Feedback We NEED a BETTER system for Downloads.

Now that Unity has 3 Render Pipelines, multiple Unity versions and so on. We need a better system of getting the right version of an asset when we buy from the Asset Store.

As a publisher, we declare which versions of unity we are supporting / uploading and also what Render Pipelines this works for, however. When you download these assets as a buyer, it may not always give you a working version or even the right one.

When using different Render pipelines for example, some assets need to use completely different shaders and cannot be converted by material upgrade options. Now, I have been trying to figure out the best way to package up my assets, but this can be very messy and hard to manage with larger asset packs such as my Humans Shader pack which now has support for 2018 LTS Built in RP, 2019 LTS Builtin RP/URP/HDRP and 2020.2 BuiltIn/URP/HDRP, that project is over 1gb in size due to all of the files and shaders included per render pipeline, so now I have one project summing up to about 7gb.

Other ways to go about it is to package up the RP specific files like the shaders, materials, prefabs and scenes then let the user do what they want from there such as unpacking the URP files then removing anything they don't need. This will likely be my way forwards because when the packages are unpacked and you are in a different render pipeline you see console errors (not ones that stop the game running, just render pipeline based warnings about missing dependencies for the RP).

But really, if you are changing up your project from one RP to another, ALL shaders will break and need upgraded. If those shaders are custom made (not unity's own ones), yes, they will turn pink (We love pink). Then you get in touch with the asset creator and they are nice enough to give you an update...now I've been proving this for about 2 years now, I'm not Blue in the face or anything, just expected Unity to have some better system in place, like a drop down list of what packs are available and a preview of the files inside them, instead of a preview of the latest uploaded package which you see now.

I'll go on providing my users with what they need and will use one of the methods suggested (packaging up relevant files per pipeline) as that seems to be the most sensible way forwards for now. Just give users the options from their Asset Library please, you ask us publishers to provide specific details about each package, so users need to also see a reflection of this.

Any more info and suggestions on this? Anyone good a good method of keeping all their Multi-RP customer happy, please post.

Thanks,
Robert - RRFreelance/PixelBurner - Human Shader pack