The Fiddly, Buggy Nature of Unity

Clyde Carey
2 min readDec 17, 2020

As Adrenaline O.D. or Rico’s Roughnecks said it, “Bugs, BUGS!!!”

Bringing back the early memories of the DAW days “did you close and reopen the program yet?” Inconsistent glitches are a constant annoyance. How many times in the tutorials did we see Unity stop responding or working properly requiring a restart?

I understand bugs. I accept that they are a fact of life and will always be part of the ecosystem even under the best of conditions.

But holy hell man!

Its hard to know, maybe it will be an instinct that comes with time, but I sure as hell can’t even guess at it now, when its actually a bug, vs something I did wrong.

I have done pretty much everything I can think of to make the camera and elements activation, fades and deactivation work correctly. Lots of very kludgy workarounds to try and force things, and it still does not behave the way it seems to show on the timeline. I’m really in the sort of area I have a lot of experience in and it still just will not behave. Some cameras don't switch. Some jump back and forth. Some positions don't update. Its a wild and frustrating ride.

On another front, I’ve gotten setup to start selling our plugins on the Unity Assets Store

Nice, fat goose eggs right now, but we shall see.

The big holdup there is some of the plugin GUIs are not showing, and I am still having a lot of trouble routing and passing audio thru them.

And oh boy is this thing munchy! Even using the native Unity plugins, the controls are incredibly slow to respond. If you've ever pushed your DAW to the limits, where everything is just completely sticky, and you can't even hit stop with it it playing on for another 20 seconds, welcome to Unity on the best of days. I’m a little bit (read that as a LOT) scared that the meters won’t even actually be capable of responding sensibly. The mixer meters themselves do seem smooth, so there may be some hope.

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