Unity MLAPI Experimental Release 0.1.0

Hey Everyone!

Today we are finally announcing the release of our first experimental MLAPI package.

Since this is an experimental release, it is not available in the Unity Package Manager yet. Instead, you have to manually add it from Github. To learn how to install MLAPI into your project follow installation guide.

Version 0.1.0
With version 0.1.0 of MLAPI, we focused on integrating MLAPI in our ecosystem and introduced changes to improve performance and make the API easier to use and maintain. You can learn about what we changed in our release notes.

Our next round of releases will focus on adding new and exciting features to MLAPI. You can get an overview of what we have planned on our roadmap. We encourage everyone to actively participate in the roadmap and submit suggestions and feature requests to us.

What does experimental mean?
We are still working on a lot of future-facing functionality which means that some features are currently a work in progress and you may experience minor issues. Please note that Experimental packages are not meant for use in Production scenarios – instead, you could use experimental packages to preview and test-drive what we are working on as an early look.

There are a few things to be aware of when using this Experimental Unity package:

• Expect breaking API changes - using this early has risks!
• Expect no SLA on the timeline to ship patches/fixes to releases, as we are still establishing our test and release cadence.
• Expect this will be moving towards a fuller Release (aka we don't plan to throw this away)
• Expect us to answer questions of early adopters on Discord and Forums, and we welcome all feedback and issues logged!

Upgrading

For all existing MLAPI users, we encourage you to upgrade to our new version. We introduced many bug fixes in version 0.1.0 and will be better able to support you if you upgrade. MLAPI is now distributed as a Unity package which means upgrading isn’t straightforward. We have created a guide for upgrading to the new version.

If you have an existing UNet project or have used UNet previously checkout our UNet upgrade guide to learn some of the key differences between UNet and MLAPI.

Where to go for help?

Let us know what you think in this forum thread and MLAPI’s discord! This is the place where you can meet our Multiplayer Solution Architect team - engagement engineers helping to support you in building multiplayer games.

Together with the Unity Package, we are also releasing our new documentation site. Our documentation is open source and contributions are welcome (repository)!

Learn more on our Netcode landing page and save the date for Boss Room to actively learn with the upcoming sample game project.

 

Let me try and help here.

1) If you have a product in production currently, what are your project deadlines and release cadence?
- Whether you should or not depends on a number of factors - 1. When do you ship? 2. Is the existing MLAPI working well for the project or do you have any issues/bugs? Review the release notes, check out the refactored API names and removed features and also follow this guide.

2) Some trade-offs to consider. Have you extended MLAPI with custom code? We are still likely to break things in the new version, but the old version is now stagnant. The old version is aged and has its problems, and will not be supported by Unity. Migrating now could save you from a bigger migration in the future if you need to migrate later. I think there is a net positive to move over for a new project. You know it'll be supported by Unity and we have forums/discord for further help.

3) Can you raise that as a GitHub issue on the MLAPI repo?

Come find us on Discord if it's easier to chat there instead of this forum. Hope this helps you come to a decision.

 

I posted the following a while ago on our Discord about why we are not doing updates:

I only know about our plans between 0.1.0 and our next release. Long term our strategy will most likely change. Right now creating a release is a very manual process for us and takes a lot of time which we could spend on development instead. This is the case because we lack some of the infrastructure which other Unity packages have for testing. So our plan is to keep patch releases to a minimum for now. If a critical issue arises where there is no easy workaround we can definitely do a patch but so far it looks like there aren't any issues like that.

No patch releases does not mean that we are not fixing bugs. Some of the bugs which were raised are already fixed on the develop branch. It is just really hard for us to get them out to you guys. You always have the option to either use the develop branch or create your own branch and merge some of the bug fixes we did into it.

tl;dr No patch releases will be made unless there is a critical issue