Estimate for RC?

Hi, how many more builds are you from RC? Thanks.

 

I'm often asking myself why it seems so important to some people to know when a certain Alpha, Beta or RC phase starts.

Can you explain that to me?

 

Yes, I want to move our production project into 2020.2. Reasons. GraphView ( InspectorElement, Elbow ), Editor speed.

 

I made that 2021.1 alpha thread the other day. For me the reason was that the uncommunicated delay meant that perhaps something happened and the alpha didn't start or wasn't going to become public. It wasn't critical to my project schedule, but it was something I was curious about.

I assume it's going to be sometime around December. Ignoring last year, all of the last yearly TECH versions came out in December. It makes sense as it gives Unity all the time they need to make the version as stable as possible.

 

20.2b has such quality of life improvements which I like to work with more than 19.4.

 

The renaming of Beta to non-Beta is completely arbitrary, and may not depend on the things you care about.
I've seen Unity versions where early Beta versions were completely stable for us.
I've seen other versions where we had to wait until .5f1 or .6f1 for blocker bugs getting fixed.

Only you know what you need and the only way to know it is by testing it yourself.
Create a branch for 2020.2 and put as much QA effort as you can to evaluate if it is production ready FOR YOU.

 

Pretty much this. They just move the number forward every quarter.

2020.2 is very fine so far, but that doesn't have to mean anything if you upgrade an existing project.

 

I would go even one step further and say that you should always keep an eye on the beta versions of the engine and report the things that are blocking you from upgrading earlier so that by the time it goes gold they are fixed. A of the issues could be unique to your project or the way you're using the engine. We for example have a lot of 2D assets and that created a lot of problems, but now most of them are solved through the alpha and beta period.

 

This. This is the main reason I test everything early on. If you find blocking issues during alpha/beta and report them, your chances getting them fixed are higher anyway than if you report them when the release is nearing end of it's support cycle