The Terrain Tools aren’t on the asset store, you can only download them via the package manager directly.
Is there some way to get notified about updates automatically for such cases? How will it be in the future when the asset store is removed from the Unity Editor and we can only download assets via the package manager?
On a side-note while the migration happens: It would be nice to have only notifications when the asset really got updated, not all the time when the publisher changes the text in the description.
Basically if you’ve installed a package on package manager and look at your “in project” list for only installed packages, you can quickly see if you are using the latest packages or if some have updates available for them (there’s different icon next to the package if there’s an update available).
Edit: Oh you mean for asset store packages? In that case you should still get the update icon on the “my assets” view (there’s a tiny icon with down arrow on white background if there’s an update available for an asset you’ve already downloaded before). But there’s no similar versioning there like with regular PM packages so it works more like in the old asset store workflow if you update and import again.
Can’t you browse Unity ID then? not quite sure what you are after. For notifications, you can control how they work on the settings link (enable “A package I bought or downloaded is updated to a new version”).
I personally have that bookmarked and poll that occasionally but you can also conf notifications to send you email about the changes at your preferred interval.
I’d like to get informed when e. g. the Terrain Tools or HDRP get updated in the Package Manager without checking every day only to see that nothing happened.
That would need to be optional. If Unity started nagging me about updating packages I’d go ballistic. Using a computer these days is essentially traversing an obstacle course of constant update message boxes in order to do what you want to do.
There’s a fundamental issue with this type of feature tho. For this to work in a way user would expect it to (to only notify user if there’s updated version of the thing the user actually has on the project), there would need to be a way to actually track what version of the thing there’s installed to the project…
Right now asset store packages are just naively imported to the project. After they have been imported, package manager doesn’t know anymore the asset version on your project so it can’t therefore know if there’s update available for that thing you just imported, for your specific project.
What it can do today is tell if there’s been an update for the thing you’ve downloaded before in the local cache, and this feature is functional even today. Just look at “my assets” in package manager and there’s a different icon for items that have updated since you’ve downloaded them to local cache.
So for this to actually work in expected way for the user, we’d need to get all asset store packages to behave like the rest of package manager packages (instead of just bloating the Assets-folder with import like it’s done now) but since there’s tons of 3rd parties involved here, it will take a long time before we even get close to that.
I don’t want to see update messages here too. My reason would be: when you work in a team, you want to use the same Unity version and packages. If however such update dialog appears, there is always that one person:
TBH as the package manager doesnt work with a number of corporate proxys, and nor does the asset store, no matter what some of us have tried, this is kinda a mute point as we cant use either
This is probably going away eventually. Recent Unity versions don’t even use bintray anymore for fetching their upm packages but they still mirror the new packages on bintray for the time being (I suspect they do this only so they don’t break things for users who use older editor versions that are configured to fetch stuff from bintray).
I thought the whole reason for moving things to the package manager way of doing things was to improve the shitty way asset store unitypackages work in the first place… including versioning.
An asset store package’s name and version number should be stored in each asset’s .meta file.
The asset store should require asset developers to certify which SRPs the package works with and that should be properly advertised.
I would imagine that these 2 things would allow at least a rudimentary form of versioning.
As for the issue at hand:
UT could set up an RSS feed of updated packages. No one would get needlessly spammed if this were the case, as you’d be able to subscribe to the feed of a specific package or not. And the notifications would not occur within the editor so there would be considerably less risk of a rogue staff member clicking on ‘update’. Problem solved.
Though really, all of this package manager stuff (inc. asset store packages) should be taken out of the editor altogether and should reside in the Hub. Less bloat in the editor, less uselessness for the Hub.
Basically the versioning issue will go away the moment Unity enforces asset store publishers to use upm packages for all new assets. I’m fairly certain this will happen eventually but I don’t know if it’s confirmed to happen or not. They also can’t just force everyone to the new package system for existing items as it would be a nightmare to get “forgotten” assets to get converted so the old approach would still need to stay there.
Trying to patch what’s bad and essentially broken system is not a good plan either (I’m now referring to current import to Assets directly), adding metadata there wouldn’t fix the things wrong about this approach (it would still bloat your project’s Assets folder) and end result would still be subpar even if you could track the files better.
Package Manager got done to fix a lot of the similar issues with distribution, there’s a reason why Unity doesn’t ship new systems anymore via Asset Store, they mainly use it to provide sample projects and such content.
Is it just me that checks for updates if something is broken ? I mean for most people, you probably don’t want to check daily. You want to check whenever:
you have a bug you can’t find and think it’s from a related package
your project is 100% great but lacking performance
And you want to just do these sort of tests maybe once a month. Daily is just not a good development practise, in fact it’s dangerous.
But that’s besides the point, I guess feedback is feedback.
