Is Unity setting a precedent of non backwards compatibility?

A couple of asset store item sellers of assets I have have decided to create entirely separate branches of their asset for Unity 2018. And I have a gut feeling that this will also be the case for the Unity post processing stack. And one of them outright stated they will no longer support the asset for Unity versions greater than 2017.4.
Is this going to be the new-norm for major Unity releases?

Is anyone else seeing this trend with assets you're using?
IF this is the case then we are locked-in, whereas before, upgrading to Unity 2017 was not that big of a deal.
But I think upgrading from 2017 to 2018 might be out of the question for most people that are far along.

 

I have a good number of the more complex technical assets and most of their updates for 2018 were trivial aside from removing substance support.

And I can't think of any reason why 2018 is different from any other release in this whole context. Ie what is so significant about 2018 as opposed to 2017 or 5.6 or whatever.

So I'm not buying it. Sounds like a lazy excuse to me.

 

Of course SRP is not backwards (or any direction currently really) compatible
Demanding publishers to support three different rendering techs in one package is not going to be fruitful in the near future.

 

The shaders for 2018.2+ and the HDR Pipeline and probably the LDR Pipeline vary significantly from the standard shader. For instance legacy, terrain and foliage shaders do not work in HDR.

There are also lots of changes coming to 2018.x via the job system.

If the developers are not getting enough income to support the development time it would take to upgrade or make the assets compatible when they could possibly earn more bringing out new 2018 specific assets once the platform matures, can you blame them?

 

Those are not settled yet though, we don't know what the impact will be. Developers making judgments on that stuff now are jumping the gun.

 

Yeah, seems like the wrong time to switch fully to the new systems when they're not even sure which features they want to include in the first stable release. I'd expect 99% (rectally acquired number) to be snug and safe in the familiar pipeline for the foreseeable future.

 

I'm pretty sure asset store devs were given some info about the pipelines months ago. There was one thread about it on these forums but asset store devs have their own forum too and without seeing everything said there, I find it hard to comment in detail.

I think that based on whatever info they have its perfectly reasonable for them to make preliminary judgements, they just have to be prepared to modify their judgements in future as things evolve.

As a user of many assets I kind of see this as an opportunity to see what devs are still enthusiastic about major evolution of their products, and who is burnt out already. Because I noticed plenty of burnout during 5.x cycles for certain kind of assets, where changes to various aspects of the graphics systems required unity version-specific changes here and there. Combined with unpleasant support workloads, some asset store devs lost a lot of enthusiasm and started being rather negative. Understandable, and they have my sympathy, but at the end of the day if they see no future for their product in Unity then I have no use for their assets and will look to the next generation to fill the gaps.

Of course there is plenty of detail, some types of assets are affected massively more than others. Some assets are made obsolete by the pipelines, others may be very handy for one pipeline but a poor fit for another pipeline (eg HD v LD). In some cases it is too early to tell (eg how good the HD volumetric fog is and whether it leaves room for 3rd party solutions that offer more).

 

Has backwards compatibility ever been a concern? When has there ever been a non-updated asset that lasts two years without throwing errors?

 

it seems like we are in a bit of a transition period here from the old numbering scheme to the new one. i would imagine it will get smoothed out when things are settled with the new version.

 

In a bit worried the old pipeline will stop being supported by the asset artists, it's hard as it is to find good PBR assets, if we see many move to the HD pipeline then there will be even less good PBR assets to choose from

 

Won't happen. Like they mentioned back in January the HD pipeline is designed with PBR in mind.

https://blogs.unity3d.com/en/2018/01/18/2018-and-graphics/

 

How does it work, you first design the standard PBR textures (Albado, metal, normal) then you add the HD specific stuff ontop of this? If those textures are standard PBR textures then I guess its not a problem

edit: I have not had any time to look into the HD pipeline yet

 

I haven't looked into it either but my understanding is that the SRP is just for configuring the behaviour of the engine. PBR itself shouldn't be dependent on that as we've had PBR since before this and even before Unity itself officially supported them in the form of third party shader assets like Lux.

Just searching the repository for common PBR terms (eg albedo) shows results for both the HD and LW pipelines.