Hey wonderful Unity folks!
Quick question: will the 2019 LTS version of Unity also support Apple Silicon? And if not, can you perhaps share some of the decision making behind things like this?
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Probably not, but perhaps you can still do a recompile in xcode ?
+1ing Adriaan’s question.
Same! Without this added to 2019 LTS it will mean we’re yet again forced to use tech streams for production again. We’ve not been able to ever sit on an LTS version due to critical features likes this.
I would actually say that it will probably be backported looking at the history of 64bit support for iOS. This doesn’t seem to use anything special from 2020.2 and I’m guessing that right now they just want to put a version out there for developers to test. If not, then what’s the point of LTS at all.
The point is stability and not new features, so any new features can break stabilty. Thats why I said probably not, because there is a new feature cut off point at 2019.3 and 2019.4 is only for bug fixes.
Would love to be wrong here by the way
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I get that supporting ARM-based mac is gonna be a huge backend change, but this is something a lot of people who are already on LTS versions and near release need, so, like iOS 64bit support, they will be ok with stability problems as long as they can ship their game.
This is all early days and I guess we’ll know more when the dust settles down.
I am not needing the LTS support as I’ll transition to 2020 anyway, but seeing how Apple is touting automated translation for binaries via Rosetta 2 (DIRT Rally and Tomb Raider were run that way) it may be that Unity does not need to do full Apple Silicon support for 2019 LTS after all and just patch Intel compilation so that it works with Rosetta 2. Apple themselves have said the transition will be 2 years for their hardware and it would be unreasonable of them to expect all software vendors to transition immediately so they mitigated this with a way for “most” software to run in some emulated form. The caveat will for sure be that it may very well not run if you rely on OpenGL, it’s clear that the new architecture will be Metal only.
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The problem with Rosetta 2 is that if the same thing happens that happened with Rosetta 1, Apple will deprecate Rosetta 2 at some point in future. And at that point you really need to make a native Apple Silicon build of your app… Great if all 2019 LTS projects can be opened and they work with 2020.2, but that’s goodbye for my 2017 LTS apps…
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+1
A response regarding support for 2019 LTS would be very much appreciated.
Kind of crazy that there is no official reply yet…
I would direct folks to Unity Blog which has all the details
Thank you for your reply, but the reason this question is here, as well as in the replies of the blog post and the apple forums, is that the blog post does not explicitely answer this. If there is going to be no support for LTS versions of the editor or even if there is just build support for Silicon we would like to know.
As mentioned by the blog post it would 2020.2 LTS. At the moment there is no plans to backport to 2019.4 LTS, if that changes we definitely will call it out.
Alright thank you for the response, it really is appreciated.
I’d say stick with Intel Macs until you’re ready to move your projects to 2020.2. The ARM transition won’t happen fully for several years and it’s not like you have to ditch your current Mac immediately.
What I’m curious about is if Unity are planning to port the editor itself to ARM? Rosetta 2 apparently is pretty great but I’ve no doubt it will not be the optimal way of doing it and I’m sure in a few years Apple will drop that like they did 32 bit support (not before giving developers a heads up of course), for the sake of efficiency, and I’d like to know if I can keep working on Macs indefinitely or if I should try not to get too deep into Apple’s ecosystem.
Still waiting for Hub to be updated on Apple Silicon before I can dig deep on 2020.2
We will support native ARM64 editor eventually. However, we don’t have any timelines to share.
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Our full focus at this time is delivering a stable, publicly available version of Unity which supports Apple Silicon & Universal Apps. We specifically chose to do this work in 2020.2 where we have an opportunity to collect feedback and stabilize this effort. After support has landed and we have had a period of time to evaluate the feedback from users we will seriously consider back porting to 2019 LTS if we have confidence we can do so while preserving the stability offered by the LTS version. A complete OS architecture change is a non-trivial change with a code base like Unity and we expect there will be a period of stabilization required. We understand your ask and are working hard to be able to give concrete guidance as soon as possible.
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What about us on the Apple Dev Kit ? Unity Hub being the blocker for me, any updates please ?
we hope to have an updated hub soon that works on the Apple Dev Kit.
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