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Updating Unity without fresh installation

Discussion in 'Editor & General Support' started by XsongyangX, Dec 30, 2020.

  1. XsongyangX

    XsongyangX

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    Hello, I'm wondering how I can update my unity editor without installing a new one each time there is an update. Any tips?
     
  2. Kurt-Dekker

    Kurt-Dekker

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    That doesn't make any sense. That's like asking "How can I buy a new car without buying a new car."

    What are you trying to do?
     
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  3. Joe-Censored

    Joe-Censored

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    You should install a new version of Unity if there is a new feature or bug fix needed in one or more of your projects. If you're installing every new version simply because the version number is higher, you're wasting your time and bandwidth for hardly any benefit.
     
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  4. XsongyangX

    XsongyangX

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    It would be nice if this was delivered in patches like in League of Legends. So time could be saved.
     
  5. Kurt-Dekker

    Kurt-Dekker

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    Time downloading a new version of Unity is TINY compared with how much time you will waste if you do this every day and it breaks your project in mysterious and unexplained ways.

    As Uncle Joe says above, don't upgrade unless you NEED it, or perhaps if you want to give your free time to Unity to help them test their bugs.
     
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  6. XsongyangX

    XsongyangX

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    Thank you for the replies. :) <3
     
  7. Joe-Censored

    Joe-Censored

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    A patch system makes sense for something like League of Legends because there is a predictable update path, and you've got just 1 installation. You're always expected to be on the latest, so the patches can be just diffs of the previous version. With Unity it is completely normal to have a wide variety of versions installed at the same time, to make large jumps between versions, and to install them out of order.

    While a patch system isn't impossible, it would be far more complicated, creates a new opportunity for bugs, and isn't nearly as important for Unity's target audience as compared to an ESports title. Unity is a professional level development tool, and software dev professionals typically have excellent internet and plenty of storage. Unity currently is maintaining 4 public and independent branches instead of just 1 (2018.4.x, 2019.4.x, 2020.2.x, and 2021.1 beta), a good portion of the engine has been moving to packages with their own independent release cycles, branches, and supported editor versions.

    I'm sure the company weighed the rather limited up side against the potential downside in their decision on how installs work.
     
  8. Kurt-Dekker

    Kurt-Dekker

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    THIS... if LoL fails an update, well, I guess I'll play another game tonight.

    If Unity did auto-update and my company was making $1 million a day and now I suddenly can't update my game... that gets expensive really quickly.
     
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  9. Joe-Censored

    Joe-Censored

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    I was also thinking how if you run into a Unity bug, suddenly not just the version you are using is important, but also the version you were upgrading from. You will eventually run into update issues where when a new version is released, many people have no problems, but a small number who happened to update from a specific previous version are hitting some bug. This type of bug can be extremely difficult for QA to reproduce and track down.

    With the potential spiderweb of upgrade paths Unity would have, instead of the straight line in LoL, this could easily become a complete support nightmare for a rather trivial savings in bandwidth to most Unity users. Do we want Unity throwing resources on improving shaders, improving HDRP, improving networking? Or do we want Unity redirecting much of that to a complicated patch system so devs with OCD can keep the highest version number every 2 weeks for minimal bandwidth?
     
  10. Kurt-Dekker

    Kurt-Dekker

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    Without even knowing anything about LoL I bet they have a really hairy migration matrix for testing changes and upgrades!

    They just have the luxury of being able to store 100% of user data on their own database, so they can test 100% of the codepath on 100% of the userbase if they so choose, before ever releasing to the public.
     
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  11. IARI

    IARI

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    A Simple solution solution to avoid the "spider-web of upgrade paths" Problem would be to only allow smaller incremental upgrades within a version. Of course it would be desirable to stay on the latest version of an LTS support.
    I can imagine that an update from Unity 2020.3f0 to 2020.3f1 should not be a huge problem.
    The motivation/use cases are clear too.

    And why are we even comparing to something like LoL? Other Production tools and programs can do it too.
    IDE's are professional development tools - jetbrains does it too, and it works: I have been using the ides for ~8 years, never had a failed update.

    I believe the reason that incremental updates are not a thing is not, that they shouldn't be or wouldn't make sense - the problem is the nature of unity itsself, and that could very well change, but not over night.
    The one fundamental problem of unity is that is just too big and monolithic. They have to work on that, and thankfully they do. The package manager as a feature has been long overdue, something like that should have been there a lot longer.
    Features are hopefully moved bit by bit form the core into their own packages.

    If they actually go through with as far as it is possible, t wouldn't surprise me if we could see some sort of incremental updates down the road at some point.
     
    Last edited: Mar 24, 2021
  12. Kurt-Dekker

    Kurt-Dekker

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    Let me correct that for you: it's the problem of software itself and has nothing to do with Unity.

    It doesn't matter how small an update is. If you change ONE SINGLE BIT of an executable, you risk wrecking it for somebody. Software is funny like that. It's not like "oh yeah, it sorta works, like 99% of the way."

    It's binary. It either works for you, or it fails for you, and one lousy bit out of place can make the difference.

    And nowadays you don't even have to change the software to break it. Any one of these things will instantly and irrevocably break software:

    - update your OS so that your software doesn't work (MacOSX Big Sur for instance)
    - Apple or Google changes policy, making your current build invalid
    - someone changes the way a critical back end server works
    - change the way the application is signed by the appstore(s)

    etc.

    That's why we don't futz about with automatic updates. As I said, if Unity were to break my company's revenue stream because they fatfingered an automatic update, I have ZERO recourse and I'm out of business.

    My recourse is that I tell all 190 of my employees, "Sorry, you're unemployed now, go home. Auto-update broke our game."

    Was that "incremental update" worth it?
     
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  13. IARI

    IARI

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    We have also experienced half of these 4 things you mentioned.

    Basically what I understand you're saying is that
    "There's lots of little things, each of which can break software - why add another one?"

    But I still think that this sentiment is way too broad.

    I don't see why incremental update would break Unity for you or any of your employees - you don't have to use it, just download the whole thing. Or just don't update and stay on LTS.

    And then again in my experience software is simply not always the same, and it absolutely depends on the company and the product. Some products just struggle more with these issues, others less.