Is there a way that I can tell the Unity editor to not open the last project that I was working on when I launch it?
For instance, could I instead have Unity display the Project Wizard dialog by default every time I launch it?
hold down the option key when you launch unity
If my brain was good enough to remember that, I’d do it! 
I wonder why there’s no option or pref setting for so obvious a thing. [hint]
I must say that Word and Unity have rather different use cases. I imagine that most folks work on one Unity project at a time – not so much with Word.
I like the current system.
Okay, maybe Word was a bad example - isn’t it always?
But Flash, Director, VirTools, Torque, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema4D all arguably share many use cases with Unity, but none of them have this default behavior.
I guess what it really comes down to is that this is a great feature if you tend to only work on one Unity project at a time, but if you don’t, it can be a trip-up. And I’d be willing to bet that there are a significant number of Unity users who work on multiple projects, load sample projects, make iterations and do other things that can result in this behavior being problematic.
I think its worth having as an option. Sometimes if I move a project I don’t want to automatically open it.
Maybe ‘Open a Blank Project’ or ‘Open Last Project’ (which might just be showing us list of recent projects with the latest at the top)
< accidental dupe post, sorry >
What would be really nice would be the ability to have more than one project open at a time (especially when working with sample projects). But I’m guessing that’s non-trivial.
The way Flash (for example) opens up in a kind of bizarro splash screen cum “where do you want to go today” wizard doesn’t seem that great to me. It’s the fact you can have multiple documents open that is helpful.
Let’s suppose you are working on three projects at this given time, and every time you launch Unity there’s a 33% chance the project it opens up is the one you want. That’s 33% better than Flash which NEVER opens up the project you want by default.
I’m not exactly sure what the deal is with Unity, but it seems to launch and load the last project quite quickly compared with loading other projects, so the “cost” of this behavior is lower than you might think. (Similarly with Flash, the load time for Flash is huge compared with the load time for a given document.)
(One of the simplest usability optimizations you can add to most programs is to remember the last thing the user did, and offer to do it again, e.g. prepopulating dialogs with the last thing the user entered into them. It almost NEVER costs you anything.)
And the new trend towards big “wizardy” dialogs that ask whether you want to open this or that piece of stationery are even worse. Not only do they not open the document you were working on, they often take longer to load than a typical document (because, in essence, they’re opening a dozen smallish documents or something). I’m thinking of the iWork apps in particular, here.
Multiple projects open at once would indeed rock - especially if you could seamlessly drag things between them (e.g. Flash).
I’m guessing though that individual Unity projects are pretty heavy with dependancies and locked-memory and so on, so you’d probably have to have a pretty beefy system to use it. Which could run askew to one of Unity’s better bits of newbie bait: the whole “works well on a Mini” pitch.
lol! get annoyed enough and you’ll remember! does seem like it would be trivial to add a show this at start up check box but i’d bet there’s better things brewin…
That happens only one time then you click the checkbox at lower left that says “Do not show this again” and you never see it again. Same for all of Adobe’s Creative Suite products.
Yes, but doing nothing at all on launch is even LESS useful.
i like it the way it is but its good to have an alternative too
.ORG