What has happened to the QA in Unity?

News & General Discussion
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Im not sure whether to carry on with Unity as my main development tool anymore. I feel the direction the company is going is the wrong one. After paying a lot for Unity Pro over the years (from version 3) I feel like the product has got worse. I now spend most of my time figuring or googling workarounds when the editor throws an error or some bug appears in the build, or Unity crashes.

I run Unity 5 on a Mac and it is still a mess months after release. Crashes for no reason, the “new” UI is buggy and requires a lot of messing about to get it working. (Masking is now broken on some screen resolutions). I also feel mobile development has been sacrificed for so called AAA features.

  • Pro licence is a joke and you get nothing for the $5k you spend on it

  • The terrain system is ancient and crap, runs poorly on mobiles still!

Recent problems while working on a project

The file ‘MemoryStream’ is corrupted! Remove it and launch unity again!

[Position out of bounds!]- Unity Crashes , Jesus even the bug reporter crashes!

  • Asset store shows up white can’t load anything
  • Android runs slower than unity 4

sorry for the rant. Just frustrated at spending so much time working around all the bugs.

People say submit a bug report. How often should I do this? Every day? How do I submit a 3gb project, ridiculous.

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Sounds like the complaints of someone who is trying to get something done… ahahah i love it

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Are you able to recreate any bugs in a new project?

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A 3 GB project for a mobile? Wow.

The best option is to vote with your money. There are decent alternative to Unity now. It’s up to you to choose if porting is worth eliminating the frustration of using Unity.

I personally don’t have that many issues with the engine.

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Agreed. The grass is not always greener.

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Hi Matt,

I like your feedback. I think it’s honest and Unity needs to hear it. If you still want to submit your project, Unity can set up an FTP for you to drop it off, or find another way to meet you halfway. There’s a ton of bugs in software as complex as Unity and they’re getting nailed each day.

Sorry yours isn’t yet nailed but if we can get your project to Unity, something can be done at least. Also, why not tell the forum what bugs you have - perhaps there are known issues?

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Ha yes that was a real rant. Feel better today. I know it’s not the fault of Unity but I live in Sydney, Australia which is a tech backwater even in the city centre. Im not kidding it would take 70 hours to FTP a 3gb file!

I guess I just feel Unity should concentrate on a few platforms and get the bugs ironed out, then I mean how many people develop for PS vita, Blackberry and Windows store etc.

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Is it possible to reproduce the problem with a small scene? Again, I’m sorry you’re going through this. I’m not paid by Unity or anything, but I do appreciate what you are going through and have the luxury of a little bit of insight being a moderator, in how Unity works and their staff. They really are a bunch of cool people who do go that extra mile, so it’s easy to get angry if you can’t see the human side of it.

If it’s possible to make a small reproduction of the issue, ie just a test scene or smaller part?

Let us know what can be done to help.

Off topic: Unity had a massive uphill battle to fight on multiple fronts, they had competition from Unreal Engine, Cryengine, everyone asking for different things (hobbyists, professionals, 2D games, 3D AAA techniques, better performance, better everything, more platforms) and they had to do this in one year (for Unity 5) - so that’s an incredible amount of pressure, things can go wrong but we’re here now and it’s just a matter of fixing everything up and bug reports are such a valuable and essential part of that.

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Do you use a remote server for version control and/or backups? You could simply pass the Unity devs a username and password set aside specifically for them.

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I’m gearing up for an Android release soon and I feel your pain. Shadow performance is terrible and trying to get lightmapping looking ‘correct’ on an Android device has been nothing but painful which has cost me countless hours of development time.

I just upload a repro scene that highlights the issue, usually you can strip out art, scenes, plugins etc and anything that doesn’t need to illustrate the issue. I use my OneDrive account to sync any uploads, and for massive projects I would just let it sync overnight, then send Unity the download link in the bug report.

Also I’m sure you are aware you only need to send your project’s ‘Assets’ folder right? You don’t need to send any other files. A lot of people include the Library and Obj folders which are unnecessary.

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Sounds like something an automated test on the client side should pick up. :wink:

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So true! I spent over 15$k in assets and licenses for Unity over the last years. 2 months ago i decided to dump Unity and replace it with Unreal4 instead. I had 2 bug reports there on their forums and on both i got a DEV from Epic looking into it - 3 weeks later both got fixed.

The big difference between both DEV teams is that Epic actually makes games and they know what you need. With Unity i just feel lost as a customer. I tried ordering premium support which costs you about 10$k a year and they needed over 3 months just to send me an offer - for UE4 you’ll get a better support for free…

For the XB1 Support i had to set the MS Staff on CC when sending an email to the Unity Staff to get a reply, awfull. And after working with the UE4 engine with every week i just regret i didn’t change the engine earlier.

The engine is degrading, too many things are broken or not on industry standard (terrain, shaders, speedtree implementation, GI etc etc etc) and support is awfull.

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People exist that check in Library and Obj files to source control, nuff said :stuck_out_tongue:

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The source control isn’t a part of Unity, though. The bug reporter is. :wink:

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AAh I get you now, I was talking about submitting a seperate download link, not using the bug reporter attachment feature. So yes, it shouldn’t include library and obj folders, or does it?

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I’ve never checked, so I don’t know. I expect that the built in collator would get the minimum required files. I was more thinking about when people supply their own archive.

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I agree with @mattSydney here.

Unity seems to be crumbling under its own size : my bug reports rarely get any coverage ; even the simple ones about typo & errors in the documentation are ignored ; Feedback site is a 4 years old cruel joke (or maybe even more old, I arrived on Unity 4 years ago) ; new features keep being added while the existing ones are still incomplete years after their 1st release (eg: Mecanim that was released in v4.0 and needed to wait v5.1 to be finally relatively feature complete).

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend Unity to a team. As a single developer, it’s still a good choice, but one has to plan for the inevitable roadblocks he’ll get if he doesn’t use Unity in the generic ways it was intended to be used (or not so generic => can’t even redefine the input from within the game…!!).
So Unity will make you save years of development, but will also likely make you lose months of development to bypass its issues & shortcoming, and recreate from scratch a feature that you had thought to already be in Unity, but was unusable because it missed something indispensable (and often it’s an obviously needed thing).

Just lately, I got 2 annoying bugs : 1 has been reported 1 month & half ago (with a project, but not by me) and there’s still no fix so far ( => Update to Unity 5.1 = too bright GUI [EDIT: bug is back in 2019.1] - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions ), and another one, with a project by me, 2 weeks ago, and still didn’t get any answer from Unity (about previewing in the Editor small audio file, which gives totally bugged sound).

Always asking “post a project” when reporting a bug, when a normal project will be several GB big, requiring several days to upload, and containing a lot of confidential data (I’m not willing to give my source to anybody) is not a good way to proceed.

Asking to “create a project” is also not a good way ; it takes time, and as right now it feels almost no one check the bug reports, it feels like a total waste of time anyway

v5.1.2 seems to be the 1st version ever that I can publish my game in good conditions (if no nasty bug arise, I still didn’t check too much) ; I started to work on my game more than 3 years ago, and I’m near release, so it seems I got lucky, but I can’t imagine the stress I’d have been if I was ready to release 1 year ago, as what I had in mind wouldn’t have worked in U4 without a lot extra painful & sub-optimal bypassing.

And no, I couldn’t have known at 1st that it wouldn’t work in U4 because the documentation didn’t have a word about the limits I hit during development (about physics engine).

Did I mention the lacking documentation ? :wink:

Anyway, I could go on for hours about all the shortcomings of Unity. If you want to see some of them, you can check my post history, as usually I post about them in the Forum…

Thus said, it’s still a great engine, it’s just the unfinished parts that are (really) annoying !

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The terrain system has always been a bonus extra. Go model your own terrain in one of the 1000 tools out there. Or even use Blender + a heightmap generated from somewhere.

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As a developer, can you suggest a way for them to more efficiently get the information they need? If they can’t reproduce it they can’t fix it.

I agree that uploading projects is an utter pain for exactly the reasons you’ve mentioned, but I can’t think of a less painful way to send an actually useful report.

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Just to note, we are hiring in the bug-fixing department, for both senior and not-so-senior roles.

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