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I read this and couldn't shake the feeling that it's a fantasy tale because it mentions the mystical Unity support engineer who actually fixes bugs - the one I

I read this and couldn't shake the feeling that it's a fantasy tale because it mentions the mystical Unity support engineer who actually fixes bugs - the one I haven't been able to get a hold on for the past 5 years, despite having critical bugs escalated by support... But then I noticed this is from 2016, so before they started kicking out experienced people to polish their profit margin for the IPO. Still an amazing debugging story, though :)

doomlaser 5y ago
Luckily, this particular developer is still at Unity and still fixing bugs—and doing the world a service by writing fascinating breakdowns about them https://blog.unity.com/technology/fixing-time-deltatime-in-unity-2020-2-for-smoother-gameplay-what-did-it-take https://blog.unity.com/technology/fixing-time-deltatime-in-u...
- mrguyorama 5y ago
  I get a 502 bad gateway from that link?
ncmncm 5y ago
"Mythical", I guess you mean. A mystical engineer might be even less useful.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  :) I now looked up "mystical" in Merriam-Webster: "having a spiritual meaning [..] that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence" That sounds like a pretty good description of my relationship with Unity's support engineers. I hope they exist, but to me it's more of a religious thing because I have never met one. "mythical" says: "existing only in the imagination: fictitious, imaginary, having qualities suitable to myth: legendary". That also fits well, because so far they exist only in my imagination but reading this story, I am impressed by their legendary problem-solving power. Thanks to you, today I learned the difference between two similar words :) And now I can even more clearly articulate someone's progress on being less useful ^_^
  - nikanj 5y ago
    You can pray to god, and you can pray to unity support. Many people claim they exist and perform miracles, but hardly anyone can point to fungible proof
    - dzdt 5y ago
      Which makes tangible vs. fungible your next dictionary dive :^)
      - wiredfool 5y ago
        Well, non tangible token makes a lot of sense.
        ncmncm 5y ago
        A tangible token is a ... coin.
nhoughto 5y ago
Had the same thought, my experience with unity support is its a blackhole. Good that there are some good examples even if from times past.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  I think it's a sort of tragedy of the commons situation. When I first met some of the Unity people at the Nordic Game Jam in 2012, they seemed like an awesome team making game development accessible to everyone. At that time, UE was still closed source and out of every indie's reach. And Unity was Mac-only. Since then, Unity has become the de-factor platform for cheap outsourced mobile games, reskin spam, and app store gambling scams. They now have millions of developers using their game engine, but it's an army of people building 1€ apps. Obviously, you can't charge them much because their revenue is so low. And so they had to make support cheap to compensate. But the part which I don't get is why Unity doesn't offer paid support for medium-sized indie studios. And why they don't publicly sell source code access. I mean their biggest competitor UE4/5 already has all source code on GitHub.
  - gfxgirl 5y ago
    They do sell support https://unity.com/success-plans https://unity.com/success-plans
    - franknine 5y ago
      The paid support is not cheap and mostly useless, at least in Asia region. We still need to go through normal bug report system, create reproduction steps for them, and get denied for back-porting bug fixes every single time. The only thing changed is that there's a "bug fix progress update" to make you feel a little bit better. We terminated the support right after the term expired.
  - Karliss 5y ago
    They sell both paid support and source code for extra money in addition to the subscription. It's in the plan comparison table.
animal531 5y ago
IL2CPP unfortunately still has issues. I had a friend playtest some of my gamejam entries and any IL2CPP build would just randomly crash on his laptop. Unfortunately I couldn't replicate it, so eventually I just swapped to using the Mono build, which works fine.
- franknine 5y ago
  You are forced to use IL2CPP on mobile since the Google/Apple mandated ARM64 build is not available through Mono. (Mono itself does support ARM64, just Unity doesn't bother to port it) I recently had a bug which erroneously stripped functions in generated IL2CPP code, and I had to trace generated IL2CPP line by line, it’s so much fun.
  - animal531 5y ago
    Wow, I didn't know that. I can imagine the frustration!

doomlaser 5y ago

Luckily, this particular developer is still at Unity and still fixing bugs—and doing the world a service by writing fascinating breakdowns about them https://blog.unity.com/technology/fixing-time-deltatime-in-unity-2020-2-for-smoother-gameplay-what-did-it-take https://blog.unity.com/technology/fixing-time-deltatime-in-u...

mrguyorama 5y ago
I get a 502 bad gateway from that link?

ncmncm 5y ago

"Mythical", I guess you mean. A mystical engineer might be even less useful.

fxtentacle 5y ago
:) I now looked up "mystical" in Merriam-Webster: "having a spiritual meaning [..] that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence" That sounds like a pretty good description of my relationship with Unity's support engineers. I hope they exist, but to me it's more of a religious thing because I have never met one. "mythical" says: "existing only in the imagination: fictitious, imaginary, having qualities suitable to myth: legendary". That also fits well, because so far they exist only in my imagination but reading this story, I am impressed by their legendary problem-solving power. Thanks to you, today I learned the difference between two similar words :) And now I can even more clearly articulate someone's progress on being less useful ^_^
- nikanj 5y ago
  You can pray to god, and you can pray to unity support. Many people claim they exist and perform miracles, but hardly anyone can point to fungible proof
  - dzdt 5y ago
    Which makes tangible vs. fungible your next dictionary dive :^)
    - wiredfool 5y ago
      Well, non tangible token makes a lot of sense.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        A tangible token is a ... coin.

nhoughto 5y ago

Had the same thought, my experience with unity support is its a blackhole. Good that there are some good examples even if from times past.

fxtentacle 5y ago
I think it's a sort of tragedy of the commons situation. When I first met some of the Unity people at the Nordic Game Jam in 2012, they seemed like an awesome team making game development accessible to everyone. At that time, UE was still closed source and out of every indie's reach. And Unity was Mac-only. Since then, Unity has become the de-factor platform for cheap outsourced mobile games, reskin spam, and app store gambling scams. They now have millions of developers using their game engine, but it's an army of people building 1€ apps. Obviously, you can't charge them much because their revenue is so low. And so they had to make support cheap to compensate. But the part which I don't get is why Unity doesn't offer paid support for medium-sized indie studios. And why they don't publicly sell source code access. I mean their biggest competitor UE4/5 already has all source code on GitHub.
- gfxgirl 5y ago
  They do sell support https://unity.com/success-plans https://unity.com/success-plans
  - franknine 5y ago
    The paid support is not cheap and mostly useless, at least in Asia region. We still need to go through normal bug report system, create reproduction steps for them, and get denied for back-porting bug fixes every single time. The only thing changed is that there's a "bug fix progress update" to make you feel a little bit better. We terminated the support right after the term expired.
- Karliss 5y ago
  They sell both paid support and source code for extra money in addition to the subscription. It's in the plan comparison table.

animal531 5y ago

IL2CPP unfortunately still has issues. I had a friend playtest some of my gamejam entries and any IL2CPP build would just randomly crash on his laptop. Unfortunately I couldn't replicate it, so eventually I just swapped to using the Mono build, which works fine.

franknine 5y ago
You are forced to use IL2CPP on mobile since the Google/Apple mandated ARM64 build is not available through Mono. (Mono itself does support ARM64, just Unity doesn't bother to port it) I recently had a bug which erroneously stripped functions in generated IL2CPP code, and I had to trace generated IL2CPP line by line, it’s so much fun.
- animal531 5y ago
  Wow, I didn't know that. I can imagine the frustration!