Upgrade version button + other feedbacks

I don't know if it had been suggested or not, but I love checking for new version every morning and read patch notes with my coffee and breakfast. Could you add a notification badge on each version? Something like this :



I don't know if someone will hate the social counter, maybe make it able to go off in preferences.

And also a menu in that vertical ... that leads you to that version's release note would be very helpful After pressing the upgrade and uninstall the old one, the ... should lead to the new version's release note while it downloads. Thank you.

2. If the project page is intelligence enough to dig Player Settings/UPM package.json and figure out my game's app icon to display on the list that would be the best.. I like how there is a repo icon on SourceTree's main menu so I know where to click. Especially that I have a lot of open source repo, now the same thing is happening in Unity that I have more and more open source UPM project on the list. It would even be ok if this icon selection process is manual per project.

3. The 2D template inside New might as well be called "Empty" and just uncheck the 2D button on the Scene tab. I have not seen many apps without an explicit "Empty" like this, and the real 2D template should come with more stuff.

4. Please remember my choice as I always choose 2D (Empty) to make a new project in order to make a reproduce project for reporting bugs.

5. This "Retry" button while doing invalid downgrade is confusing since it doesn't really retry opening the project.



Expected behaviour : try the same routine that leads to this popup again if I don't take any action to fix the project. (Which I will go delete my manifest.json before pressing Retry)

Actual behaviour
2019.2 -> 2019.1 : Nothing happen. You have to Alt+tab to the hub and retry by yourself.
2019.2 -> 2018.4 : It opens the old launcher. I then have to retry by clicking the current top entry.

Neither is an expected meaning of "Retry" button.

 

I very much agree about the upgrade notifications in Hub, I think it would be a good addition and exactly the type of feature you'd expect to see in a launcher/installation management utility like Unity Hub.

As for the other ideas, perhaps you could start separate threads about them and keep this one about the new version notifications? It'll be hard to discuss so many different things in one thread.

 

@5argon, thanks for feedback. Separate threads would help for the discussion but I will try my best tackle a few of your points.

1) New install notifications. This is on our radar as an improvement to the Hub v2 design (align with various organizational improvements the Install tab > Add list). No ETA yet but we do recognize that the Hub v2 makes it more of a manual task to know when new versions of the Editor are available.

As far as upgrading+automatically uninstalling the Editor release. This has been a widely discussed topic before, and unfortunately there is no unanimous decision on best practices (some want the keep multiple versions of patch releases side by side, others want to upgrade/uninstall). If we were to address this request, we would need to keep options for both. Currently it's not part our short term priorities

2) If I understand your request, you're looking for a way to either automatically or manually associate a visual icon to identify your projects? I'm not sure if I fully understand the UPM correlation though so any additional points there would help

3/4) noted, thank you.

5) Project downgrade /retry. I believe what you're experiencing is failure for the Unity Packgage Manager (UPM) to successfully add/remove the correct packages&versions to your project's package manifest. downgrading in UPM is not a supported function unfortunately; especially with older Editor releases where there was less functionality available in packages. In the case from your screenshot above, the UI dialogue 'retry' should actually not be an option. I will discuss more with the team...

Thanks,
Daniel

 

Regarding upgrading+automatically uninstalling the Editor (basically replacing the existing installation or not), perhaps an easy way could simply be to show a notification about the new available version linked to the existing installation closest to it (or same major version), and then in the install steps simply offer a choice to replace the old installation or to add a new separate one. Hub could then recommend one or the other based on if this is a major update that will likely break some things and require some re-work (like 2018.x to 2019.x) which would recommend a separate install so you can keep your old editor in case you want to go back. Or it could recommend replacing the installation for smaller updates (like 2019.2b3 to 2019.2b4), where it's likely very few users will want to go back to the previous version after the update. If you still keep the "Add" button that always add new installations as well, I don't think it will be too unexpected for users if "Update" options on existing installations would also give an option to replace them.

You could then for example easily maintain one 2018.4 stable installation and one 2019.2 beta installation and see and get updates for both as they're published.