So, I don’t stay on the bleeding edge version of unity, when a new one comes out I may take a few weeks, or even months to update. This happened when unity 4.6 came out, I didn’t really have a need to go through the hassle (I work on a team) when I didn’t really need the GUI stuff yet. Other times I might not even get the prompt from Unity that a new version is available (I just checked now, 4.6.3 is available, I’m on 4.6.1, I had no idea, and unity didn’t prompt me).
A problem arises though when it comes to documentation. I don’t know WHAT version the documentation is for.
I work 60+ hours a week in unity, that’s a lot of hours in which a week difference of version could come with confusion when I’m combing documentation.
Example, today I was writing some audio stuff and I assumed there would be a ‘pause’ property on the AudioSource… and there wasn’t. OK, so I go and pull up documentation to read about how to pause/unpause audio and I find:
AudioSource.Pause:
AudiosSource.UnPause:
Nice… that’s easy.
So I go back to my code and I go to write, and nope… there’s no UnPause function. Huh???
I haven’t updated my unity yet, but I’ve since checked if a new version is out, and I’m going to assume the method exists there (I’ll laugh if the function was removed versions ago… I guess I’ll find out after I update).
Thing is, I don’t know when or where this function appeared. I have to go and update now and hope that it comes with that version, and hope that nothing breaks in my code during update… which is rare, but still on a large scale project, it’s scary. Furthermore if I had a proper team, an update would come with a new cycle of QA. I won’t lie though, we don’t have a QA team… so really it just means that we have to be aware for the next couple weeks to keep our eyes open.
Of course there is the release notes when a new version comes out…
https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-4.6.3
But, that’s one hell of a thing to dig through EVERY time. Furthermore, there’s no mention in there of unpause (well I just ctrl+f’d unpause, maybe it does… but it doesn’t obvsly say it in an easy to locate way). And worse is if I’m looking at a method that was released multiple versions ago… ugh.
My Question:
It’d be nice if the documentation, when added, included the version it was added in. Or if there is a way to get this info easily, can someone point me to it?
Of course, what would be nicest would be something like MSDN where when you’re on a documentations page, there is a drop down that shows the versions of documentation that exist for that entry, and obvsly… if a version doesn’t exist for selection, it didn’t exist in that version. It’s super nice because if you’re running an older version, you have an easy way to drop back to that version of the documentation.
Don’t get me wrong, I know documentation is tough to put together nicely. I can’t STAND writing documentation, and it’s a costly thing to do. Just tossing out there something that would certainly make my life easier.