Unity 5.5 or 5.6?

Hi to all I'm starting a fresh new project, so I don't know whether to go with the current version 5.5 of unity ( I'm still on 5.4) or to wait unity 5.6? Any advice is appreciated

 

Get the latest version, and move on to 5.6 when it comes out. It won't be so much of a difference that upgrading is an issue.

 

That's what I thought. Thanks a lot!

 

Depends if you are doing mobile, if you are I wouldn't bother.

Read the forums, Unity's QA department is notoriously bad and they tend to release buggy versions that you have to constantly patch. Plus, often bugs that have been fixed will reappear in later versions. If you have a working version, stick with it unless you desperately need a new feature.

5.5 is probably the worse release since 5.0, it is unusable on the new mac book pro (crashes after every Android build). Full of bugs as noted in the forums. Not holding out much look for 5.6, the beta crashes all the time (Mac). The new features such as video player is very buggy or doesn't work most of the time (at all Android).

I'm using 5.4 which is quite stable

Windows version may be a different story

Make sure you back up your project!

 

No issues with 5.5 on macOS here, not even the "asset store window on Sierra is blank" problem. (It always works, docked or not.)

--Eric

 

I have had a very different experience with 5.5. I am on Windows 10, and not a Mac. In my case, Unity 5.5 has been the best version I've seen in years. Stable, fast, and included some key features for my needs. Mainly it included the Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced API method. The automated instancing in 5.4 does not work reliably. I absolutely love being able to manage the GPU instancing manually from my own code, so I love Unity 5.5.

 

I somewhat playing with the 5.6 beta version. I like some new tools such as progressive lightmapper, timeline. They pretty speed up the work, but they are still buggy. Also I see that global illumination have some changes

 

Safer to go with 5.5 release and upgrade to 5.6 when it is out of beta and is the current 'stable' release (Which we are aiming for be some-time this month).

 

I think it will be so! Thanks for the advice in any case

 

I think it appears that the mac version is not as stable as PC. I have the new macbook pro and I think they had some problems with that. However I am now on 5.5.2 and it's looking good.

- The Asset store now loads as mentioned above!
- No longer crashes when building to Android (Although the "Deploying Player" message hangs halfway until you lose its focus)
- Editor hasn't crashed for a while

Keeping my fingers crossed

 

Actully I will not prefer the new 5.6 version since I am using win 10, when I installed unity 5.6 I get lots of error. Like launcher error, Vuforia importing error, assets error, etc.

 

Just a heads up - if you’re doing VR either use Unity 5.5 or jump to Unity 2017.1.
I found 5.6 to have many issues with SPSR.

 

Here's a recent 2018 update (the year 2018, not the Unity version). I updated to 5.6.5.44118 (the last available Unity Editor for 32-bit systems), and have had nothing but problems with it. I was using 5.5.4f1, and most of the projects, assets, scripts and assemblies that worked perfectly with 5.5.4 no longer work with 5.6.5. One major issue is that Unity crashes every time any Standard Assets are imported. Also, Text Mesh Pro no longer works. Some DLL's are just throwing exceptions now. Unity crashes a lot now too. There's a lot more problems and issues also. I am going to switch back to 5.5.4 (or lower).
I tried to send a Bug Report but it took too long, but version 5 might not be a top priority anyways.
mattSydney made a good point about Unity releasing buggy versions and the frequent patching. Also, the patches include the full Unity Editor installation (not just the small patch to be applied to the Editor, like most software companies do), which means you have to have ample hard drive space for these gigabytes and gigabytes of patches, editors, packages and assets for that specific Unity version. For some reason, Unity has made a habit of releasing new versions that do not work well as the last version, and instead of fixing that version properly, they just release a newer version (which works even worse). For example, I started out with Unity 3, and everything worked great. I updated to Unity 4, a couple of minor things no longer worked the same way, but everything else worked great. Dynamic shadows worked great, my Unity never crashed once, and errors were minimal. However, since switching to Unity 5+, my dynamic shadows have never worked the same, and with most Unity 5 versions I've tried they don't work at all. Nothing on my computer has been changed except the update from 5.5.4 to 5.6.5, so I know it's Unity not my computer. I am an experienced programmer and have tried to get 5.6.5 working for two days, with no success. --Update: I tried 5.6.4 and it works.
PS, To Unity staff: I know you guys are busy, and you have built an amazing and versatile engine, so I appreciate your hard work.

 

https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases?version=5.6
Try if that helps your problem, and they are making 5.6.6, if your project depends on 5.x, better be hurry.

 

5.5 > 5.6 was a hell of a migration, took us several months with on and off work to move from 5.5, we even skipped 5.6 and released on 2017.2 instead

 

Thanks Lu4e, I'll try it. I finally was able to save up for a 64-bit system (still being shipped) so I'll try Unity 2017-2018 too.

-Also, for any one else having the same problems (Editor crashing, DLL errors, unusual script errors) with Unity 5.6.5, I tried version 5.6.4 and the DLL and script errors were fixed, TextMeshPro worked again, and the only thing wrong was that Unity would still crash when attempting to import Standard Assets. Unity 5.6.4 seemed to have a problem with importing Ethan's Occlusion texture, crashed, but then made a temporary asset for the texture and recovered from the crash after restart of Unity. Unity 5.6.5 was not able to create a temporary asset and would just crash again when you reloaded that project (until you deleted the Standard Assets folder), and it never gave a reason in the console (because it crashes as soon as you load the project). So 5.6.4 works well now.

 

this is why i usually dont upgrade a project unless there is some amazing new feature i need to have, which is usually never for me.

however i recently upgraded my project from 5.6.1f1 to the 2017 LTS version and I didn't even get any kind of script errors or anything.

 

Yes, I fully agree banreaxe! For now I'm on some 90% of the project and I don't touch anything until I'm finished. It is too risky and I put a lot of effort into it. So when I'm done, I will definitely start a new project with a new 2018 installation

 

I should have asked around the forum before I updated Unity versions, but I agree with you and salex1, and I will try out the new 2017 and 2018 versions. There are a lot of really great assets on the Asset Store, for Unity 2017 and up ONLY.
It turned out that 5.6.4 has a bunch of 'bugs' and I still get crashing issues (not as often as 5.6.6). I will have a 64-bit PC soon, and I am looking forward to taking trying out stuff like Cinemachine and the new Animator Timeline.

 

You can even move to 2018, 2017 > 2018 was pretty straight forward, substance break and shader forge break. Substance is fixed with a external plugin, be sure to google on how to migrate existing projects (Use Git so you can revert offcourse). Shader forge seems a bit harder, there is a git fork for 2018.

There is probably other things that break for others, but that was the things that broke for us, though I have only done initial testing and also ran our automated tests, need todo a full regression test

 

Thanks, I was hoping I could avoid Shader Forge, but Substance might have given me issues, I'll get the plug-in.

 

The plugin seem to work pretty well, but I just have a few substance materials. If you have mask textures you need to remove compressesion for them, I guess if you have alot it will affect the size of the game

 

Thanks, I noticed about the compression already with some sprites being scrambled if compression was on.