Which Unity for PC Games?

Hi,

I'm using Unity 5.3.6 for creating mobile games. I think, it's stable enough.
I want to start a new project for desktop platforms but I'm confused about the version of Unity.

• Unity 5.6.4 is stable (?)
• Unity 2017.x is not stable (?) but has beautiful features
• Unity 2018.x is not stable (?) but has awesome graphics features and improvements

So, I'm asking this question for everyone,
Which version of Unity should be used for making PC games.

I hope this thread will be a useful source for who confused like me if you share your experiences and suggestions.

 

If you are starting a new project, then you should use the latest version.

 

Unity 5.6.4 is stable (?) yeh maybe... if you just want to ignore a whole year of experimental and unfinished stuff.
Unity 2017.3.at whatever the latest patch version is probably best...the 2017.1, .2 are pointless seeing as .3 kinda wrapped things up.

Or if you feeling brave and want to develop on the bleeding edge 2018.1 beta ... where the climate of current bugs is ever changing. Todays forecast is currently ugui layout bugs and prefab saving misery. You find a beta version that has as little issues as possible to point where you don't need to upgrade beacuse nothing new in the next beta release, or bug fixes that you been waiting for, then you stay on that while it works.. only upgrading to the final release..jumping on the patch releases while you wait.. for the next round beta releases and features to come out then repeat. If you don't have an game release deadlines this is the Unity way really

 

Stability is in the eye of the beholder (and in the code of your components and plugins...).

The newer versions of Unity have been reasonably stable for us. Newer mono and a few other things is a big plus.

 

I was at 2017.1. Upgraded to 2017.3 and broke multiple things that worked fine before (even in scripts). Tried to get it to work, eventually gave up and went back to 2017.2. That's working fine for me.

 

Always *avoid* the latest major version. Using the final/latest patch release of the previous major version seems a fairly safe approach (they've usually fixed the worst of the bugs before breaking it again with more significant changes/new features)

 

2017.3 is borked. Do not use.

 

What I tend to do is use the latest version when starting a new project, and then mostly just patch within the major build version for much of the project. If it is a larger project (something taking months or even years), it is usually safe to assume that major version will be stable before the time a project ships. I definitely would not intentionally avoid the latest version for a completely new project unless there are known show stopping bugs in that version.

Once I am pretty far into a longer project, I periodically fork my project and test with newer builds to see if the newer builds improve or break things. I generally dislike upgrading the major version of a project once it is large and close to shipping. For example, my current space game (Disputed Space) runs Unity 5.5.x. I started development of that project way back in the Unity 4.x days, and then periodically upgraded. Unity 5.5 included an API method for doing high performance GPU instancing, so I definitely needed to upgrade to that point. At this time, there is very little I would gain by upgrading past that major version, though.

 

What about Unity 2017.3 is show stopping broken? I have not tried that version yet, but some other people have said it is stable. What issue have you run into with that version?

 

For one, they totally changed the physics update system. Big perf impact.

Also has some weird proxy issue where you cant use it on some networks. Seems to be okay for 2018 tho.

 

There is a pretty serious bug with RectTransform that resets all the positions of elements in a hierarchy to 0,0 in certain situations. It’s apparently been fixed and due for a patch release soon.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/ver...ne-else-experienced-this.510596/#post-3363273

(And several other threads as well).

 

Ya I hit those on my game wasn't fun. What pissed me off is that they chose to make some of these breaking changes for the benefit of the next release. In a way that I think is likely to result in them never getting fixed in 2017.

But at the end of the day it just depends on your specific game. So many bugs only hit specific scenarios. Like the physics stuff hit me hard, but I have several hundred rigidbodies. If you have half a dozen the bug that hit me you won't even notice. Or a memory corruption with app domain reloading that hit if you were using .NET 4.6. Lots of people it just hit now and then entering play mode. For me it was a consistent 1 out of 3.

So the experience of someone else might be drastically different from yours. Really just have to try them out yourself.

 

Dang, that's exactly what I was facing. Had a sprite that kept shifting to the corner of the screen (for the anchored element to be at 0,0). Had no idea why it was happening. It was maddening.

 

I'm still using 5.6.4 with no issues for PC development. I would suggest looking at the release notes (and the forum) to decide which features are actually working in each. If there are features in 2017.3 that you must have, then I would do some testing to make sure that the things that work in 5.6.4 are all still working in 2017 without issue. I would stay clear of 2018 for some time.

I have been using Unity since early 2009, and my personal rule of thumb has been to hang back two major releases. I was thinking of upgrading to 2017.3 until two things happened: 1) Unity started talking about moving on to 2018, and 2) I saw the number of issues being reported with 2017.3. So in the end, I elected to stay on 5.6.4 and will do so for some time.

 

Same here. It took me a day to realize I wasn’t just screwing something up. It sucked because it also applied to hidden elements, so I didn’t actually see the problem till a build went out. It’s pretty unusable in production four ui at this point. There was some sort of Android issue as well, but everything worked after downgrading.

 

Can you clarify snacktime? What do you mean by "in a way"? I'm interested if it is different than past updates.

Doesn't Unity always patch back until a build is stable, for a solid year after a new release? I distinctively remember 4.6 being patched for at least a year after 5.0 dropped - and with all the issues that were introduced in 5.1-5.3 I was surprised they found the time and still kept patching 4.6.

Won't 2017 eventually be patched to a stable build as others have been?
I'm on 2017.1 atm with no complaints but was considering moving up soon. I also hang back on update releases - just in case.

 

Unity 4 and 5 were separated by a license barrier though.

 

Indeed. They were also different "major versions", whereas now the year is just a part of the version number.

"20XX.1.1" just means "first patch of the second version released in 20XX".

 

When even your moderators are making wild statements about the stability of new versions of Unity you might want to open a channel of communication on stability issues Unity Devs! Or a 'we hear you' would perhaps be a start!!

(I am actually using 2017.3 for prototyping and the main issue is an amusing undo/redo bug that adds loads of steps when you move a slider - fixed in a patch but must we search patch releases for major bug fixes like this?)

 

Probably the most stable version is 2017.1 right now. The newer ones have some really big changes that are not production ready as well as some bugs introduced in progressing young features. The versions are also forked off with this new release pattern they have going on so there's no telling which versions will see fixes for which bugs or how long they'll be maintained.