Workflow Case Study - Show us your pain!

Unity Engine
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UPDATE: This thread has become a general ‘Show us your pain’ thread, and I’m fine with that, so if you have workflow issues to share, feel free to ignore the below and skip ahead.

Original Post:

Too Long Didn’t Read version:

Show us how you do a thing on video to help us make Unity better! Interested? read on.

Hi everyone

As part of Product Management and UX, we are working on reviewing our workflows across the board as we build towards a) better tooling for Unity and b) future Unity editor based around our Data Oriented Tech Stack - because the latter affords much broader changes to workflow than we’ve ever been able to achieve, due to the data model and other details we’re still solidifying.

We are looking for participants - anyone with 6 months+ experience in Unity to engage with us in think-aloud Case Studies on Unity workflow. For this we will be asking you to record a think-aloud video (see guidelines below!!) which shows us you creating a specific scenario (see pitch video below) - in this first instance, a simple hallway from a horror game, where the mood changes when the player enters.

Video overview

What to do

  • Contact us to register with us as participant - email me on will@unity3d.com
  • Download the zipped FBX model of a hallway here, import it into a new project in Unity 2018.3 or above
  • Watch the explanation video above
  • Record your think aloud video (see guidelines below)
  • fill out the survey
  • Stop recording
  • Later - follow up with an interview if you wish.

Survey for this study

Think Aloud Guidelines

As you record your video - let us know what you expect to see before taking an action, you reactions after taking an action, and what would have made it better. We really want to hear everything, and this process helps us and you to think about how intuitive our tools are and is generally considered a tried and tested format for think-aloud research.

To record the video itself, please utilize a free method such as Quicktime on mac (File > New Screen recording) or OBS Studio on PC (http://obsproject.com).

Looking forward to hearing from you, any questions, fire away.

Will

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Is that missing a link on “here”?

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Fixed oops!

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Hey everyone just wanted to say thanks to those of you who have submitted entries for this study so far. We’re still accepting more and responding to those that have, but we’re open to further ones if you have time, feel free to get in touch, thanks!

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Launch Unity
Close Unity Hub
Work for a a few minutes
Unity crashes, force quit
Launch Unity
Close Unity Hub …

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I see you’ve gone a bit literal there. If you have issues / bug reports post em! happy to help.

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@willgoldstone My biggest workflow pain is also quite literal. As expressed by myself and others on this thread…

That’s one of a number of threads where we are asked for our feedback and then ignored. After a while without any replies from Unity the frustration builds and the thread descends into Lord of the Flies territory. :slight_smile: So it’s greatly appreciated that you’re looking into our workflow woes! I’d say the the link I posted above could give you an example of obvious issues that would only require minor fixes from your end. And if fixes aren’t possible for some reason, then feedback about our feedback can’t hurt! :wink:

PS - although the link reads “asset store” the above thread is more about importing and updating assets in a project… which can sadly only be done through the in-editor “asset store” (which for many users means a 5+ minute wait for Unity to respond to each click/scroll, as well as silly workarounds to determine which assets in a project haven’t been updated).

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This is terrible
I have the great fortune of possessing close to 200 animation clips in a single file
But when I go to the animation inspector to change the clip settings my productivity suffers

Due to the overly long clips list. I have to scroll up to select the clip then scroll down to change the settings

Also when setting up events it is impossible to preview things like vfx or sfx
Maybe we need a standalone window for such editing
A la timeline (or Montage from Unreal)
It doesn’t make sense to cram everything into one scene (even the humanoid set up screen could be a separate screen)

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hey unity, i have an idea:

Why don’t you make ReorderableList from internal to public and have it affect every array / list in inspector.
You have had that piece of code for 5 years, and only the few selected elites know how to use it. It is not the by default option. Therefore people who don’t know gui programming are missing it, and get worse gui experience.

If there reason it is internal, is because of performance, then i would understand your decision to keep it internal only.

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The solution to a long list is a pages. Give us pages on everything.
Even the asset brose could do with pages. I know we can use folders in that case but sometimes sub-conceptualization is not fun.

Virtual folders in the scene hierarchy to reduce the need for empty game objects
So items can be grouped

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The 2017 versions and those before… The method of simply saving a Standalone exe by pressing “build” and then naming the file was so easy. All of this stored nicely in the Project file and easily seen and new builds added.

Now with 2018/19 I must create and name a new folder to store the build exe into!! Each and every time.
What a waste of time and such an increase in file data!

Not only that but actually naming the standalone build is a nasty method.
By default it names it with the Project name and thus overwrites any new build !!
To stop overwriting your old build you must create another new folder or rename everything inside the old folder! !!!

I often will change things in the current Scene and rebuild to compare.
Used to be so easy and so intuitive. Now its a PITA!!

Can this be changed?
Also when changing projects one is left with the old project and the editor and another complete Unity program in the background, visible and taking up space.
Maybe…maybe someone might give some clues about why this “new” way of doing things is good for us all?? Please!

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Workflow can depend on many things especially having a Manual that’s accurate?

2019.1 Manual Unity - Manual: Publishing Builds

“Finally press the Build
button. You will be able to select a name and location for the game using a standard Save dialog. When you click Save, Unity builds your game pronto. It’s that simple. If you are unsure where to save your built game to, consider saving it into the projects root folder”

This is wrong.
You do not get an option to select a name or location.
In 2017.xx you did.
But no more.
You are now asked to select a folder !!!
Nowhere can you do as stated in your manual.

Please fix this to be correct. Hopefully by restoring the Build settings to how they were.

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If you feel that selecting a folder where the build should go isn’t selection of location and/or writing a folder name isn’t selection of “name”, then hit the “Report a problem on this page” link on the bottom of the manual and report whatever is your problem with the documentation.

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Done

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How about using the Asset Store tab in the Editor? → Editor Asset Store has terrible performance

Major UX & workflow pain for me.

(just saw this thread after posting about the issue, great idea!)

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Just another shout out here for the lack of performance and UX love shown for the Asset Store both in the Browser and in the Editor. Please load up an account with a decent amount of assets and try using it and you’ll see what I mean. It is a major UX pain.

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Agreed. It’s already slow on a modern browser (Chrome, firefox) but inside of Unity? I avoid it as much as humanly possible.

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Another feedback thread. Sigh… It’s not about the lack of feedback but Unity is just too lazy and stubborn to do anything about it. I’m sure you’ve gotten plenty of good feedback already. Start with fundamental thing likes missing history (mouse back/forward button) support, mouse wheels should works where scrollbar is, long list view with missing scrollbar, automatic animation preview playback option and so on. The list can go on and on.

Well… forget about everything I said. Just make the Editor works faster. As the project size grows, clicking on a checkbox takes few seconds, clicking on prefabs take 5 to 10 seconds to show up on Inspector, Enter to PlayMode take ~15 seconds on an empty scene and so on.
Making two times faster will not help much. It needs to be faster by about 10 times to feel snappy. Doesn’t it tell you something seriously wrong? It’s getting to a point to becoming a joke.

ps. FYI, my project size is about 60GB with ~20 popular 3rd party Assets. I’m profiling everytime I install new Asset to make sure the Asset is not causing the slow down. Yeah, I think I have one of the most powerful system. AMD 3700x, 64GB Ram, GFX1070, fastest M2 SSD.

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In my Oculus development arena I have a project with multiple scenes. One is a test scene where I load new assets to play with then copy them over to my project scenes. I like to switch scenes and do a ‘Build and Run’ pushing different apks to the headsets. This means I need to change Build and Player settings often to have multiple apks in my device library.
I am looking for a way to autofill or automate the changing of parameters. Something simple like a management tool purchase or editor script. In the current editor scripting intellisense there are a lot that parameters missing.
Is there anything I can use? The Headless Build Manager outputs but does not read.
Thanks.

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Just wanted to leave this here…

https://forum.unity.com/threads/new-editor-camera-controls-in-2019-1-are-great-but.664378/

I’m okay with making money, but basic editor usability (without an asset) is MUCH more important to me. :frowning:
Please let people override your internal scene CameraControllerStandard methods for the SceneView… Many people would really like to tweak their behavior.

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