Legacy Particle System deprecation

It's about time guys, correct me but Shuriken is available since Unity 4, it's about like, 20 years ago?
Keep moving forward !

 

You asked to be corrected, so...

Shuriken was available in Unity 3.5

 

Same will happen to legacy animation at some point I guess? No surprises there

 

If Unity offered a tool to automatically convert existing legacy particle systems to Shuriken systems, then I bet most people would be pretty happy about it. I am guessing that the people still using the legacy particle systems are doing so simply because that is what they initially set some of their prefabs to use. I cannot think of any reason to actively choose legacy particle systems over Shuriken at this point.

 

That could be a dark day, comparable to the loss of Beast...

 

You're right, I'm getting old...I'm using Unity since the version 2.6 (like many of us I guess?)

 

The sooner legacy animation disappears the better it will be for every model asset and buyer on the store.

 

If it's not broke, why remove it?

 

That's fair enough. If you can't get an auto-converter working, would there be any pointers in how to go about converting any you have from the legacy to the new system? Sort of a "these settings in the legacy system correspond to these settings in this module and that module in the shuriken system"

I have very little experience in the particle systems, either legacy or shuriken, other than accessing them via code to switch them on/off as required.

 

imo at some point if you want to keep working on old stuff, you will have to live with previous versions of Unity, that's it.
The way UT is handling obsolete part of their engine is one the best solution for their users.

 

But a potential disaster for anyone that needs full code control over animation playback and loading...

There's things I've done with legacy anims that just weren't possible with Mecanim. Something as simple as resetting an animation controller (e.g. for reusing prefab instances when object pooling) was impossible not so long ago. And loading an anim clip from resources and assigning it to a Mecanim state was impossible last time I tried.

I've also written tools that could display animations in editor mode, by setting the exact anim times and blend state, and using Animation.Sample - couldn't see any way to do the equivalent via Mecanim at the time.

If the old animation data format is removed, that's probably great - but I don't think we can afford to lose that more direct control over loading and playback of animations that the Animation component gives. And while Mecanim in principle is great for main characters with lots of anims/transitions, setting up a new animation controller for every little 'door opens' or 'UI bounce+spin' animation seems kind of overkill, and additional work.

(Sorry, this was rather off-topic... losing legacy particles doesn't affect me - but losing Beast hurt. The year of broken lightprobes. So losing legacy animation is a scary prospect, given that my Mecanim experiences so far have been fairly mixed)

 

You might want to check out playables api, it should mirror the functionality as far as I've checked. As it eventually will go (it is depreciated after all), you should be moving to it as the day will come when you don't have the choice (same for all depreciated stuff I guess).

 

( *cough* Beast, Enlighten? )

But anyway, I'm all for deprecating the legacy particles. I recently went and switched a few particle effects we still had that used the old system and I didn't find any trouble replicating the effects.

 

Well...most of the time

 

Hello.
Particle.color is now marked as Obsolete. But I need to change color property of the individual particle not changing other's particles properties. What should I do to make it right now? (the same for size of particle for example)

 

I like being able to create new animations in the editor. I hope you're not planning on removing that because it's really useful!

 

Awesome, it's one of my favorite features. In fact I wrote an article on GamaSutra about it awhile back because I wanted other people to know that the editor has this amazing animation system built into it. I had a lot of clients that were animating all of the objects in 3DS and some of them were very frustrated with the workflow for that so I am glad that it's a priority

 

I'm still using the legacy animation system. :'( Mind you I'm also still using Unity 4.7.

 

Care to share the link to the article? Searching Gamasutra I came up with bupkis!

 

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JorisVanLaar/20151002/255204/Unity_game_engine_animation.php

 

Actually, the animation window is actually getting some improvements in the next couple of versions. One of the Unite talks back in July went over a lot of the stuff they're adding.. IE) keyframe scaling, etc.

My guess is that it all ties into Sequencer eventually, so they need to keep it relatively cutting edge.

 

Last time I tested Shuriken (a few Unity versions ago), it was slower than legacy particles and certain equivalent functions generated garbage.

Is Shuriken fairly garbage-free at this point? How does the speed compare? I use legacy particles all over my mobile projects, where every millisecond of performance counts. Hearing that they'll be deprecated is a pretty massive blow, if they don't yet have fully equivalent functionality/speed of legacy...

 

Great, sounds like it's time to upgrade then

 

Shuriken has been a massive improvement from the legacy particles for my uses, though as others are saying it would be a shame to see legacy animation leave right now. Totally forgot about the Playables API, it looked useful in the introduction talk and could fill the gap missing from Legacy Anim, but I haven't seen much else about it.

Will there be more examples/tutorials/documentation on Playables before legacy animation is deprecated?

 

Please keep in mind that not all people who work with animation can program, so if any old features are removed, they should ideally be auto converted to the new version that can do the equivalent.

 

Second +1 for personal reasons.
Although Ive found (with limited fx work) very few instances where Shuriken has come up short.

 

Haven't tried 5.5 Shuriken update yet but would be cool if particles had unique id. The id would change when the particle dies/respawns. Would be possible to know which particle is which when controlling them by script. And could link some metadata to them with the id.

 

An automatic upgrade tool would be much appreciated because we are a small team and I have to do triple duty as a scripter, 3d modeler and a music composer lmao.

 

Just wanted to report back that I converted 100+ legacy particles system to Shuriken in my current game, and despite the task being fairly time consuming (I wrote an auto-converter to speed up the process but not everything translates nicely), I am now much happier with how Shuriken is working, and am really appreciating all the extra options and customizations it offers. Definitely glad I made the switch!

 

-_-
So I'm just coming back after a few months away from Unity, and it looks like I have to recode a few thousand lines across dozens of projects, and rebuild hundreds of particle emitters...
I get that these are improvements, but as an indy developer with literally no one helping me, being slammed with six hundred man hours of mandatory update work across every game project is not a good feeling.
Please stop doing this to the little guy. I hate to be the one who points out the negatives, but you guys really need to be bringing these auto updates along if you're going to force the new protocols on us. Not everybody has a team of programmers at their disposal, and for a lot of us, that's why we came to Unity in the first place.
I really hope I don't wake up one morning to discover I have to recreate every single animation.

 

Unity do what they can with script updating where possible. It's recommended you go from version to version rather than a giant leap if upgrading a (very) old project.

I recently updated a 3.5x project which was relatively simple. I made sure to from 3.x to 4.x then to 5, fixing issues as I went, and it took 30 mins for 15,000 lines of code - ie not much. This is a full game as well.

Also, IMHO I would rather see progress with engines. You don't necessarily have to upgrade.

 

Unity does not have to break anything, they have enough manpower to make an autoupgrade to a new api.

Can you imagine the uproar if adobe photoshop files could not be read in a newer version? this is the same kind of situation.

Nobody whats to stop progress, just
make the progress seamless. its better that unity spends more time to autoupgrade things they brake rather than let every developer spend time.

lets say unity spends 100 hours to fix this, now muliply this number to the million developers unity has, then you have a figure how much time unity could save its userbase.

it's not a small number

 

Care to share the code?

 

Good, I am glad we are getting rid of it... never liked it to be honest. Shuriken is very easy to use...

 

I did not update Unity for a while (5.2.4f), are all Shuriken bugs ironed out in the newer versions? Since there were objective reasons to use Legacy system over it. For example, if the Shuriken emission had been disabled while off camera, all particles belonging to it just disappear even if their lifetime wasnt over. Legacy particles treated this situation properly.

 

@karl_jones' blog post may have an answer for you.

 

So by the looks of it, it is intended behavior, and legacy emitter did not display it because it isnt fully "procedural" and can not be culled. Okay that answers my question. Shame that the culling can be only disabled by indirect means when it is not needed.

 

I understand, will there be an auto conversion to the new system?

 

So you think all the projects using legacy particle systems will be fixed by using the artist and programmers time for each project, that is gonna be a lot of hours.

I dont mind removing old stuff, just don't let it break anything please.