Feedback wanted - Your feeling about 2018.3 in its current state

I voted 3.

No, because:

-There is a known issue about metal performance degradation, and I'm developing for mobile right now.

-Something keeps going wrong with skinned characters with animation. It seems they all get jumbled up in the scene and I need to reimport the mesh manually. This keeps happening even in the latest version.

-A lot of iffy stuff with reimporting meshes in general. Some objects complain about needing the normals fixed (something about blendshapes, even though I'm not using blendshapes for those), and when I hit fix (or change any setting for that matter) and apply, the lightmap gets destroyed, which is a problem for me, because if all lightmaps are gone, I need a week of baking to rebake everything. Or worse, the order in which submeshes get imported gets changed, so suddenly a submesh has another submesh's transform/script etc. (<- This sometimes gets fixed by reimporting -> reverting -> reimporting again, but it means I have to check EVERY scene and every mesh to ensure that everything is still alright).

-Improved prefabs is something I have no use for, and relearning to do the stuff I need to do is something I don't want to bother with right now.

Light Probe deringing. Aaaand, that's it. Or maybe Legacy particle system being removed, just because it's funny that you list it as a feature

Upgrading the project is not smooth. Stuff keeps breaking. It has been the most un-smooth in a while actually.

Even though the last few releases were pretty decent, 2018.3 seems on par with what I've come to expect form Unity from all these years using it. Every release being a step forward, a summersault back and a bunch of sideways hops.

And at this point I don't want to spent weeks fixing stuff in my project that were not broken just to have light probes that don't look horrible.

Maybe all these are specific to my project for one reason or another, or I don't know, but you did ask us how we feel.

 

1. Are you using 2018.3 in a real production? If not, did something keep you from doing so?
We are currently using 2018.2 in production, but after extensive testing we plan to push a 2018.3 b11 build to production next week. I am amazed with how stable this beta build is. We stopped using beta builds earlier this year due to instability, but decided to try 2018.3 b10 and was pleasantly surprised.

2. What feature(s) are you most excited about?
Pause the Garbage Collector (expected and happy with it)
Better prefab workflow (didn't expect this to be so good )
Faster compiling (didn't expect this)

3. What is/are the most annoying/painful part(s) of 2018.3 today?
Every time I build, I get 2 ambiguous errors. They don't affect anything so I would just classify it as 'annoying'.

Failed to ad separator

UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)

Edit: This one went away after a full system reboot for some reason!

[Physics.PhysX] RigidBody::setRigidBodyFlag: kinematic bodies with CCD enabled are not supported! CCD will be ignored.

UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)

Edit: This one is likely happening on some prefabs I am not using in my 3 year old project, maybe even in a 3rd party asset.

4. How would you feel if we released 2018.3 in its current state (b11)? What makes you feel this way?
I would feel positive about Unity's quality standards. 2018.3 is in good shape.
This applies to Windows & Mac Standalone builds.

 

Your last two points are pretty spot on for me as well, @AcidArrow

Not entirely. Too much stuff breaks silently right now. I'm on the cutting edge on our branch, so I actually use 2018.3, but I'm not recommending migration yet. Still waiting to see smoother project upgrades and better support for the improved prefabs system.

I think work being done in the "backend" is the hottest thing right now. Compiler improvements, burst, non-alloc stuff, native arrays and friends, and, especially, the talk about getting the assembly reload times down in editor for better iteration times (still not much on this last point, sadly).

No matter how much you pack your engine with features, if the iteration times scale linearly (at best) with project size, too much time will be wasted there.

This has been, possibly, the largest pain point for us since Unity 3 and one of the major pain points for large-ish projects.

You can't give total freedom to the creatives if each asset they add to the project adds a bit of time when entering playmode. Or when each type you define makes assembly reloads takes a bit more time.

 

I am using Unity 2018.3, with conjunction of ECS and latest previews.

I didn't have chance to test many of new features, but since I am aware, many of them are in preview, I wouldn't be complaining about it

Using on my main project and prototypes. No specific issues so far.
Had some small hiccup, but can not reproduce anymore.

For me ECS at given time. But looking later, to test some new graphical features as well.

Stuff in preview Well not really annoying, but continuous tension, keeping on tip of toes that something may change any time.

I completely don't like UI Canvas system. Perhaps is because, I am a bit demanding on that part. But still feels somehow awkward to work with.

Generally I am happy the route Unity has took so far, in past year. So I would say generally yes.

Currently for what I am doing, I don't see objections. But this may be very subjective, since I haven't checked many features, which normally should.

 

would be nice if gpu lightmapping would work on the mac, because I don't think its a good thing to release a full version with features that only work on pc
it goes against the unity history of being cross plaform for development not only for builds

 

Are you using 2018.3 in a real production? If not, did something keep you from doing so?
Yes because we dot have urgent releases and improved prefabs makes a huge difference when working on UI and other complex mechanisms.

What feature(s) are you most excited about?
Improved prefab but to be honest I didn't took a very close look on other features since they were not needed or could wait.


What is/are the most annoying/painful part(s) of 2018.3 today?
Collaborate. Well, it was catastrophic before but since this beta, updating anything takes 10 min of "compiling" or something.

There are other annoying bugs like the F key not working and the package manager being broken. From what I understand these issues are specific of my project but I can't do anything about it because they are all unity features that I don't have any access to.

How would you feel if we released 2018.3 in its current state (b11)? What makes you feel this way?
I had to give the worst answer to that. I see from the other beta tester that 2018.3 seems stable enough but the issues I encounter make it unusable on my project.

 

Hi, tried to open our 2017.2.15f project in latest b11 and except 2 sigabrt when importing the whole project. ( I just reopened two times and it went through ), deleting DataPrivacy and importing new Playmaker for 2018.3 all seems to be working fine. Since we are waiting for nested prefabs I feel like I can work with b11 onward but still will wait one more week for f1 release. We will start from there and make it our production version. M.

 

Are you using 2018.3 in a real production?

- YES. (develop on and targeting macOS with Intel GPU)

What feature(s) are you most excited about?

- LWRP and ShaderGraph are finally in a working state, releases for 2018.1 and 2018.2 have too many bugs.
- Nested prefabs, prefabs mode (editing) are very nice tools to have.
- Bugfixes that are relavent to our workflow.

What is/are the most annoying/painful part(s) of 2018.3 today?

- Seeing LWRP is now stable for 2019.1, but not sure if it would be supported in 2018 LTS.
- Few asset authors are ready for LWRP at the moment.

How would you feel if we released 2018.3 in its current state (b11)? What makes you feel this way? Please elaborate.

- I would feel ok about it (VOTED 4).
- For a beta, it appears surprisingly stable, and I have seen few bugs that prevented me to do my work.

 

My thoughts are that because of the fundamental changes between 2018.3 and 2019.1, its imperetive that we get 2019.1 into peoples hands as fast as possible.

Id rather we ship 2018.3 and move focus onto 2019.1, given how stable 2018.3 is as a beta.

In fact, we are considering moving from 2018.2 to the beta for 2018.3 given how the usability is so much better (prefabs anyone, amiright?)

 

I understand.

But as I'm sure you also know, creating reliable minimal repro cases and narrowing down the issues takes time, especially since it doesn't seem to happen 100% of the time. And I'm fairly sure that low effort bug reports like "stuff brakes sometimes" with no reliable repro are not very useful.

So I wasn't going to make a fuss about this, but you asked how we feel, so I replied

 

It's no less stable than 99% of your older releases. I suggest a shorter beta cycle now you have a clear alpha. As Unity does its fixes in Alpha then ports to beta, I feel beta should be regulated to just "bugs Unity missed" and soft-release basically.

Anyone disagree with this?


You can probably define this a bit better as then people will be more likely to place feedback where it's actually going to have impact: on alpha.

By the time people have a moan about a feature in beta, it's too late. So beta being a soft release in general (with bugs being possible) makes alpha have an actual point.

Currently alpha is borderline pointless while beta is such a strongly promoted draw. Letting people understand that alpha can affect the outcome while beta is mostly just bugs, will probably give both releases a point. Currently it feels mildly imbalanced, perceptually at least from this side of the fence.

On another note: Unity should probably stop using the term "preview" outside of package manager, and only have the occasional "experimental" unity build. Using both terms for Unity builds has led to confusion, so much so that some people use experimental builds as a base to work from and then become upset when this experimental build is majorly behind alpha and beta releases.

So making experimental only for editor builds on occasion and preview for package manager only, will likely just clear up a lot of fog. You probably should have the experimental builds have a text overlay in the editor warning that it is experimental and there are no guarantees. Seems people really didn't get the memo at times.

OK experimental and preview are different things and still apply to Unity editor but the rationale behind my suggestion is that for Unity's userbase which has wildly different competencies and varying grasp of English language, you should simplify it down to:

Preview: package manager

Experimental: standalone unsupported editor builds (which can also be preview, just not in name!)

It's clearer for people with varying development and language competency.

--

Sorry if post got a bit long!

 

Not to be pedantic: since 5.1.0, LWRP is no longer behind preview flag. (regardless, it's also only available for 2019.1; 2018.3 currently use 4.x-preview branches, due to core engine difference AFAIK.)

https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...nes.lightweight/CHANGELOG.md#510---2018-11-19

https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...tweight/CHANGELOG.md#420-preview---2018-11-16

I have made argument that LWRP should be supported in 2018 LTS even if with reduced feature, so I won't repeat it here:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/fee...-render-pipelines.470095/page-21#post-3873364

https://forum.unity.com/threads/lwr...5-1-0-19-1-are-out.562291/page-3#post-3870511

 

It's not going to happen and I know this upsets you but you have a concrete and belligerent answer from non-unity staff here to make it clearer. Sorry.

What you can do is diff it and port it yourself. That might well be possible. It would cost Unity the same amount of money to do it for you, and you're the only one asking for it.

If you have any issues porting the feature you want, THEN Unity can help! They just can't choose to backport something that was clearly labelled preview for an older version.

But what specifically is your issue? Why not let people help you backport the bits you need (please post a new thread on this btw not here).

 

Just to be clear:

- I am not asking Unity to backport any feature from 2019.1 to 2018 LTS. These 2 branches have already diverged (4.1.0/4.2.0 were released after 5.0.0 to fix some critical bugs we reported).

- I am saying it's bad look for Unity to create so much enthusiasm for LWRP during 2018 TECH cycle, only to end with "well, thx, but you have to use 2019 TECH release for LWRP to be supported." (And it creates a weird dilemma for us where we can't trust Unity's 2019 roadmap, but we have to because LWRP is on the line.)

- I don't want to go on a quest to ask twitter/reddit to support us in "keeping a Lite-LWRP for 2018 LTS". But I believe the need exists, if Unity team want me to do that to present a business case, I can.

Sorry to sound so negative, even though I generally enjoy working with 2018.3b and LWRP (when they work, they are fabulous.)

 

1. Are you using 2018.3 in a real production? If not, did something keep you from doing so?
   • No, I was having an issue loading external assemblies. Which in retrospect, I think was an issue on my end.
2. What feature(s) are you most excited about?
   • Prefab workflow. It's been a long time coming.
   • Package manager stuff, specifically Git support. External libraries has always been a major downfall of Unity IMO. But after the recent runtime upgrade, and planned package manager support, I'm pretty excited that Unity is finally addressing it.
3. What is/are the most annoying/painful part(s) of 2018.3 today?
   • The premature deprecation of UNET is the biggest issue I have with it. Many people have already aired all the grievances I have in the deprecation thread, I don't think retreading it here is necessary.
4. How would you feel if we released 2018.3 in its current state (b11)? What makes you feel this way? Please elaborate.

"I would be disappointed. 2018.3 does not feel ready". However, I think it should be released anyway.

To elaborate, I'm worried that 2018.3 is in danger of being delayed (just a "gut feeling"). If that is the case, I think delaying 2018.3 would impact 2018.4 LTS, I think it's more important to ensure a proper LTS release, even if 2018.3 isn't perfect.

 

I didn't try with the latest version, no, I just saw that it's still on the "Known issues" list. I'll do a fresh project upgrade in the next couple of days and try again.

 

1. I am but due to the reasons mentioned later, I'm actually considering moving to 2019.1 asap it starts to feel stable enough, been already testing alphas (it's great to finally get access to alphas btw, huge thanks for that!).

2. Prefab improvements, PhysX 3.4, terrain improvements, c#7 without incremental compiler, speedtree v8 support (yet we STILL miss the actual modeler for it but that's up to Speedtree, not Unity).

3. SRPs getting left behind was really annoying. I do get that Unity couldn't get it done in time but there was a lot of messaging throughout the first half of the year that HDRP would be stable around the time 2018.3 came out. Now that it's certain that HDRP will not be stable on 2018.3 or next LTS, it really forces me to move on to 2019.1 as early as possible as that's where the feats I'm going to be needing will be at.

4. Having tested almost every 2018.3.0 beta, I haven't really found any major showstoppers but then again I'm mainly focusing on Windows standalone so I don't get the "pain" from mobile issues. From where I'm looking at it, 2018.3 feels fine for release.

 

Hey @LeonhardP , I feel obligated to say that I just did a fresh upgrade of my project and it has gone much more smoothly. It's a bit soon to say there are no issues at all, but I can safely say it's much better than my previous experience.

The previous upgrade that I based my experience from, was an older local copy that I opened in most 2018.3 betas. (and I was reverting to older commits in collab to make it "upgrade" again in each beta). I guess that made it carry some baggage that eventually made stuff start to break.

I need some more time before I can say that the upgrade has been completely smooth (and if it is I'll edit my first post), but if I had to vote on the poll again right now I would vote something like 3.5

 

My gut feeling? Not very good honestly, although I want to say here, first and foremost, that you're taking steps in the right direction with ECS, Burst and the SRPs... and that y'all doing a great job! Really appreciate the efforts.

But back to my guts: I would never use it in production. Why? Because we are in a transition phase, which is the worst. Old stuff is being deprecated, and the new stuff is only half-assed and not ready, early access, in preview, alpha, experimental, beta, whatever. A thousand names for basically telling "it's not ready, nothing is really final so don't expect any official support and/or clean upgrade paths from here on, but hey: here you go anyway, ENJOY".

I'm not dumb, as a programmer I know best that nothing is more valuable than a decent feedback, but wouldn't it be better to pay or collab with a gremium of 10 or 20 selected, sponsored game dev studios in order to test the features extensively under every aspect, instead of re-purposing your customers as experimental guinea pigs?

Why is this a thing anyway in today's world? All the time we (customers and consumers) are being abused as beta-testers with limited warranty for almost everything. Feel like this has become worse 'n' worse over the years... (not just with game engines).

Let's take the HDRP: nice demo. Kudos to everybody at Unity working on it, it's a HUGE thing for the engine, and I think I speak for everyone when I say that the graphics look just phenomenal!
But how do you think somebody with close-to-zero Unity experience would feel when they download 2018.3, import the preview HD rendering pipeline and everything first of all -breaks- (just a stupid example). So then he goes "well, it's in preview I guess... so, let's learn how to program!" There, he is greeted with two input systems: an old cripple and an unborn baby. Which one to learn? Which one to spend your time with? Which one to invest your resources in? Buy it from the asset store? Keep in mind: not all game developers are kids who want to buy assets from the asset store and play lego.. and then release their AAA innovative survival horror zombie FPS tactical game.
Some people want to actually be developing serious games from the ground up, as a hand craft product that takes many years to build.

So, two input systems. Very confusing. The list could go on here, really... But I think you get the point.

If something takes a long time to be released, dear Unity, SO BE IT! Don't rush your primordial stuff out! We have time, it's not like your engine is unusable it was perfectly fine before, you have a working product!
Don't worry, non-patient developers aren't the ones who release projects: they usually just get fed up with something way before and just rage-quit into some other project (or entirely). Test your things internally in deep collaboration with real world production game studios, and THEN show it to the rest of the world. Otherwise we have to do triple the work. Nobody wants that.

Again, do NOT take this offensively in ANY way. Love how Unity is democratizing game dev and all. But you wanted my gut feelings and here they are wish you all the best, and keep up the GREAT work! Really wish I could do more, but hope that this feedback will help for now.

Cheers, and greetings from Basel everyone

 

I have used 2018b9 exclusively for the past 3-4 weeks, 8-10 hours per day, restarted it every 4-5 days.
Nested prefabs workflows are very useful for our current project. It went very smooth.

2d physics preference collision grid is not well aligned, some stupid error messages appear when you create an audio mixer and play a little with it but no showstoppers yet - I worked mostly with 2D Physics, Spine imports and Particles.

I like your efforts to raise your quality standards, democratization by asking our opinion e.t.c. but, just go ahead and release it. It is already much better than 4.0 or 5.0 releases.

 

Are you using 2018.3 in a real production? If not, did something keep you from doing so?
We are using it to develop a production Android application. We would like 2018.3 officially released to signify the all clear to use ECS, Jobs, and Burst in production though before we send to Google Play.

What feature(s) are you most excited about?
Definately ECS, Jobs, and Burst along with Android App Bundles. EDIT: (Of course nested prefabs too)

What is/are the most annoying/painful part(s) of 2018.3 today?
No GUI in Linux builds (we run some servers in Linux, just headless right now). Hard to debug ECS at design time. Releasing the code for how you did Prefab -> ECS conversion in Mega City Demo would be helpful.

How would you feel if we released 2018.3 in its current state (b11)? What makes you feel this way? Please elaborate.

• Ship it already! 2018.3 is a prime example of excellent software quality.

It feels really stable for us at this point ON ANDROID. We love the Android improvements and it loads faster than 2017.4 so that will be a bonus for our users. Lets get it out the door and update it with patch releases.

Great job on "Performance by default"

 

2018.3 being released now would be a disaster for me. Here's why:

Texture Arrays are effectively broken by a Graphics.CopyTexture bug introduced in beta5, which breaks all 14 of my asset store assets. This bug was introduced when they added 3d texture support to Graphics.CopyTexture, and could have been caught by a unit test.

The asset store just changed it's rules so they will pull assets which don't work on the latest Unity. So all 14 of my asset, and most of my direct competitors, will have their assets removed from the store if these new guidelines are followed, via no fault of our own.

2018 added significant new terrain features. I upgraded my products to support these using beta3, but have been unable to test on more recent beta's due to this bug, so I have no idea what other issues might be lurking behind it.

I have a product which supports LWRP- this was written for 3.0, but 4.0 and 5.0 are currently being worked on. Currently there are a number of problems with this:
- I cannot upgrade to 4.0 or 5.0 because of the above mentioned bug
- There is no way to #if LWRP_40_OR_GREATER around code in packages to support multiple versions, and thus no way to upgrade my code which doesn't break for someone using the old version
- There is no way to properly manage dependencies for packages in assets

 

I'm using 2018.3 in 2 productions: a mobile and a desktop games. I like the new prefab system, it's really life changing. In particular i like the variant because i can make one single minion and then place items like weapons or shields in others.

I think this release needs a little more time to fix the bugs, in addition I'd like a cleaner Assets/Create menu. Maybe reorganize it or add some sub-menus.

 

Not yet. Still testing the stability of Unity 2018.3 beta.

Improved Prefab maybe. I haven't look in depth yet.

After the introduction of Improved Prefab, there is regression to the prefab when working on UI. Another problem is very unstable lighting issue that when you rotate when scene the lightintensity will keep changing and also the lightmap will keep unload and reload. When changing Reflection Probe to Baked, the lighting keep flickering.

I suggest allocating more time to fix all the problems that I mention. There is a feature from custom Unity build for prefab that fixes the prefab problem. I hope it can be merged into this actual Unity 2018.3. Then for the light issue, I don't think you want to ship final version that will keep changing light intensity, light flicking, unload and reload lightmap for no reason.

 

No. I'm using Microsplat from @jbooth and it's not working yet (and it's not his fault)

Improved prefabs.

See the answer for the first question.

I would have mixed feelings. 2018.3 is good enough to be used, but not great.
Because I can't use it in my production. I will have to pass on it and wait until you fix the issues and I can use Microsplat. So I can update my project (which I'm planning to do).

 

@MelvMay Sure, its the layer collision matrix in the Physics 2D Settings panel.

 

I think this window isn't b11. Because it contains the title "Settings". In b11 it's already Project Settings. I don't remember when it changed, one or two beta ago?

 

I have specified in my post that I use 2018b9.
[Edit] I really like that it is already fixed

 

• Are you using 2018.3 in a real production? If not, did something keep you from doing so?

Yes as we needed the latest addressables.

• What feature(s) are you most excited about?

Mostly use it for the latest ECS and the SRP, but the latest addressables are great as well.

• What is/are the most annoying/painful part(s) of 2018.3 today?

Haven't had any issues

• How would you feel if we released 2018.3 in its current state (b11)? What makes you feel this way? Please elaborate.

4. I would feel positive about Unity's quality standards. 2018.3 is in good shape.
While we haven't had any issues for our use, I am aware of issues other users have had so I can't give it a 5.

 

A small point as it seems not to get much of a mention - I'm really keen for the new SpeedTree update and hoping Speedtree 8 for Unity can be released soon... (oh yeh - and the prefab thingy ;-) ).

 

I voted #4.

However, there is a big show stopper that is keeping us from shipping on 2018.3. Otherwise we would have already shipped with 2018.3 beta 11. There is a bug on 2018.2 that is a show stopper as well for over half a year and was introduced in version 2017. That bug is fixed on 2018.3. Along with the other enhancements such as VR particle roll, GC improvements, and IL2CPP improvements we would very much like to ship on 2018.3.

This is the bug in question: https://forum.unity.com/threads/case-1103998-xboxoneendpoint-unet-majorly-broken.588391/

On a slight subtopic, after digging pretty deep on the given bug it is pretty obvious someone made a code change and didn't bother testing it at all. I don't mind beta testing for the most part, but seriously, if core developers and qa are not going to test at all then I'm going to start sending invoices to Unity Headquarters.

I'm serious, by the way...

 

- Are you using 2018.3 in a real production? If not, did something keep you from doing so?

No, not yet. Our project is rather large, upgrading takes several weeks and we'd rather not invest this time right now.

- What feature(s) are you most excited about?

Improved terrain performance, improved Physx performance

- What is/are the most annoying/painful part(s) of 2018.3 today?

The new prefab workflow is absolutely unusable, and a huge step backwards compared to older versions. We will not be upgrading because of these two issues.

The fact that you cant multi-edit prefabs anymore is a huge breaking issue, and not being able to quickly see and edit a prefab in the inspector is a dealbreaker and a feature-regression. Its very hard for me to understand why it was removed, and how you could make a project without it.

Changing prefabs in isolation is also not compatible with any sane workflow, you need to see the entire scene to make any meaningful change. For example, if an asset is too large and we need to change the scale its impossible to do this in isolation, because its relative to the rest of the objects around it. I dont see much use for the editing-in-isolation mode, 99.99% of the times you would just make the changes in the scene and apply them there. Being able to see exactly what properties are changed is a nice addition though, and in itself another reason to never do things in isolation.

For a comparison, lets remove a component from just 3 prefabs. This is in the old workflow, that takes 4 clicks, this is the new 'improved' workflow. In our project we have 141 avatar prefabs, i wouldnt want to be the person that needs to change something on all of them in the new workflow. We'll have to make some custom editor script just to get the old functionality back.

Apologies if my feedback is a bit harsh, i just cant use the new system that i got excited about.

 

So with optional dependencies, will I be able to tell which version of the LWRP is installed via a conditional compilation flag in C# AND in a shader? Since I write shader generators I can likely work around it, but it will mean example shaders fail to compile if shipped with the package and defines are not set for shaders as well.

In terms of the second issue; Right now there's no way for an asset store asset to depend on a package what so ever. So I'm reliant on telling the user which packages to install as well as which versions of those packages to install. Further, one asset might require LWRP4.0, while another requires LWRP5.0, and different versions of a package may require different Unity versions. So it's kind of a nightmare for the average user, who is used to unity's old "Just works" model, to use this stuff right now.

 

I love 2018.3 but I only use a fairly narrow subset of features (and HDRP & VFX) so I am not fully qualified to judge.

In terms of annoyances, it has long annoyed me that the version of HDRP that is used by the HD new project template is usually quite a bit older than the latest version available via package manager. I understand that there may be QA reasons for this, but its pretty tedious to start a new project using that template and then have to update the HDRP version through package manager straight away.

 

This confuses me because at no point during 2018 was I under the impression that HDRP would be production ready or out of preview/experimental during the 2018 release cycle. And I don't remember any messages from Unity staff that would create a different impression about this, they were all really cautious about timescales and clear that much, much more remained to be done to HDRP before it could begin to be considered as production ready. I'm very happy with where they've managed to get to for 2018.3, and maybe next year at some stage I will start to get more confident about it reaching a production ready milestone, but not for a while yet.

 

@elbows I don't want to pick individual people who suggested such so no quotes coming up from me. And yes, it's always been clear to people who've followed the development more closely that these targets have been estimates. Having done software develop for decade has taught me that things always evolve a bit differently than originally planned so I totally understand this from Unity's HDRP team's point of view. But it's still a bummer that we still have to wait up to 1.5 years to get LTS that has stable HDRP support.

This is probably first time I see some negative impact from LTS itself (which is it's amazing concept otherwise): you do feel left out as you know you'll not get that 2 year support for the feat that just didn't make it out of the preview in time. For example if next year ECS stable release gets pushed to 2020.1, it'll disappoint a lot of people for sure as well but it's still totally possible that is will happen (and realistically speaking Unity's ECS and it's systems get more feature complete toward 2020 anyway).

 

For us, we're using the beta since a month or two now, the new terrain is great, the nested prefab is great too, but we have an issue with the new physic engine

https://forum.unity.com/threads/physic-issue-with-joint-since-2018-3.585397/

 

I feel like a lot of issues are about packages like LWRP and others, in my opinion yes 18.3 has several issues with some packages (that's why there is a forum and bug reports about them) but in itself, there isn't major issue that I see for using it in production and if there is, it usually also has an alternative until it's fixed.

There is a few critics about the new prefab workflow, but while some of them are related to real issues (like a crash or bad serialization, etc.) overall people are just saying "it's not the same, it's holding me back". I don't really get it. I know that it's not easy on a large code base but if you think with the new workflow logic and not with the logic "I need to find the easy way and do the fewest updates to my code possible to fit the new workflow" then you can solve at least 80-90% of your problems because from what I read it's just misuse of the new prefabs that are the root cause of these issues.

If I take the multi edit for example: why not create a base prefab and then variants ? So that you can "multi-edit" prefabs. Then there is the inspector issue, well if you need to update your prefab based on the scene then it's usually a transform issue which you can update in the scene, you just can't change the hierarchy and if you need to do that how about using a custom environment scene (you can change that in the settings but I agree that's half a solution since it will be used for all prefabs).

I can understand the frustration of seeing new features while not being able to use them but the point here is just to get feedbacks about 18.3 itself which, in my opinion, is good to go out of beta.

I just want to add that I agree with this, alpha has cool features at the moment I feel like Unity wants me to use 2 versions at the same time which is not possible.

 

Well, I would just suggest picking one and feeding back on that. So if 2019 has what you want, use that, otherwise I think it's generally "ok ish" to use the latest beta for dev assuming you're not near release.

 

1. Are you using 2018.3 in a real production? If not, did something keep you from doing so?
   Yes we are currently using it on a real production cause the nested prefab system was compulsory in our case to avoid a full rework after the 2018.3 release. It's probably quite not common on Unity but we are using it for a "lifestyle" app to manage your home based on IoT stuff and thing like this. Due to this, our app is 90% of UI that's why we used really intensively your new nested prefab system and we reported some issue with it.
   
   
2. What feature(s) are you most excited about?
   We are really excited by this nested prefab system.
   The notch's support on Android & iOS is quite cool and the Android AppBundle too ! We will maybe take a look at ECS due to some intensive mesh generation we do in some part of our app it's not critical right now but it could something interesting in our case.
   There is probably many things I forget but... yeah... there is a lot of cool stuff.
   
   
3. What is/are the most annoying/painful part(s) of 2018.3 today?
   - Today the most annoying/painful element in the current element are some issue found in the prefab importing system on a fresh project that sometimes still lost references. As I mentionned here :
   https://forum.unity.com/threads/switching-from-b2-to-b7-prefab-references-issue.574369/#post-3886084 (last post)
   I don't try to reproduce it in a sample project until I know if it's worth to lost (sometimes a lot) of my working time to find a step to reproduce. Cause basically for us, you have to take our project (or maybe another project) and import it in 2018.3b8 (I can't test other beta version due to the next bug) and a lot of refrences just vanished with no reason.
   - The combo namespace + preprocessor variable (that would be fixed in the b12 if everything is ok) due to this bug we stop beta usage in 2018.3b8 cause this bug create a lot of issue in our code.
   - Some elements that would be more "quality of life" like this one we reported (we had some good returns but we just wait a final answer), we know it won't reach the 2018.X. But it stays important to us to improve your sprite atlasing and our build size (that's why we asked it in 2018.3 cycle) :
   https://forum.unity.com/threads/help-getting-a-sprites-atlas-during-build.576781/#post-3872656
   
   
   
4. How would you feel if we released 2018.3 in its current state (b11)? What makes you feel this way?
   We are currently not totally satisfied of the stability and the quality of the 2018.3 even if it's REALLY IMPROVED since the b1 (hopefully ) I think in 1 or 2 beta update I could be a good rc

 

We're not using 2018.x in a critical revenue-generating product, so I'm all for releasing it as a tech release.

Agree with the comments that most of the issues with new prefabs concern existing projects trying to use multi-select as a way to implement what should be handled using composition in the new system. But the fact that removing the old workflows is happening in 2018.3 directly make me think Unity doesn't believe large legacy projects (many of which have this problem, or have otherwise hacked workflows out of the old system) will be updating.

Looking forward, I still don't understand who the target customer base for 2018.4 is. The world seems to divide into "teams who get only minor benefits from going from 2017.4 to 2018.4, in exchange for probably lower stability and possibly rebuilding any prefab workflows they've built" and "Teams using new preview features with no choice but to go to 2019."