I am creating game for mobile OSes with hundreds of animated simple (not humanoid) objects. Legacy animation system in this situation works pretty fast and has comfortably API.
And so i have question. Legacy animation support will be dropped or not?
It probably isn’t getting dropped in 5. Maybe 6+ and only then if all functionality can be achieved with Mecanim.
Unity isn’t going to be fixing any bugs unless it crashes the game or such though, as it’s legacy.
But Mecanim for simple animations is overkill. It slower and needs more code for simple things.
Because i have 40+ models with 3 simple animations with same name (.fbx). In Mecanim i must create AnimatorController for every model. In legacy i just use animation.Play[‘walk’]. Now i using AnimatorController generation from editor script, but i want just use simple legacy animation system (but i can’t because its legacy and may be dropped).
1 Like
You’re not forced to upgrade though, and you can run multiple versions of Unity if you rename the folder it instals to by default. Nothing wrong with using a dated version if it gets the job done.
New versions of unity - providing support of new devices and OS versions. 
Legacy will be in the 5.x cycle so you have no worries for nearly 2 years.