the noise on the forums.
Other than ooh I dunno let me think… having a release folder where your game builds go into… where you’d normally get a _Data folder and .exe… now you get an additional UnityPlayer.dll that gets overwritten with whichever Unity build you built the game on… its ok until you go back to check an older game build and find you need to fuck around with some older Unity version just to get the UnityPlayer.dll it was built for… yeh I could imagine a scenario like that happening
Because I sell an executable that is ultimately handle by non power users.
The data folder is a bit technical but it has the same name as the .exe, so my client’s employees who have to install it on a machine can manage it and sort things out if they forget it. But the unityplayer.dll, what’s that? They don’t know what unity or a dll file is and why should they? Of course, I told them it’s an important file and it need to be in the same folder and it’s already confusing because some exe need it, some don’t, and they can share the same unityplayer.dll file, but soon they’re is going to be a new one that’s named exactly the same but isn’t compatible and they’ll have to be careful and not mix things up…
But this is not over yet, the fun part begins when the later will teach hosts and hostesses how to use the computer and what to do if it doesn’t work. Their job is to help tourists on a beach or a supermarket into putting on a VR headset before they press start and reset in my game. What could go wrong? I mean, even I already forgot unityplayer.dll when installing my own games on an other machine, everybody I worked with did it too (and asked me why Unity thought this was a good idea). But let’s hope the students hired for a summer job will be ok…
So as you can see, it is making my work harder because I made myslef a name delivering bulletproof products that can be used by my grandmother. Not only my clients are happy, it also allow me to move onto the next project without worrying about the last one. Until now. Now I’m going to lose time playing IT and sending back unityplayer.dll to users who deleted it.
So… you’re trying to work with users who are not very computer literate, and yet you’re asking them to poke around in files? Why aren’t you just shipping an installer exe?
Anyway, the main reason that we did the UnityPlayer.dll thing was so that we could split all the engine code away from the executable itself, and ship you the source code to the executable. Take a look at this docs page for more info. Amongst other things, this means you can modify the source code yourself to load the UnityPlayer.dll from inside the data folder if that’s really what you want to do.
I honestly don’t get why the UnityPlayer.dll wasn’t just shoved into the Managed folder where all the other dll files reside… why does it need to dumped in the same root folder as the exe?
Because of how Windows searches for DLLs. It searches the folder alongside the executable, then falls back to checking various system locations, the PATH, etc.
This may be a little off topic, and I don’t mean to intrude, but I think it would be pretty cool if Unity offered the option to have an installer made with the package
On topic, I think Unity does a great job with this engine, bug fixes, new improvements, etc…
Only been here for about 22 months (I think?), but I’m enjoying it.
It would be cool indeed. It’s not especially hard to do, and there are a number of free packages that’ll do it for you, but it still takes a bit of time and I’m pretty sure that almost all of us would be coming up with equivalent solutions. It’d be great if it were a tick box in the build options.
Because I never needed to in the first place. A drag and drop of two files doesn’t require any computer literacy and need less clics from the user.
I never doubted some would have a use of the dll file, I just don’t understand why I have to deal with its drawback even though the solution exists by your own admission. Expecting me to spend resources on an issue that was surely mentioned during meetings is exactly why I say Unity’s quality is going down: you guys were aware this would be an issue an yet chose to ignore it an let down your customers. Why?
I seriously don’t understand how you can pass the opportunity to make more money with a better product directed to professionals and chose instead to ship halfassed features that’ll cost them even more to fix.
This is going to be a rare post, for me, but I think Unity3D is a very good–no, the best–product for 3D game development and there are relatively few bugs for the scope of what they’ve built. With the visual studio integration and continued enhancements to the UI, particle systems and now they’re working on a built-in tile engine?
Honestly, Unity is probably one of the best, most responsive companies out there when it comes to listening to their customers and providing feedback and responding to concerns.
Over the years I have seen only top-notch work and service from them. Real things cost real money, and they dedicate engineers to tasks based on priority and customer demand. Eventually, every system will be improved and every bug will be addressed if it needs to be.
I didn’t really read through the OP because I know that despite the complaints of the few, Unity suits the needs of the many and continues to excel beyond other products, especially in mobile game development and allowing people to publish to all of the oddball operating systems out there.
It’s easy to feel short-changed when Unity doesn’t amaze you, but keep in mind that’s only because you’re accustomed to being amazed by the product in the first place.
Edit: And keep in mind–many of the users, such as myself, are not even paying customers (yet).
With a solution like NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) you can create an “installer” that extracts the files it contains into a temporary location (eg Windows temp folders), executes the program, and once it completes removes the files again.
Sure it does. They at the very least need to be able to navigate files and folders, and there’s the opportunity for error if they don’t keep all of the files together.
InnoSetup is free and well regarded, haven’t used it myself but it’s what I’ll likely try next time I need one. I’ve previously used NSIS as well, though I found it somewhat fiddly to set up.
Personally I have used Inno setup as well and even though it looks intimidating initially, its actually super easy to use.
If you have no experience (like I did), then it still only takes a few minutes to make an installer.
After that, maybe a day or two to to fine tune all the details (button labels, dialog pages, specific paths, what should happen on remove, or installing a new version, …)
I can only recommend it, super easy and powerful if you put in only a few hours.
I don’t know that this is an issue that would have been discussed by them. The industry standard for providing software to casual / non-power users is to wrap it in an installer. If you’re doing that then it doesn’t matter what files are in there.
Edit: It also gives a better experience, as it lets you easily make desktop icons or Start menu entries and such.
Even if you’re not doing that, why are people copying the files and folders individually? Put the whole lot in a folder before you zip it up (or whatever) and users can extract/drag the whole folder to their intended destination, again without concern for what files are in it.
+1 for this. Its a great little program. Looks intimidating at a first glance, but is easy to use. Plus it takes care of uninstalls too, which is nice.
