[POLL] Are you stuck on Unity 4?

Hi!
I'm looking into the forthcoming development of Particle Playground. In Unity 5.3 the Shuriken particle system got a long awaited update which made it easier to extend upon. Some parts of Particle Playground could possibly be rewritten in the future to function more streamlined with the new Shuriken version and further development would overall be more efficient. As a transition phase my intent is to still support the old version of Shuriken to remain the Unity 5.0 - Unity 5.2 support, but possibly drop the Unity 4 support.

What I'd like to get some insight into is if you're unable to upgrade to Unity 5 during 2016, if so please write a post about why that is.

If you are stuck with Unity 4 and is looking forward to Particle Playground updates don't be alarmed just yet, whichever the results this won't be an overnight change.

 

Well, for those that are stuck because of missing features/bugs in Unity 5, we can't really tell you if we're going to upgrade in 2016, because it depends on what Unity does

 

I know, it's a vague phrasing and a bit difficult to foresee. Still, for me it's nice to get some sort of big picture on the matter to plan the development and it felt wrong to just use user statistics. My best guess would be that the biggest issue in transitioning between 4 to 5 would be editor functionality/bugs.

It's also nice to open up for a discussion while I'm peeking into the idea, if the idea is really crappy or not.

 

SWC is still in 4x, mostly because of no need to upgrade. We are in the process of prepping for a switch to 5ish, just to be proactive. For prototyping, other projects and personal projects, I use 5.3x. I've had almost no problems with it.

 

Wish I was stuck on Unity 4. I made the career suicide choice of agreeing to deliver using Unity 5.

 

Personally, I'm not stuck on Unity 4.x, but still: While working with Unity 5.3.1, I wouldn't be able to release _anything_ with that version. There are quite a few crucial bugs. If some patch release of 5.3 isn't going to be stable, I will probably have to go back to 5.1 or something like that.

 

Remember that polls like this will be heavily biased by the vast majority of non-Pro users using 5.x, simply because it gives more shiny stuff for free than 4.x ever did.

Pro users are likely to be more cautious about upgrading...

Working on a mobile game with a lot of baked lighting, moving to 5.x is going to be a massive pain even if there's no actual showstopping bugs (lightprobes were broken for many months, but may have been fixed in 5.3?) - having to re-set-up and rebake all the lighting for an entire game (using a system that many are struggling with, or reporting performance/stability problems with) isn't something to rush into unless there's a definite game from the 'upgrade'... but there's also the possibility/probability that we'd see a drop in overall performance.

Unless we can figure out some way to import lightmaps baked in 4.x intact into a 5.x project... but if that was practical, I'd kind of hope that the 4.x -> 5.x import process would have been able preserve the existing lightmaps/probes - which it didn't last time I experimented with it...

 

Seems very reasonable, thanks for the insight! It's also understandable that bigger projects has a more narrow turn rate. The general reason for upgrading in my daytime work is usually platform specific fixes/support, but then we're mostly working with mobile where IL2CPP requirements along with specific OS updates has lead the Unity updates. So far in our specific case > Unity 5 has been good to work with, apart from some stability issues in Unity 5.3.

It seems Unity 4 support should be around for a while for extensions in general, Unity is still updating and supporting it which is a really good case.