Official Unity 2021 LTS Is Now Available

Cannot build for WebGL (URP) due to shader errors

Shader error in 'Hidden/Universal/CoreBlit': invalid subscript 'positionCS'
Shader error in 'Hidden/kMotion/CameraMotionVectors': SV_VertexID semantic is not supported on GLES 2.0 at line 11 (on gles)

 

I really cannot get why the Unity Github example projects are not updated to the 2021 LTS release before doing the LTS release.

• SpaceShipDemo

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/SpaceshipDemo

- latest update was to 2021.2.

• HDRP Raytracing scenes
  
  https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/HDRPRayTracingScenes

- latest update was to 2021.2.

• FontainebleauDemo
  
  https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/FontainebleauDemo/branches

...

By doing so (and trying to build these) you would see in what state 2021.3 LTS really is.
In special the shader compiler issues and the state of DX12 vs DX11 in HDRP.


Some questions i "hope" to get an answer:

What´s the reason behind not updating small minimal unity demo projects before?

What´s the reason by not providing complex, real world scenario with an LTS release like the UE Demo city?

'What´s the reason to not have automated Benchmark statistics for build times, render performance,.... across releases and Vulkan, DX11, DX12....?

What´s the reason behind delivering marketing flattened release notes like?
https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/2021.3.0

What´s the reasons to upload all the resulting mess and resulting time loss to your customers?
For an Tech Stream release, ok.
Obviously we have to live with it.
But for an LTS release?

Automated test scenarios like the HDRP tests with sphere´s, donuts and cubes and minimal example projects seems to be not enough these days..

 

I've looked at unreal 5 official videos and they strongly advise to update projects to the latest engine version. I'm still new to that engine and I don't know how likely it is to break everything if one does this. But I have experience with unity, and you do not want to update! IF your project works right now. Chances to break some stuff immediately or after hours of development down the line are quite high.

 

I found the source of the jerkiness I was experiencing:
I'm updating the physics engine manually on LateUpdate by the delta time of the last frame, and it was working smoothly up until Unity 2021LTS.
Now the slight variations in delta time from a frame to the next are making the physics engine skip frames and act jerky.
Is this the expected behavior @LeonhardP @Tautvydas-Zilys ?
There was no info about changes in the physics engine in the release notes that I have seen.

edit: setting a fixed time step while manually updating the physics engine makes it go smoothly, but then the physics slow down or speed up when the actual render frame rate changes.

edit2: on the plus side, physics on fixed update are less jerky than on 2020LTS, so I can just use fixed update like everyone else instead,

 

ty this helped

 

Polybrush Vertex Paint on FBX meshes seams broken?

 

Hey, I was really psyched for the new release. Opened my project (backup so nothing lost) and it crashed saying I had under 1gb storage space. After that project got corrupted. When I open now a new HDRP scene it looks either black (without any assets) or like this... any idea why? 2020 LTS works like a charm.

 

Unity Hub suggests installing Intel version of Editor instead of Apple Silicon version by default. Not a huge deal but might confuse some people owning M1 devices.

 

This is why you should always backup your project - either manually or via version control - before you update. Even Unity advises this as seen on the very first post of this thread, their Download archive page, etc.
.

 

Editor and Player. Although only noticeable on low frame rates (<60)
I was doing that to avoid some jerkiness between physics controlled objects and update controlled objects that was impossible to fix by other means like interpolation.
Now I switched everything to Fixed Update and it's working good, but there is clearly something weird going on with the manual physics update that wasn't happening before on Unity 2020LTS.
Sadly, I don't have the time to make a full repro project and fill a bug report, so I'll just use Fixed Update for now.

EDIT: nope, I had to return to manually update the physics engine on late update because using FixedUpdate just doesn't cut it for smooth movement, interpolation enabled or not.
It seems like Unity 2021LTS physics interpolations are much more sensitive to jerkiness between physics updates than Unity 2020LTS (either that or deltaTime has spikes now), so in the end I had to filter out the delta times between regular updates for spikes along several frames and then manually update the physics engine myself on LateUpdate with that filtered out deltaTime aaand... it's working smoothly and lovely now. Even with jerky frame rates, all movements are smoooth now, physics and non-physics alike

 

it is, in fact an empty, brand new 2021LTS project. the editor profiler just keeps telling me that:

ApplicationReload > AssetDatabasev2.RefreshInternal > AssetDatabase.V2.ImportOutOfDateAssets>
ReloadAsseblies>ReloadAssebly
takes ages.

I don't think that's something we can fix

 

Sorry to hear people having problems with this but I'm just chipping in to say that at least for me 2021.3 seems to work just great.

Compile times seems faster.

Nothing broken for me.

Thanks Unity Team.

 

Same for me: after a bumpy upgrade, all is fine and the editor and build speed improvements are easily worth the hassle.
I only use the built-in render pipeline though, so your mileage may vary for SRPs.

Edit: LOL NO, the editor keeps crashing at me...

 

URP seems fine since ~2021.2.10 builds, been using it in production since. Also new rendering debugger ON DEVICE is a breath of fresh air in finding out what causes framedrops/flickering/whatever artifacts on screen. According to other posts, main issues are Library folder + HDRP (?) + addressables 1.19

 

I had this problem. If you look in task manager you will probably see that Unity has stopped responding.
I fixed this by reimporting all assets from the asset menu. After that I closed and re-opened Unity, and I could enter play mode again.

 

Seriously though, just delete the whole "Library" folder inside the project and let Unity rebuild it anew and reimport everything, otherwise you'll have problems in the long run: I've had weird issues in the past because of this, and I have been upgrading the same project since Unity 2017...

Every time I think it will be alright without deleting the library folder, I end up having hours of issues only to finally having to delete that damn folder and reimport again to finally fix it.
I don't know why Unity isn't doing that by default when upgrading to a new whole version. That would get rid of 99% of user's upgrade issues.

 

Cool, cool but its an empty brand new 2021 project. Ive got like 10 scripts in it now and this „reload script assemblies“ pops up on every little script change and stay for a bunch of seconds (randomly between 5 and 20 seconds, or forever til i kill unity aswell)

 

I don't know how to say this in any other way. this editor freezing for short or long period of time is an issue that is known to the devs but that was never fixed. Some people have this issue and they can't do nothing about it. I've lost two years behind this thing because I didn't knew it existed. I lost track of how many times I've created a new project and reimported/moved assets from the broken project because the editor decided to freeze for 10 minutes at the time.

I finally figured out that unity as a company don't care about small developers that use the free option of their engine. They provide help only to paid pro users if those users have enough seats to justify talking with them. I've said this on forums and unity team said it was not true and then finally kind of accepting (my impression) that I may be right when I've pointed out that this is stated in the benefits of paying the pro version.

What I wanted to do more than two years ago was to start understanding the editor, see if I can build the game I want, and then pay for the monthly subscription. Unfortunately I never got past the two steps as in a month in average I would spend half the time figuring out how to fix bugs. It still boil my blood right now thinking about it.

You are fine if you build small 2D games but you will get into a lot of troubles when dealing with HDRP setup. Is broken.

You may think I'm stupid/beginner and I don't know how to use the editor. There is some part of truth about this, but this doesn't explain that in the past one month that I've switched to unreal I've had no issues. I've managed to set up something advanced that actually works. I'm not a fan of unreal over unity, I hate the interface in unreal 4 and I clearly see that unreal 5 copied the unity user interface. So this is not a fanboy thing.

Is sad and infuriating that unity is in this state and instead of investing in stuff that works they build half baked concepts that requires the user figuring out complex stuff that is above our head. And those modules build by unity don't work with each other.

For example, I've asked unity team if I can use a skeleton ingame animation as reference for other skeletons. For example you have one character as a fbx file and you want to add a piece of clothing on top of it. That piece of clothing is a different fbx file with a similar but not the same skeleton. It needs to match the parent fbx skeleton animation. They said it can't be done. Ok, yet I've actually managed to do this and got this working in unity after two months of understanding how this works. That was not easy for me. Maybe someone that knows what he is doing would had figured out this in a few hours. Like someone from unity dev team that said it can't be done.

Then I've move to unreal and I see they have ONE blueprint node that does this to me automatically. ONE damn node that was already created by the devs there that could had saved me two months of work.

Instead of learning how a game engine works at the core I would had build the game. I've spent too much time trying to make the engine work than actually building a game. it was exhausting.

Sorry for the rant.

I really hate all this issue about the state of unity, I was thinking that maybe they don't have the funding of epic games so that was something one needs to deal with, but then I read they paid billions to peter jackson for the outdated weta tools that no care about. like really? get those billions and pay some devs to fix the editor freezing for minutes just because you have clicked on an object. no excuse then, you had the money to make it work.

 

The rest of the rant is... debatable. But this up here is hands down 100% true.
And I have a feeling that the actual devs developing Unity agree too.
Spending all that money == resources in buying some random company not directly related to make your current product better is a classical corporate dick move.

 

Ok
Forget all the good things I said about this new LTS version: the editor is now constantly crashing randomly on me.
When compiling, when entering or exiting game mode... there is always a chance for the editor to crash.
The builds don't crash though, only the editor, but that makes development a nightmare.

I made a bug report with all the dumps, but I just can't wait months for someone to look at it.

Unity 2021LTS is NOT ready for release, Unity 2020LTS never crashed on me.

What's the point of Unity LTS if we must be beta-testing it the same as the tech-stream version?

 

So...
it seems the crashes happen when you execute code in OnValidate()

Any code that raises a warning of type "SendMessage cannot be called during Awake, CheckConsistency, or OnValidate" WILL crash Unity 2021LTS randomly when reloading the scripts or changing from edit to play mode.

Notice that I never use SendMessage anywhere in my code.
The non exhaustive list of things that make Unity generate this warning when executed from OnValidate() are:

- Creating a GameObject
- Adding a new Component to a GameObject
- Changing the layer of a GameObject
- Reparenting a GameObject
- using GetComponent or derivatives
- Transform.Find()

Also notice that this list of things are executed correctly when called from OnValidate(), but generate a bizarre warning and somehow corrupt the editor until it crashes.
It's important to notice that this warning has been appearing for years on other Unity versions (at least since 2016) but never crashed the editor until Unity 2021 LTS

There is also traces of this bug having been reported and checked as "fixed" when in reality it wasn't.

@LeonhardP talked about this warning as early as 2016 in this thread.
Seems like this bug was never really fixed and instead has grown into something much more serious.

Edit:
There is something more going on: even getting rid of all code executed in OnValidate() doesn't completely prevent crashes.
When on play mode, Unity may forget the reference of some components previously cached!
In the last crashes I'm having, the log clearly shows Unity spontaneously losing track of component references and leading to a crash. (details in the bug report additional notes)

Seriously though, does anyone actually test the Tech Stream Unity releases??
What's even the point of tech stream vs LTS when we have to beta test LTS releases?

 

the post above exemplifies exactly what I'm talking about. atomicjoe become an expert on how the editor works at extremely technical levels instead of working on his game. I'm assuming here your goals are to create your game not debug the editor.

this is a very slippy sloop I always seem to fall on, "oh an error, hmm, what could be, hmm let me check this and that! and look at this point, is doing this!" and.......... the day is gone and no work done

 

This is it.
I'm rolling back my project to Unity 2020 LTS, and that may very well be the last Unity version I use.
This new 2021 LTS version has not only broken my project, but also Bakery, Rewired and god knows what else.
I'm losing faith in Unity by the minute, and I'm a Pro tier paying user.
Let me explain why:

If this was an alpha or even a beta release, I could understand it, but this is not a beta or an alpha, this is a version Unity has matured for more than a year and is supposed to have been alpha, beta and final release tested.

THIS is what Unity seriously think is a MATURE, STABLE, TRUSTWORTHY, RELIABLE, PRODUCTION READY version of its engine.

It took me only two days to experience all this crashing, show stopper bugs, not even speaking about the nightmarish upgrade process from the 2020LTS version.
Did NO ONE, EVER, for more than A YEAR, notice ANY of that?

I don't trust Unity anymore.
I don't trust this to be the engine I'm shipping my game on.

That's it.

 

After 5 days i deinstalled 2021.3.0f1.

Don t get me wrong. I prepared in serveral weeks 6 of my 2020 LTS projects so that they run fine in 2021.2.19f1.
After upgrading to 2021.3.0f1,

• 5 of them are not buildable
• all of the have build times raised up tp several hours (addressables build and build)
• all of the are crashing in editor

I checked on 3 PC s because initially was thinking the installed editor version is broken. Did also complete reimports of all projects after a while.

These 6 projects are mainly independent.
DX11 HDRP DXR, DX12 HDRP DXR, HDRP DX11, ranging from 280GB to 50GB in size.

So for me it seems this "LTS" release was auto packed from the outlook calendar to match a release date without any real world testing and the thinking.... lets push all "open problems" inside now. We have 2 years of time to fix these.

None of the small example projects (Raytracing scenes, Space Ship Demo,.... )on github are updated and tested in this release.
And i think an official large, real world example project is not available out of these reasons.

QA, not ok and seems to be completly offloaded to the users.

2021.3.0f1 LTS (L ow T ested S erve)

During the same time. 5 days. During waiting on the Unity shader compiler , I built several times the UE5 city demo on another PC and extended it with own high res car, archviz and free megascan assets. No problems and i am mainly in Unity the last 4 years.

So 5 day of crasehs, wating on compilers vs 5 days of productive progress.

 

Reload Script Assemblies and the Shader compiler in Unity 2021.3.0f1 are placed on mars now and are operating directly with Earth via the extremly slow data transfers rates — only 32 kilobits per second — so using the orbiters remains the best option.

The Unity PLM and Adressable teams are moved out of our solar system (secret location because of best in class tech) so they are several months behind the development and cannot afford to test in bigger datasets because transfering them is to expensive.
Next sync should be in several months. A real world test scene (300GB) is sent from earth via dots powered rockets and is currently on a swing by gravity assist manoveure to gain up some speed at jupiter.

Unfortuately they forgot to implement the landing system before launch, so scene streaming, on demand asset streaming, crossFading of LODs and many more features needed to land it are still in planing phase.

 

at least 2021 dont have memory leaks as 2020. for me works good so far.but my projects are simple

 

... for me this feels like a memory leak,

(Filename: Library/PackageCache/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@12.1.6/Editor/BuildProcessors/HDRPPreprocessShaders.cs Line: 775)

d3d12: upload buffer was full! Waited for COPY queue for 0.000 ms.
d3d12: failed to wait for fence (258).
D3D12Fence::Wait(1879) error: got 1878. Possible device removal.
D3D12Fence::Wait(1879) error: got 1878. Possible device removal.
Crash!!!

One of more than 10 anoying 2021.3.0f1 crash messages.

 

Hii , I have upgraded to Unity 2021.3 LTS version and there are some good improvements but there are some points which i think are really frustrating.

- Editor is too slow .Everytime, i play, pause or stop , it takes 10-15 seconds . I asked about this problem in other thread in the forum and someone gave me a solution. It is effective but not 100%.

- The second issue is. DROP IN FRAMERATE. I was working on a game and it was smooth..no lag but after i Upgrade to 2021.3 Lts, game is so laggy in mobile Device. I checked their Framerate , It is 30fps which was 59-60fps before. then I thought , may be game is too complex so i made a simple test game (Cube moves forward on touch) but the problem is same(30 Fps) .and Unfortunately i have not made a copy of my project before Upgrade.

 

now that you have mentioned this. You know what sealed the deal for unreal? When they said they tested the 5 version in fortnite.

If they risked using the new version for a game where if something is broken they may potentially lose 15 millions dollars a day, then you know they are not joking, they really trust the engine.

but I'm done, I know this may be out of place talking about unreal on the unity forum. I've tested the moderators patience enough.

 

I think that your mobile phone is limitinhg the frame rate to 30fps which is common thing...

 

I dont think so. I have tested same APKs with previous version of unity on the same Mobiles(redmi 6A and one plus 3T) yesterday and Frame rate was 60fps.

 

Have you checked that there aren't errors thrown on the device now for some reason?
Those can often be the cause of such massive drops.

 

yes, I have checked and i also made a test project with two line of code. It also Showing 30FPS. Now I am Installing previous version of Unity and hopefully will show the difference between the builds .

 

This is common Android behavior.
Put this in your code:

Code (CSharp):

1. QualitySettings.vSyncCount =  0;
2. Application.targetFrameRate = Screen.currentResolution.refreshRate;
3.  

 

Okay, i will try but what about stuttering or lagging ? My game also become so laggy after Upgrade. I hope , This solution will work.Thanks.

 

I was having issues with stuttering physics on this release too. I'm NOT defending Unity 2021 in any way!

 

I know , you are just trying to help.

 

unity limited to 30fps i think. and it was all 2021 versions as i remeber or even 2020

 

I got 60fps with 2020 version.

 

They changed how you set the frame rate on Android for 2021. Just set application targetframerate.

 

Not working and game is still laggy.

 

This must not be happening if u were not facing any issues in 2021.2... plz submit a bug report

 

I have already submitted the bug report and the previous version i used was 2020.3.33f1.

 

I am also having many problems with this release, I updated my project since unity 5 to every major release except for 2021 and literally never had any problems. Yesterday I upgraded it from 2020 lts to this one and cant believe how much this feels like an alpha release.

1: The terrain inspector is completely bugged and I am not using any third party asset, it only shows up half the time and the other time its only partially visible and throws a lot of errors in the console.

2: Also I had to include Nature/Terrain/Standard in my always included shaders, otherwise calling "Shader.WarmupAllShaders()" would crash the editor completely - I had this line of code in there since Unity 5 and have not changed the terrain shader

3: The game mode performance is also noticeably slower, I have not tried the build yet though.

4: And also, the new ui is even worse than the 2020 one. I am on the bright theme and there is 0 contrast in the icons - who even comes up with this. Yeah sure lets go from black - white to grey - white to light blue - white contrast, that will make it better. And also while we're at it lets just remove ALL the shading from everywhere. Also the icons in general are so detailed now and there is no color or shading to them, making them just so hard to actually use. I am navigating the editor now by trying to remember where the button was that I want to use instead of looking for the button as the icon is so much harder to read, same case with components, I only look at the text. This goes for the entire editor, please give us an option to let us use custom icons.

You ruined the entire editor with your oh everything has to be modern and clean and there can't be any color or shading and simply copied popular design trends without actually thinking - in the fear it wont look professional but forgot this is a game engine and not a business app.

5: Also, having the account name in the top left at all times is so unnessecary. Why did you remove the icons that you always need which also had great ux and have been there forever. These two new buttons are pretty much never used and should just be in the help top section.


I have posted this before, but just look at this image, I guess it speaks for itself.


Unity went from a fun, friendly and inviting looking game engine to a characterless much more complicated to use and look at generic program with 0 identity or soul. This is also reflected in the new logo which has no movement in it like the old one which resembled a 3 dimensional moving dice (remember this is a game engine?) now its just a static, lifeless, 2 dimensional cube that could probably be the logo for a moving company.

If the ui and ux department want some inspiration on how to make an easy to use and nice to look at editor, here you go
This is Unity 5. With shading on buttons and input/object fields. With coloured and shaded icons that were readable at a glance. With contrast throughout all menus.

How your tools look and feel will influence the outcome of what you create with them.

What will a child draw when all of their pencils are colourful and have the color the individual pencil actually draws in, versus what will they draw when all of their pencils are colored pitch black?
What if the room they draw it in is also grey and outside its night instead of full of warm sunlight shining on their sheet of paper and they can look outside and see the sky.

I will go back to 2020.3, how was this version approved for release, both bug and ux wise?

 

I have an Oculus Quest project which was working OK for play-in-editor on Quest 1 (through Oculus Link) in 2021.2.15. It now seems to get stuck in 2021.3.0 (looks like it is trying to run through SteamVR, this never happened before); anyone else seeing this?

Could submit my complete 320 MB project zip file in a bug report but not sure I want to do that, will try to simplify and submit a minimal example. Guessing if it's a real bug, a lot of people running into it already.

 

I've been trying to migrate an HDRP project from 2020.3.26 to this new 2021.3.0 version, but I get this window:



When I click on "Ok", the project re-imports for another 30min and then it crashes.

 

Some Forum threads who document the current issues since years/months:

Why is DX12 so much slower than DX11?
https://forum.unity.com/threads/why-is-dx12-so-much-slower-than-dx11.841903/page-3

Dramatic slowdown of build process

https://forum.unity.com/threads/dramatic-slowdown-of-build-process.1236976/#post-8049998

Build time taking almost a day - URP

https://forum.unity.com/threads/build-time-taking-almost-a-day-urp.1133605/#post-7991574

same in HDRP for all my projects.


The reactions in the forums vary from "officially there exists no problem" and yes, we know but send us an bug report we have no time to test in own Unity projects.

 

Final observation who should be legit:

Comparing:

• build process overall
• dx11/dx12 render performance

• render feature set, HDRP got very close and in case of DXR implementation even tops. But out of DX12 perfomance issues not usable.

• world streaming

vs the competitor Unity 2021 LTS marks an early alpha state.
Meantime the LTS development logic seems to be used as "safe harbour" statement for not further need to optimize the core functionalty/issues by not allowing api changes to fix/optimize these.