Just trying a prototype test in 2021 after using 2019. Every time I make a script change and swap back to Unity, I get a progress bar loading assemblies or something.
Everything’s so slow in this latest Unity. If productivity’s going to take a nose-dive, isn’t it better to stick with old, fast Unitys so long as you don’t need specific features? Or am I just missing a setting somewhere?
Edit: This is doing my head in! I can’t work like this.
Welcome to 2021! I’ve said this often before and still say…why do you need it now? What specific benefits are you looking for?
What did you expect to be able to do better than the version you are currently using?
But “having said that” just think back to Unity 5 ! Oh boy the problems folks had with that at the time. The point being wait for at least 12 months minimum unless you are going for that completely hair pulling shaved look on your bonce !
All the best.
Stick to LTS releases. Expect things to keep consistently getting worse.
Tried 2018.LTS for the UnityScript
Then tried 2017.LTS
Perhaps this was a mistake. I can’t unsee the performance advantages of 2017. It was fast.
Absolutely. In my case I was just trying it out. I like the idea of using the latest version for a new project so the project is fairly up to date when it finally releases. There are some features I’d like to try like shader graph. But if the productivity is this impossible, I’ll go back to whatever version actually works.
I like the platform integration in later Unity’s which handles Android itself, etc. But dang, is it slow. development PCs get faster and faster, but development times get slower and slower because of who-knows-what.
Check the “Enter Play Mode settings” in the Project Settings → Editor. It drastically increased my productivity and eliminated some of these “hold on” popups. I also migrated some parts of the game to Visual Scripting just to use Enter Play mode better. Newer Unity has different workflow still not fully fleshed out. I am slowly adapting myself to Visual Scripting just to avoid recompile/importing assembly definition etc. popups.
Also, start removing packages you can part with. The more packages installed the slower things become.
I don’t know if this helps, but I’m using 2020.3.9f1 and the project is ENORMOUS (100 GBs+) and the editor literally flies. Absolutely no complains (SSD of course, 16 GBs ram and an old i7-5820k paired with more modern RTX 3070)
Can you give us a screenshot of your Package Manager installs?
Well, this is not a comercial project, so I’m massively testing assets. This is my package manager (nothing special):
But a lot of assets are installed manually, this are the folders:
80K files. Sometimes Unity hangs for a 10 seconds (Window.Tick and things like this) but it’s from time to time. Most of the times it insta-plays and insta-saves. I had a bug where this hangs were 5-15 minutes long but I resolved it by deleting shader cache (wich I repeat from time to time). What I can say tho, is that scenes are not very big, yet.
Not experienced user tho, maybe I feel it fast and 2018s were way faster, dunno, but for me is completely acceptable now after resolving the bug (we know it’s a pain when it starts to slow down)
Thank you @Kitsune_bcn
This is very interesting. You have seemingly hit a sweet spot!
If you load a very big scene, do things slow down?
I can try to test. How big the scene should be, and what slowdowns may I expect? (performance in game window, waiting for scene to save, importing…)
Perhaps the biggest scene I’ve tested with was small, in comparison to what your assets are capable of making, but I managed to get to 20 second editor to Play times…
I got this down by putting placeholders in every single position in the scene’s level of info… and creating instances of prefabs at Play start to populate the level rather than having them all sitting as full objects in the Scene. This reduced entering Play mode to less than 5 seconds. Without code changes.
I learned this trick, of using placeholders, from reading somewhere that Unity reloads the entire Scene is copied into another set of memory, recreating it, to enter Play mode. So removing all the fat content from the Scene, using placeholders, meant that there wasn’t anything to copy over, it was simply creating instances with a copy function to (re)build the scene.
This also means I get to manually control the sequence of propagation of prefabs and their initialisation, which is huge for sanity.
However…
ANY code changes create a delay of about 7 seconds whilst those changes are ‘compiled’ and then entering Play Mode takes around 5 seconds on top of that.
This (12 seconds) is the fastest I can do things in a meaningful level/Scene, with 2019.LTS.
Caveat… this time is shorter than most others are experiencing, because I’ve got far less packages installed than you:
Cinemachine
Timeline
TextMeshPro
Rider
2D Sprite
that’s it. The biggest difference between us, I suspect, is the use of a newer Unity by you, and URP with its bits and pieces.
