Confused About Maintaining Unity 4 and Unity 5 Packages (Publisher)

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1

Hi everyone, I am a little confused about how to go about having a Unity 4 & Unity 5 version of my asset store packages. I was told that if I am to have multiple versions (I don’t want to leave out the Unity 4 guys by having them only work on Unity 5) then I have to upload both versions to the same package I already have on the store, that sounds fine but…

How do I do that? Do I have two Asset folders next to each other, maybe one is labelled Assets 4 and Assets 5 or under a parent folder each, Unity 4/Assets and Unity 5/Assets. But then if I upload that from one version of Unity (5?) then the whole project will be from that version of Unity, how will they know what version of Unity 4 that folder is intended for?

Anyone gone through this yet, or did you just keep it simple and make all your assets Unity 5 only (one version) and did you notice a drop in sales from now not supporting Unity 4. I have read the guidelines but there wasn’t a clear step by step guide on how best to do this.

Thanks,
Scott

1 Like
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I was hoping someone was going to ask this.

Also hoping someone will give a detailed response. :slight_smile:

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Hi,

I submit Unity 4 & Unity 5 versions of Love/Hate and the Dialogue System for Unity. I still regularly receive support requests for versions as low as Unity 4.3.4. But from the latest usage graph you’ll cover something like 90% of all Unity users with Unity 4.6 and 5.0.

Here are the steps I follow to submit products:

  • Create a draft on your Unity Asset Store publisher page.

  • Install separate copies of Unity 4 and Unity 5 on your computer. (See Installing Multiple Versions of Unity.) Install the lowest version of each that you want to support. For example, I installed Unity 4.3.4 and Unity 5.0. (I actually have 8 versions of Unity installed, but I submit with those 2 versions.)

  • Open your product in Unity 4. I develop in a project named something like “Dev”. Export your product as a unitypackage file (e.g., myproduct.unitypackage).

  • Start Unity 4 and create a new project called something like “Asset Store 4”. Import Asset Store Tools and your package (myproduct.unitypackage). I import myproduct.unitypackage into this project to verify that it imports cleanly on its own without any errors or missing dependencies. Select Asset Store > Package Upload, and upload your package.

  • Start Unity 5 and create a new project called “Asset Store 5”. Import Asset Store Tools and your package. Upload your package.

  • Refresh the publisher page. It should show two versions of the package. Make sure your other info is good (version, description, meta data, etc.), and submit it.

Once it’s accepted, if a Unity 5 customer downloads your package, the Asset Store will send them the version you submitted in Unity 5. If a Unity 4 customer downloads, they’ll receive the version you submitted in Unity 4.

I use uTomate to automate this. The Dialogue System has over two dozen sub-projects, one for each supported third party product such as UFPS and Adventure Creator. To do a build, uTomate automatically opens each project, imports the latest core Dialogue System code, runs some unit tests, and exports the third party support package back into “Dev”. Then it exports “myproduct.unitypackage”, imports it into the “Asset Store X” projects, and builds the documentation. It would take hours to do this by hand. With uTomate, it’s a single click. If your product is simpler, you can get away with doing it by hand.

If your product has different content for Unity 4 and Unity 5, such as version-specific shaders or version-specific NavMeshes in example scenes, you’ll need to handle it slightly differently. But uTomate can help with this, too.

2 Likes
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Thank you so much Tony, I will give this a try tonight and see how that goes! Appreciate the detailed response. :slight_smile:

Have a great weekend!
Scott

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Thank you TonyLi.

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Happy to help, and good luck with your product!

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Thank you TonyLi.
I can not create two distinct assets for the two version and send them separately with their respective versions of Unity? What would be the contraindications?

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Sure, you can do this. I think it would be twice as much work, though. If you make a change to one version, you’d have to remember to make the change to the other version. To me, it’s easier to maintain one project than two parallel projects that have to be kept in sync.