Unity 5.0 Beta (9)

Just got the Unity3d Pro 5.0 beta 9 today.
pros:
-great features as always, still looking at all the changes now...i especially like the multi-scene, gui canvas features and the audio feature right away
-stable editor and assets import from local machine (when available for me) and basic features as advertised on tin
-still checking it out more all day today...
-projects created in cloud like dropbox and git-svn'd runs good and speedy
-works good for my workflow as carry-over from 4.6

cons:
-immediately, I had lots of trouble with assets scripts conversion. too much time waste
-i went with brand new project and imported
-crashes lots in importing assets from asset store, more than usual even in 4.6
-asset store access is slower than it was in 4.6
-needs more work to polish obviously as expected from a beta release
-not all assets publishers have updated their code to be 100%-compatible with 5. sticky situation for us wheo need this unfortunately. so, code massage is necessary for me.

my system is same:
macbookpro 2011 OSX 10.9.5 Mavericks, 16gb ram, 500gb hdd, storage in cloud and runs good and fully backed up and optimized with mackeeper

I hope to build bunch of stuff today and into this week and hopefully all's well (fingers crossed ;-)
Happy dev'ing everyone! Bless
Ciao!
Lis

 

Although its clear that some asset developers had early beta access, I'm not at all surprised that a lot of asset store stuff doesn't play that well with Unity 5 at this stage.

Unfortunately due to the number of asset store developers who seem to lose interest in updating their products, even whilst still offering them for sale, a major release like Unity 5 is going to have the side-effect of showing users which assets they can rely on to be updated in a timely fashion and which ones aren't going anywhere in a hurry.

 

Yeah, I noticed this immediately when I noticed that skyshop didnt work in 5. Very disappointed so far.

 

Well I didn't mean to imply that I have yet formed any negative opinions about asset developers as a result of Unity 5 compatibility issues. I really wouldn't expect many to work right now, at least ones that involve rendering, lighting or shader systems.

Certainly I rewarded one developer whose asset was already updated to work with the important new lighting & reflection stuff in 5 by becoming a customer on the strength of it (Time Of Day). But I don't think I'll start moaning at anyone who fails to move with the times until at least the end of this year, and even then I'm inclined to think of Unity 5 as a separate platform to build stuff with, rather than a simple upgrade that I should expect all my existing assets to work with. But thats probably in part because I've long since tried to comes to terms with the fact that when I buy from the asset store, I'm not getting any sort of guarantee about future updates. It's far from ideal, but I don't know what Unity could do about this issue, it's not in their control.

 

it is, buts theres plenty of room for improving the asset store itself
mostly to do with managing customer expectations through less promise and more upfront facts

for example clicking the version link for release notes could be a list of posts linked to each updated release,,
as some developers don't keep previous release information.
then have a number next to the version and date for "Updates in the last Y months: X times"?

also better user tools, maybe badges/ tags voting system, like "great support" , "updates frequently", "works as advertised", "overpriced", "over-promose"

taking the rating system info and using it in a better way, parse the info for repeated phrases??, so info is at a glace rather then read 5 or more reviews..

competitors, would be nice to have a way of voting up groups of assets that directly compete with each other, assets with same core functionality

 

kool!
running 5beta on yosemite (osx 10.10) on a macbookpro i7 2.7GHz 16gb.
no issues except the slow loading of the asset store plug...
having to ck code again from diff devs and again for compile errors...expected.

i don't expect this to be resolved for at least another 3-6 months easy imho.

back to design, coding and dev'ing...just solve it is my outlook.

happy hunting and happy halloween/allhallowseve/etc... (whichever u prefer ;-) ;-)
ciao!
lis

 

I would never expect asset publishers to fully support Beta releases. I personally have been ensuring Unity 5 compatibility since early on with the exception of WebGL which is a whole new monster and I don't yet have JSON .NET supporting it.

That being said, most publishers do not have access to these releases. I was very fortunate to get early access as it was a very limited group. And even now, it's only available to those who pre-ordered so asset developers who only rely on Unity Free still have no ability to even verify compatibility. I would reserve judgement until after public release and then see how quickly they move to get updated.

 

I find the new beta 5 to be a lot faster in loading the asset store (lots of assets) which is an immediate plus. Also had issues converting my current project and decided to toss it and build from scratch (oh well). In making a new project, I had some issues with the terrain tool in that it kept complaining about the texture resolution and spamming info messages to my console every time I used a terrain brush. I did find a texture that was above my 512 limit, but even changing the max size only took effect after I quit and restarted Unity.

I am not too hung up on performance for it being a beta and happy that it installs to a seperate directory, but the current build is certainly quite prone to freezing and hanging - saving at 15 min intervals is suddenly important for me

On the plus side, I found some issues with assets and informed the devs of the problems. Most were very responsive to the feedback and while we cannot expect the asset store devs to have sorted all issues, the beta is a great opportunity for early adopters to at least inform a dev that there is an issue.

Thank you, Unity - I really like the new version and the added detail available for things like materials is fantastic.