So I have several thousands of dollars in assets for a game that was started as a prototype back in 2016 and locked to an engine in 2018 – I cannot switch up engine version at this point.
The package manager does not contain the selection My assets anymore and the Asset store window does ofcourse not work.
Grabbing assets via a newer version of the engine is failing for a lot of asset-parts as they are serialized differently or in same cases explicitly branded with a version and refuse to load due to being saved with a newer version.
So what do I do know? Should I just go and jump off a cliff because not only is the paid license about to expire on the engine but now I can not even load additional assets purchased for the game so I can actually use them and finish it?
Any reason I should not switch to a less hostile engine for my next project?
I know they exist - but as I mention they cannot be downloaded via the older engine. Going to store and asking to open then in Unity does nothing as it will bring up the Asset Store window in the engine, and it is completely broken since several years back.
The Packet manager does NOT have My Assets anymore for the 2018 client, hence the big problem.
For those, you just have to accept that they are no longer backwards-compatible with Unity 2018. The only unfortunate thing in this case being that Unity does not, and has never offered a way for customers to choose and download a previous version of an asset.
To a certain degree this is also your own fault. Software ages, it will eventually become incompatible with something. There is always an upgrade path, and while they can be painful and take some time, this is part of the process of development particularly in the game industry.
Even “regular software” programmers from time to time face the challenge of having to upgrade a certain technology, be it the database, the GUI framework, the compiler and language versions, the platform SDK you develop for, web technologies, and so forth.
So, once a year, set aside some time to trial run the newer version. I’ve noticed quite often that developers skip over versions +1 and +2 and sometimes even +3 so they’re faced with upgrading from 2018 to 2021 or even 2022 and try to take that jump all at once. If they had done a week (or less) of upgrading every year, they’d already be on 2022. But the longer you sit it out, the more costly it’ll be, and the less inclined you will be to perform the upgrade. To the point where the 2018 to 2022 upgrade would not be 3 weeks but perhaps 3 months.
Same analogy as for bugs. You fix them as you find them whenever possible. If you don’t and try to hunt them down months later, they’ll be more costly to fix and probably caused a lot of damage in the meantime as well.
I also think 2018 is out of support now, if its not, and you have the extended support, you should be able to talk to unity rep to find a way to make it work, heck someone in the last couple of years got them to fix it so they could run unity 5…
That is false - the assets are all backwards compatible (also still explicitly listing the version in the store as supported) upon upload to Unity Asset store. They are re-encoded ‘on-demand’ to the newer format if downloading with a newer engine. Which is why one cannot just download with a newer engine to get it in the older LTS.
The claim that one should just upgrade engine is ignorant and clearly ignoring the reality here - the purchased assets are compatible with the old version, several of them are not for the latest version of the engine. That would require a re-purchase for no other purpose than to stay in compatibility of the engine that one should not need to stay on latest version with just to, for instance, release an update to an existing game that was release several years ago.
Could you let me know which newer version you tried downloading from? In 2018.4, the Package Manager does not display the “My Assets” tab, as you described. However, in 2019.4, it seems to work as expected.
Is there a difference between the 2019 and 2018 versions of your Assets? If not, you could download and open one of the 2019.4 versions of the Editor, and install the assets from there. Then, you could import the files by navigating to Assets → Import Package → Custom package and select the .unityPackage in the AppData\Roaming\Unity\Asset Store-5.x subfolder (assuming you are on Windows)
If this does not work for you however, please let me know we’ll investigate the issue further.
Have used 2020.3 and found all assets with version-specific encoding (or, at a minimum, version fingerprint, such as terrains) to fail at the side-loading.
