No!!! Don't do it!!! Don't!!!!!!!

Unity, you have removed the Asset Store from within the Unity Editor!

With this, you're killing your business.

I don't even remember all the items that I have purchased.

The Asset Store within the Unity Editor is the only thing where I can conviently search for some, manage them, quickly check for updates, go to the forum, etc.

The Asset Store within the Unity Editor is like a great treasure box where I can quickly take things out. It makes me (and I guess many other users) feel like a child at play sometimes, and some purchases may even be due to the fact that it feels great just having them quickly at hand right after purchase.

There may be really experienced users who only have their own custom-made assets and who don't need the Asset Store in the Editor, but most non-100%-pro's love the Asset Store in the Editor. And I guess we are the ones who contribute a lot of money to your business.

Un-cuppling it and having it in a web browser only stops me from using and buying assets.

I would bet that it doesn't do Unity good financially.

Please un-do.

 

They are all in the Package Manager, ready to be downloaded.

Anyway, you could also have kept them in a safe place.

 

How do I see my 300+ purchases in the Package Manager?
I have to search for them by name, right?

For most, I don't even remember that I bought them, so how do I search for them by name?
I have to fire up the web browser.

If I have to do that in the future, I will think really hard if I really need something.

For example, I wanted to use an automatic eye movement script that I purchase.
I open the Package Manager, I enter "eye". Nothing found.

Also, I remember that I once purchased some gas cans, PBR materials, looking nice. Normally, I would just locate them in the Unity Asset Store in the Editor and drop them into my project.

 

Why don't you just try it out before you're guessing? Obviously the answer is no.

 

@Lurking-Ninja
I don't understand your screenshot. You enter "Mesh", and it shows "2DDL Pro", and your arrow points at "Octave3D"?

 

What is complicated on this? I searched for a term, it show stuff which has name with the term in it and show stuff which doesn't have the term in the name. You asked if you only can search for the name. I showed you that no.

My arrow is pointing to an entire list, which is full of names with and without the term "mesh".

 

Obviously, one has to select "My Assets" first, and then they show up.
However, I don't think that hiding the assets in the package manager isn't a wise decision.

Most Unity users are children at play (even those who do it for a living ) , and hiding their toys is not a wise decision.

 

Well, ok, you can still locate them in Unity.

But I don't think that hiding them is a wise decision.

There was a reason the integrated Asset Store was shown up-front in the earlier versions of Unity.

The Asset Store is highly inspiring and a great way to manage your existing assets.
It should not be hidden.

 

As I understood the in-editor asset store used a Web framework that's no longer integrated into the editor itself, can't remember what the reason behind this was, but it wasn't to simply annoy people.

In the future, the package manager is going to allow for assets to have dependencies on other packages, restrictions based on supported Unity versions, and allow demo files to be downloaded/imported separately. Much like Unity's own packages. With that in mind, the move to the PM is definitely a step in the right direction. It "killing a business" is wildly exaggerated.

 

You are here, in your prefered browser, posting on the forum page - the "new" way of searching and adding assets, is opening the browser while unity is open, then click on "download" or "import" on your asset and it will open inside unity, in the package manager. They just removed the embeded browser because it was slow and couldn't display HTML5 Videos (Youtube videos which usually show off what an asset offers / Trailers). The whole functionallity is still there, you just have to open an extra browser.

 

@Hannibal_Leo Yes, and there was also a reason why people somewhen integrated toilets into their houses and no longer outside.

I have seen Unity's hint "It's in your web browser now!", but I don't like it, and I wanted to express my dislike here, hoping that other people would jump in.

But if all of you are fine with the new strategy... then who am I to complain... But wait... I have purchased +300 assets as shown in the screenshot, perhaps I do have a voice here...

 

It's not that we like the new strategy, it's just that we know that there will not be a coming back. You need to learn how to handle the new things and move on.

 

We'll see if it will be coming back if sales go down.

 

The "Asset Store" tab is just an embedded browser window, how is it that much better than just Alt-Tabbing into your actual browser?

 

I hardly believe they would have removed it, if the removal affected their business. The decision was probably supported by analytics, perhaps the asset store is even insignificant from an income point of view for them. If the AS would be what's Unity keep going, I'm pretty sure we would see more rather than less integrations

 

I need to work on a different monitor, log in to the Asset Store, click a few times to show my items.
Not a big deal, but it sums up so much that it feels like work and not joy anymore.

I had big fun scrolling through my list of assets.
It was right at my hands.

Now it's only work to locate existing assets, not even to speak of new ones.

 

I always hated the web browser inside Unity editor, it was slow and sluggish and it also straight up brought a security hole to Unity as there were vulnerabilities related to that. I bet this was partly a reason why it got removed.

I don't miss it at all but I'd love to see some improvements on the PM workflow with your assets (which is another topic and there's actually another forum thread discussing it).

 

To add up on the why they removed it, I remember reading that it was somewhat heavy on the installation download size, but I don't remember by how much.

However, I actually only reluctantly used that in-unity asset store interface because, as it has already been said, it was awefully slow and not very practical to use.

I understand that a begginer or an amateur game dev wouldn't care about that, but working with Unity professionally, everything slow or unsecure is painful to use. Plus, since this is not a game to me, actually paying for an asset makes me cautious of where that is located (most of the time, it remains on the assetstore until I need to download it again), and if I forget about it, well then to bad for me... I wasted money.

One way or the other, wether we like it or not, Unity is going to change. Hopefully for the best, but not everyone will be happy with every changes. The best we can do is to accept it and adapt to the new ways.

Personally, I'm happy that this interface is disappearing and that Unity is making some better way to interact with the AssetStore from the Editor.

 

I don't get it. If you can switch to your browser to use the Unity forums, you can switch to your browser to use the Asset Store. If you're worried about extra keystrokes or clicks to get to your list of owned assets and the built-in package manager (understandably) doesn't do it for you, put a shortcut to https://assetstore.unity.com/account/assets somewhere and/or setup a keyboard shortcut for it.

 

Obviously you don't have many (asset store) assets to manage, or do you?

 

This change only improved asset management IMO.

 

If the PackageManager currently doesn't fit your needs, you can always make a proposal of features that would help improve PackageManager in your opinion, for your current workflow.
Odds are that your workflow is a rather specific one, and thus you will maybe have to change it. But if your workflow actually makes sense for a broad range of users, maybe they (Unity) will implement your ideas.

But there is close to 0% chances that they will bring back the old assetstore integration, given it's bad state in itself, but also given all the efforts they invested in the PM in order to allow us to have all of our packages in one place, which is great imo, even thogh the PM hasn't reach its final form.

 

JFC, just write an editor script that launches the URL I pasted or something if this is such a big deal to you.

 

I understand what you mean. I have about 500 assets and I find the package manager is dry and unfriendly and it removes the delight from browsing assets. I'm quite shocked by this move.

 

If you want to shop then do it online. The implementation in the Editor was not good, Package Manager at least makes it more straightforward in terms of searching what you own and getting it into the editor. Aside from that you should be using the website to buy/find/filter/manage assets.

Honestly most veteran users don't even use the editor store, it's notoriously slow and cumbersome and only recently in the last year became usable for anyone with a substantial number of assets. Typically the workflow is find it on the website and click the Import button while the Editor is open which immediately imports it. At least that way it removed all of the defects of the Editor experience.

Plus, now that don't have to maintain a Chromium license for what amounted to a poor users experience anyway which frees up budget for real features.

 

I also pity that the included Asset Store is gone.
I don't like the dry PM approach at all.
It's not about exactely shopping directly for me.
It's about using the purchased assets in Unity.
With a certain amount of assets in your bag, you want to have a nice visual approach to manage them.
The PM isn't appealing.

I wouldn't say that Unity is "killing their business", but they make managing purchased assets much harder for die-hard asset purchasers.

 

Any problems with the package manager UI aside, I'm glad the builtin web browser is finally gone. No use in trying to carry all of this baggage when others have developed browsers for everyone to use already.

 

Much improved and easier to use with the asset store in the package manager. Like the placement of where the images of the assets are as you can remember what that asset looks like among all the other "abandoned buildings".

 

Please explain, I didn't get your post.

 

Is there a way to have the search options - by title, category, subcategory as before? Having to hit the "load more" when you are trying to get to an asset with the letter T, S or the lower alphabet will take awhile.

If you're going to keep the web asset store, then the above may not be necessary if we can keep the search functions.

 

ok so the sort by update up arrow means newest first ... that didnt seem right, i also miss the can update option we used to have..

I just wanna +1 the miss the old asset load in the game even though you couldnt play youtube through it any more

PS it seems i have 998 assets, this is painful to work with in the package manager

 

Guys at Unity, please be aware that most people's issues here is not that you removed a legacy web renderer, but that you replaced it with something that is again, half-baked. Please someone tell me how this is good UX:

Managing assets in-editor previously:

Spoiler

Managing assets in-editor now, with all data that is no longer available via the top-level package manager hierarchy blacked out:

Spoiler

It's pretty simple... This is a massive UX regression and just makes it a total pain for those of us with a large number of assets. I am talking purely about the finding assets & importing step, the step that actually needs to happen in-editor.

Unity should add as much of this functionality back in as possible, at the very least the package manager should display small icons next to each asset to make them easily & quickly visually distinguishable. Imagine you're a developer without strong English skills, and you just have to wade through blocks of non-translated text now to find an asset that you could find in 10 seconds before via icon? Where is the accessibility in that?

 

It seems several years ago power in Unity was taken by programmers and now it's how they see it fits:
- Everything is modular & packages.
- As much text as possible, neatly organized in lists. And text search function to actually find something!
- A lot of different versions (3 rendering pipelines supported at once, etc) to mess with (and to land a job to 100+ fellow programmers to support all this).
- New features to develop picked by Math.Random XD.

This may bring some serious benefits, actually, but it seems another year needed to settle things down XD.

 

I'm puzzled, you actually liked the old approach where that unrelated bloat filled most of the screen space for no good reason? vs current tidy list?

There are things that annoy me in current PM setup but they would be easily fixable if PM team just gets their things together. Main issue with PM setup IMO is just simply that it doesn't load the whole list at once, I don't want to push 50 / 100 links to actually view the whole thing. But this has been discussed many times already in other threads.

Additionally I'd welcome the ability to be able hide your asset store items from PM interface (right now to keep the list manageable, you can hide useless assets on your account via web interface only - but changes also apply to PM's list).

 

It's not unrelated bloat, it's data. And no, I never said the old approach was perfect, it's not, and should probably show twice the items per unit on the screen.

But, things like knowing when the package was released last is valuable data.

Knowing the author of the package is valuable data in differentiating similar sounding packages.

Being able to easily toggle sorting options is valuable.

Being able to see and add labels easily is valuable.

Being able to instantly recognise packages without having to read each one's title is valuable.

"Current tidy list" is perfect if you're living back in 1995 in a command line, the majority of the Unity population (who don't even read these forums) however is not. The infinite scroll I agree, needs to be the first step in making PM vaguely usable.

 

Opening the Windows item then AssetStore tab is the same amount of clicks as to open your browser and click on your AssetStore favorite icon. The difference here is that you are going to use a well-optimized browser for that instead of a slow web-view. You can still choose the asset you want in the browser and click to open it in Unity (which send you to its location in the package manager).

 

I agree that the sorting options are valuable but I'd still rather see 50 items at once instead of 5 (which was my original point). I absolutely hate wasted screenspace like on the web interface. There's really no reason why PM couldn't have sorting capabilities so instead of wanting the old setup back, it would be more beneficial to all if we just gave the feedback to improve PM instead.

 

How will I become devepoler wihtout the asset store, noo!!!1!

 

One person's wasted screen space is another persons white space. As a designer we learn to use white space to enhance clarity. If the package manager UI was as useable as, and superior to, the asset store UI then the online store itself would use the PM interface as well, but it doesn't for good reasons. For many of us being forced to use the package manager to manage store assets is a sudden and unexpected step backwards in usability.

 

Are you saying everything which is pretty, but useless crap made by artists and everything which is ugly but actually useful is made by programmers? Or what?