What i would really like from unity, beta builds!

News & General Discussion
1

I think between things lagging behind for a long time (like the new GUI) and bugs found in recent versions, it would be very profitable if unity made their private (daily!) builds available, it shouldn’t be any issue if your setup for continuous integration (and you should be!) and it would allow prerelease access to all features in development.
Game development isn’t LoB apps development, sometimes trading off support robustness for new features is a good deal, especially if you’re not going to release before they mature, and this would give great community feedback. It would solve the following:

  • We don’t know when the new gui will come out => the new gui is available now in the next feature build branch but unsupported. Big plus for unity is if it just so happens that the community decides that it sucks (it can happen, sometimes you don’t realise that untill release!) then you know IN TIME!
  • Classical email i receive in a while “hello we’re contacting you about bug X, is it fixed with the new build”, to which the answer 100% of the time has been “no” => i check when it’s marked as fixed (open up your bug control software too!) and >i< the person who submited the bug mark it as solved or not.
    I think involving users in this would be really good for unity, and for the current forum morale about the new gui for example :slight_smile:
    Let me access everything you have, let me test it and do the grunt work for you, and focus on actually fixing it, before it even releases, doesn’t that sound good for both sides?
2

There is access to alpha/beta builds, but it’s usually not general public access. Occasionally they’ve done public betas.

–Eric

3

I think that beta public builds (not necessary daily) would be ok. Also options to change the bug status would be very welcome - as in other projects out there.
Also I “quite” (but a very little) understand that bug tracker is private but I don’t think that it is needed to be private. All projects I’m/was interested in and are using them in proprietary/OSS software have public bug tracker and no one has any objection about that - every bug could be extracted in the minimal test case when none of the user private data are somehow exposed. That’s only my opinion, I’m accepting and fine with private bug tracker.

Thank you

4

I know that but i think it should be fully public, pn a daily basis, both for the next release and the dev branches!

5

I know telerik is very proud of their feature tracking system, and as a customer i’m very happy they expose it publicly!