I've been following the discussion about community frustrations in here for a bit and felt some good opinions were being expressed. It's deeply weird how many questions that are ostensibly about making games - incredibly complex, symphonic, carefully coordinated endeavors requiring high programming knowledge - are extremely basic "how to code" or Unity questions. I feel a lot of inexperienced dreamers pick up Unity expecting making games to be easy and this is the result.
Not sure if this is even a problem specific to you guys. It's just kinda a problem with... the "indie game dev" industry maybe? A lot of solo devs with impossible dreams?
A lot of people who don't know the fundamentals of code but think that surely making a gigantic open-world RPG dream game can't be that hard :p
public GameObject Obj => _obj;
This is not a variable, it's a property. It's equivalent to this:
public GameObject Obj {
get {
return _obj;
}
}
So it's just syntactic sugar for a public GameObject GetObject() { return _obj; } method.
Since Unity's Inspector displays serialized f...
Might be a symptom of what you're discussing: many users lack deep programming knowledge, so the syntax / ins and outs of C# properties seems more surprising to them? That's my best guess. 🤔
I almost closed it as a general programming question, but I figured since it was asking specifically about the behaviour of the Unity inspector it would be on-topic for game development, even if the underlying reason can be deduced from general programming knowledge.
user92578
Question still has less upvotes than the already infamous "How to show it to the user when the game ends?"
@nwp That could actually be an interesting question. "How can I clip a humanoid character model to show just a disembodied hand, like Thing in the Adams Family?" 😂 Maybe better for Halloween though.
@Vaillancourt That's very fair. As I said it's super weird that a lot of people who struggle with foundational programming are asking about making games. I don't know if there's a disconnect of the effort it takes to make an actual game and how much programming that requires, like maybe there's a perception that you can make one without knowing how to? I dunno, just speculating.
There are game engines you can make games in without knowing a lot of code, like RPG Maker, but Unity isn't normally what I consider a "code-lite" game engine, so that's why it baffles me.
@Sciborg I'm not sure. I think for a lot of people, programming <=> making games. Why would one program if it's not to make games? Gives them a purpose.
I think also a lot of Unity tutorials are just really bad at explaining the fundamentals. They'll say "copy exactly this code" without explaining why it does what it does, or what kinds of errors you can get if you mis-copy it and how to solve them.
Yeah, I suppose sometimes they copy-paste the tutorial's code, but you know, ordering what's one the menu is boring, so they try to add something new, or modify something, and since they're clueless about doing it, they end up on the site...
That's actually probably what is going on a lot of the time. Lots of poor Unity tutorials that encourage people with novice programming skills to try them, they try to modify or build on the tutorial and lack the knowledge, and they come here instead of learning more programming fundamentals to bridge the gap.
When the better idea would be strengthening their coding knowledge on other sites or with classes.
Classes may be less accessible than "the internet", and so since I suppose stackoverflow/gamedev.se is the thing that pops up the most often, they figure it's the right place to ask.
In that case I don't know what the solution is beyond continuing to moderate. It's hard to change the culture when the people asking aren't part of that culture.
I think tutorials also give the impression that there's one right way to make each game feature, that you need to be taught start-to-end. They don't practice breaking the problem into simpler parts. So when they want to implement an inventory system, they don't think "How do I store items in a list, how do I display item icons in a grid, how do I trigger a menu screen to display" they instead ask "How do I make an inventory system" - expecting a recipe to follow for the whole thing.
That's a fantastic point. They teach "follow this tutorial" instead of "here's how to break a problem into parts and use your coding knowledge to solve each sub-problem."
90% of my work on my game projects is breaking things into pieces - making an options screen needs to involve programming each option to change associated fields, making art for sliders and buttons, displaying the menu on the screen, programming the sliders to respond correctly to click-and-drag, etc..... so just asking "how to make an options menu" is missing the point.
There's no one way to make an options menu, it's what works in your game. We can't give you a recipe.
I though about creating a series of questions/answers about "how do I isolate the cause of my bug" (i.e. how do I debug), and put links to this in the help pages.
Then eventually we could close questions and redirect folks to those posts to allow them to improve their questions...
I think it's a good idea, you're essentially proposing community wiki questions right? Puzzling does those to explain how certain puzzle types work and etc. and they are a great resource.
This post is not a puzzle. There is nothing puzzly hidden inside it or the self-answer, posted at the same time.
What exactly is a cryptic crossword clue, and how do I write one?
I have some code and when it executes, it throws a NullReferenceException, saying:
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
What does this mean, and what can I do to fix this error?
How do I debug a Node.js server application?
Right now I'm mostly using alert debugging with print statements like this:
sys.puts(sys.inspect(someVariable));
There must be a better way to debug. I know that Google Chrome has a command-line debugger. Is this debugger available for Node.js as w...
Definitely, I always think they're very helpful especially for new folks. "How to debug [insert common Unity problem]?" And then we can simply link it when people ask a question along those lines.
We have one for NullRefereceException, and I'm not sure I like the one about Node.js, as it's essentially link only answers. Answers would need to be developed a bit. Also, what's the scope of the "question". Do we try to isolate a specific class of issues?
There are a lot of very common questions you guys get that fall into the category of "person failed to debug before asking." We can probably cooperatively try to pick out the most frequent/most salvageable ones that are specific and attackable - i.e. common Unity error messages that 99% of the time have the same root cause and debug process.
I could see doing one for "Why are my physics callbacks not working?" That walks through: did you spell the method correctly, are you mixing 2D/3D physics, do both objects have colliders, are they marked as triggers, do you have a rigidbody, is it kinematic...
Hmmm... would it be good to make a Meta thread for "what canonical beginner Q&A should we create?" - then folks can add to it or chip away at it like we did with posts needing MathJax upgrades?
A main benefit of the idea is that linking the wiki to somebody is an effort barrier - they need to show they have put in effort to try the steps and then they can be helped further. I feel like the main thing is just to provide clear steps for each part of the debugging investigation, like DMGreg laid out for physics callbacks, and explain each step and why it might be the problem. Headings, etc.
Maybe it could be a bit better to do a "test" first: come up with what we think we need, post it on the main site and make a meta post about it.
yes; it gets more complicated when you need to tell them how to use a debugger. Because if they had used a step-by-step debugger, they'd have spotted the problem easily.
@Vaillancourt Do I understand correctly that you mean make one trial question & answer of this format on Main to hash-out how it works, before deciding if we want to roll it out as a wider project on Meta?
The most "important" one, I think (the one that I see most users unaware of, and that could have help them narrow the issue), would probably be educating folks about break-points, the step-by-step debugger and the console. IMHO. We'd need something like that for unity. And so we might want to start by something else, less "important"...?
I don't know.
The issue is, I'd like to taclke this project for technologies I'm interested in (c++) but I kind of lack of time nowadays... :/
Then doing this in c++, there are folks that work with VS, others with VSCode, then there are some that do c++ with Unreal, others use GCC or something...
So even there , "how do you debug c++ code" is very broad.
Currently at my job I work in C++ in VS and VSCode, but other people in my workplace use all different configurations and technologies and custom plugins and etc. depending on personal preference. And then people here use a variety of packages and libraries that are specific to game dev, like SDL, etc. So you're right - writing a generic "how to debug C++" might as well be an entire textbook :p
It would need to be more specific and attackable for the sake of your sanity.
Unity's probably a good initial target as the source of the bulk of our bad questions. Also, it has just a couple of default configurations (Visual Studio or VS Code), so addressing those would probably cover the bulk of users.
Is there any way to do a table of contents in an answer? Or link to specific headings? i.e. "click here to jump down to the VS-specific section of the answer"
Ooh, that's a good idea, yeah. The question could have a bullet point list of answers and "select the one that corresponds best to your configuration."
New devs don't know how to debug their code and we don't have ways to tell them how they could do it (i.e. teach them to fish). (bad¬)
A lot of users ask questions about bugs that an experienced developer will spot by reading the code, but that the asker could have figured out if they had known r...
Could make sense, though I'm a bit wary of the precedent it sets for broad questions. When I see stuff like "What math should every game programmer know" I close them on sight as too broad/opinion-based. So maybe we can massage the title so it doesn't make it look like those other questions are OK.
public GameObject Obj => _obj;
This is not a variable, it's a property. It's equivalent to this:
public GameObject Obj {
get {
return _obj;
}
}
So it's just syntactic sugar for a public GameObject GetObject() { return _obj; } method.
Since Unity's Inspector displays serialized f...
This post is not a puzzle. There is nothing puzzly hidden inside it or the self-answer, posted at the same time.
What exactly is a cryptic crossword clue, and how do I write one?
