Official Changes to the Graphics GitHub repository

We can no longer follow the development in the internal GitHub instance?
Will this happen to everything else Unity is currently publishing on GH?

Being able to follow the development closely is important to me, and I'm sure to many others.
Will there be a another way for us to do that?


Best of luck on the migrations!

 

Yeah I hope this will still be possible, looking at PR's has become a daily routine

 

Well... GitHub Enterprise is meant for running on an organization's local network only (see this FAQ), so don't get your hopes too high up. But let's just wait and see what the announced blog post will say.

 

I've been extremely worried about this happening ever since Unity started to message they are going more closed for early versions again. So far the messaging has been that Graphics repo isn't going away but apparently our fears still came true :/

I've hoped for the opposite for a long time (that more of the Unity packages would go to github) as it's enabling me as a developer as I can cherrypick commits manually and test individual changes early on. Now this change means that we will not be able to access individual commits again and it's making it a major pain to find and revert individual changes that introduce new bugs (which has been the situation throughout the existence of HDRP for example, this is going to hurt a lot now as everything that breaks will become slower to fix manually).

I really hope there is some way to get access these commits still but I'm not holding my breath. Sad day :/

 

This is a sad day and another blow at everyone who's actually believing in the SRPs, building on them, trying to understand and even actively improve them. WHY

@ali_mohebali can you please elaborate on

? I'm not aware of these changes, I just know that Unity recently talked a lot about "embracing and supporting open source", "making our process more visible", and so on - this is the opposite.

 

So, if I understand this correctly: from now on every time you want access to the latest HDRP/URP code, you will have to wait for the next Unity engine release, extract the bundled SRP from %appdata% cache, and you will be greeted with a surprise of (possibly breaking) changes, since we're now blind and can't follow what's going on. To apply your own changes, you will have to copy and paste your own changes to every file manually, since we lose forks/merges.

Do our complaints mean anything in this situation? Because I think this is a very big mistake.

 

Hope with this step they wipe that HDRP/URP nonsense, and make the GRP(GoodRenderingPipeline)

 

Will the public Github repo be at least updated from time to time, or is the package manager going to be the only way to see the latest code going forward?

-- EDIT --

Looked it up and it's really dead:

Source: https://github.blog/2017-11-08-archiving-repositories/

 

from https://forum.unity.com/threads/srp-repository-migration.861625/:

Any chance we get the old repo back as read-only as well? That offline for backup turned out to be quite permanent and now new Graphics repo had a really short life-span. There's a ton of history on the original SRP repo.

 

@ali_mohebali sad day. all those commits. all those cares.

 

I'd like to add to here that it's not only Graphics repo that got archived, Unity also archived https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/PostProcessing. I don't know if some other repos got affected as well, just noticed PP got the same treatment.

 

Like many others, this will impact my day to day workflow immensely.

Any bit of momentum that the SRPs might have got in this last year will be effectively killed by this move.

 

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies?q=&type=archived

It's just

Graphics

and

PostProcessing

that got archived so far.
.

 

Unity has become down right hostile towards those of us trying to keep shaders running in URP/HDRP - I'm pretty sure they are actively trying to make it harder for us, hoping we'll switch over to a shader graph or move to other engines. I used to have some faith that the graphics team meant well, but had just taken some wrong turns- but that's pretty much eroded by this point. I had a meeting with Natasha in August, and it was a lot of promises of getting some plans to me and being available if I had questions or concerns, and the plans never materialized and emails have gone un-answered. There was also a ton of hand waving in that meeting about why having a shader abstraction was "hard", and I believed about none of it- talks of changing shader languages, mesh shaders, etc, somehow making it impossible to abstract away what is effectively two functions the shader graph writes already. I suspect the entire thing was just to try to make SRPLife go away, but the thing that makes that go away is NOT consistently making it worse and not communicating with anyone about anything.

The page of "Upgrade notes" doesn't cover half the changes, and basically is written by someone expecting you to already be familiar with every detail of their shader stack, not something that actually helps you fix the practical issues you run into. For instance, I recently updated MicroSplat HDRP to compile under 2020.2's version of HDRP, and the actual compile errors I hit were not in the notes at all. Meanwhile, I suspect it's a week or two of work to actually finish the job, if not more.

Unity keeps proving over and over that they simply do not care about these issues. They come out once every six months and say a lot of words to try to calm things, but they have not followed any of it up with actual action, nothing is being done, and nothing is likely to be done. I'd love to be wrong on this, but I'm doubtful.

 

This is the worst way to announce things like this.

 

I don't like this at all. What boons does it even bring? I liked it being publically visible on github.

 

Can't say I'm too happy about this, not at all in fact. This amounts to a blow to asset store publishers, who are most required to stay ahead of breaking changes. The PR list allows us to peer into current development beyond what the rather simplistic roadmap offers.

I can honestly only accept this decision if it brings forth a new communication strategy, where we can expect detailed changelogs and upgrade guides between versions. But given how this hasn't improved, despite being promised time and again over the past two years, I'm far from optimistic (please prove me wrong!). Ever since SRP landed we've been required to piece together all kinds of information based on the repo as the only alternative, which we're now being robbed of.

Hopefully the blog post will shed some light on this.

 

I really don't understand who benefits from this? It seems like a lose-lose situation. I'd really love to know the reasoning behind this decision, I'm only imagining it as a scene from Ryan George's Pitch Meeting. I hope we find that out in the blog post.

 

Hiding repository means that unity guys don't want the community to see the changes. This can means:
1 wipe HDRP/URP and make new one GoodRP
2 $$$ for repository access
3 hide that some features sit in PR for years and don't release

 

The purpose of doing this seems to be shielding them from criticism. Especially when we consider that other big mainstream engines give you source code access for free.

 

This sucks. I'm starting to feel like I backed the wrong horse. Unity management seem very committed to making increasingly bad, erratic decisions.

 

I love access to these things too. For example there's CMAA2 integration for HDRP sitting on one branch of that repo that can be upgraded to latest HDRP version with few lines of code and is valuable despite Unity never merging it.

 

Sincerely, there is no surprise at all... it is just Unity being Unity, as always.

 

... did you feel that 2020 hadn't sucked enough, and decided to add a little extra oomph just before it ended? This sounds like really bad news with no silver lining whatsoever. Please consider reversing this decision, or at least giving us some other way to follow graphics development as it happens.

 

how about next time the blog post, forum topic, questionnaires or other info would come first, before suddenly closing things?

 

This is tragic. We maintain local forks of repos for packages like ShaderGraph to support fixes and feature improvements which don't come online fast enough. This leaves us in a very painful position. @Tim-C what are the suggestions for moving forward for a scenario like this?

 

Does that mean the public Graphics repo will still show all the new commits being made, but it's just not gonna accept pull requests?

 

See https://forum.unity.com/threads/changes-to-the-graphics-github-repository.1029502/#post-6668728 (it's read-only for Unity now as well so no further updates expected).

 

That one has been effectively dead for a while now.

 

This is super disappointing and communicated horribly. Seeing all these committed devs freaking out when they've done so much to support Unity's ongoing efforts, all for a boot in the face.

This reeks of lawyers coming in and exerting because "publicly traded". "What if you invent some new technique and it's been on the public Github. You can never patent it..."

Just another reason I'm staying away from the SRPs for as long as possible.

 

Yet another terrible decision managing SRP. It's like they are trying their best to make this fail. I really don't envy asset developers right now as this is a real nightmare situation.

Given their huge lack of communication with SRP, having access to their PRs gave me accurate information on what they've done, were working on, and also allowed me to bring in bug fixes to my fork of URP without having to wait an eternity for them to publish those changes. To see this level of access go away is incredibly sad.

 

If it means that SRP is about to become (real) production ready then I'm cool with it.

The only scenario where this is ok is when URP and HDRP are feature locked and stable.

 

This is an awful decision that does very little for the community other than shows that the graphics team are completely unaware of what the userbase wants and needs

Does anyone at unity even talk to the community anymore? It really seems like you are on a mission to get rid of any commercial users of the engine and be left with a bunch of hobbyists - good luck to you on that I really can't see the engine being around in 5 years based on the ridiculous choices you keep on making

 

I hope the blog post will resolve all that confusion (Fingers crossed! Remember, these are the good guys!).

For this and other packages, there's actually an alternative to the Unity repos: for a while, @marwi and me have been trying to counter this back-and-forth approach to packages — until Unity has figured out something better, I can just point those of you who actually work with packages (not just consume them) to our Needle Mirror.

All released packages (including the SRPs of course) are mirrored there, license permitting, and you can diff/fork/read there as needed.
Links to the UPM Package Mirror: Forum Post • GitHub Org • Twitter Bot

 

I really appreciate Needle Mirror, but it's also not completely solving the problem here. Lots of people need to see the commits being made on the packages before the packages themselves are released, so they can see where things are going and anticipate the changes in their own projects

 

@PhilSA I fully agree! It's not a full solution, especially not for anticipating changes before they are released.
I think this hurts with the SRPs specifically, as they have been notoriously bad at providing preview releases - which are "by design" the mechanism for seeing changes before the general public sees them.

 

They're getting rid of the hobbyists as well at this rate, or to be honest I would think we were the first to go as we have no financial incentive to spend time finding workarounds for broken or missing features. We just want to have fun making games. I've been making hobby projects in Unity since 2007 and for the most part I've always felt sure of my choice of engine. That is it has felt like I was learning stuff worth learning and that I could at any point use what I had learned to turn one of my hobby projects into a commercial project some day, but for the last couple of years that hasn't been the case. Now using Unity is starting to feel more and more like my web development day job where it feels like I'm betting on the wrong javascript framework and that I'm spending my time learning things that get me nowhere because they'll be replaced by something new and better (read: different) before I have the time to use them anyway. And to make matters worse not only are features getting replaced, there are always multiple choices for what I could be learning, and I have no idea which option is the correct one. Which is just stressful and not enjoyable at all.

And for me by far the worst part in all of this is seeing the community become more and more fractured with every passing day as other Unity developers are making their own choices on which features to bet on.

 

Imaginitive good ending: UT prepares to open-source the C++ and C# sides of the engine for the common development folk and this is just a preparation before allowing people to dig in, similar to how UE has all of its source code behind private git repos and you need to accept the license before viewing them.

...yeah, i wish

 

. . . . _.---._ . . . .
. <.‾_ ‾‾‾‾ _‾.> .
. . . . . ‾‾‾‾ . . . . .
. I . WANT . TO .
. . . BELIEVE . . .

 

I think this is a terrible loss for the development community, especially given the scarcity of documentation, and I wish Unity would reconsider.

 

I really dislike this. I liked to look at it to help understand how the SRP worked, and how they did things. I also used to as a general learning resource, for just general Unity stuff, and for shader related things. Right now it is also the only place to see the GraphView API in use.
It has been extremely helpful and interesting to look at it, even with simply having better docs and changelogs, imo they couldn't replace actually being able to look at the source!

 

Good lord, what a terrible idea. Our team maintains reams of changes on top of the SRP and InputSystem repositories that we faithfully rebase whenever we upgrade. The open source repositories are the only reason you can build a mid-sized game with Unity at the moment -- it's what lets Unity compete with the open-source engine of UE4.

It's critical to be able to see the commit logs and history for the graphics repository. We often backport bugfixes ourselves from later versions. Copy-pasting from the Packages folder is not at all a reasonable solution. It makes rebasing an absolute nightmare.

Surely you all could turn the public repository into a mirror version of the internal source. Why make the whole thing closed source?

 

How exactly does this move benefit your customers?

 

I mean, maybe they'll do this? move the development to an internal repo but keep a read-only mirror public?

 

The public repo is archived rather than just read-only - I believe archived repositories can't be pushed to, so it's no longer even a mirror.

 

But Why???? What would even be the benefit of doing this?
Given how incomplete and volatile the graphics packages are, it was really useful to get a glimpse of the development direction of the SRPs and to get some examples of the weakly documented parts of Unity's API.
I guess I'll have to wait and see if the blog post will present a convincing rationale for such a decision.

 

Usually blog posts for major announcements. Here's to hoping they are going semi-open source.

Then again...could just be another "road to 2021 post...."

 

Most likely it'll be an announcement about their big inroads to dental imaging apps, along with a special service you can pay for to make it easier to render teeth..