Package Manager not installing packages correctly in empty project

Hello,

I'm using Unity 2020.3.12f1 (personal) on a Macbook pro 2019 running MacOS Catalina 10.15.7.

This is happening in a brand new, empty project.

I'm having an issue where the package manager won't install packages correctly. I can download them, and then click Import, and It will copy the assets I need into the asset folder as expected. But the packages folder won't be updated, the packages-lock.json won't be updated, and the package manager window will not show the package as being installed. Not only does this make the project harder to manage, it's causing major problems when it comes to trying to build out to a device, because it's causing linker errors.

I've tried closing Unity, deleting packages-lock.json, and re-opening Unity (forcing it to be re-created), but this doesn't work.


UPDATE: Looking through older projects that had no problems, I'm seeing similar occurrence even across different version of Unity. It's possible that I didn't fully understand how Package Manager works?

 

You're describing what happens when you install Asset Store assets, not packages. The Asset Store doesn't support the package format yet, so they don't install into packages folder and packages.json. They install into Assets folder just like before.

 

Thank you for the response. Does that mean you cannot use the Package Manager to manage and uninstall asset store assets? You must find and remove all the files manually?

 

Yes. Currently it means you can and should install Asset Store assets through package manager and delete them manually. Just like before. In the future this will change AS team stated they are working on the Asset Store to be UMP-compatibility. (Obvious reasons they need to support both formats for a long time)