There are lots of beta projects in nearly all aspects of Unity and then there is the 2017 release.
So will Unity 2017 drop big changes in Unity or just be a new numbering / payment / subscription scheme?
What would be the most…
Radical …
Helpful …
Amazing …
Naff …
Worst …
Best …
… thing Unity could introduce for Unity 2017?
Just numbering. We’ll continue to roll out new features and changes incrementally. That was the biggest reason why we wanted to switch to subscription - big, shiny releases are only good for marketing reasons. It costs way too much time and energy for most people to upgrade their projects, and we see no reason to artificially not give you features as they come out just so we could justify a new major version.
Based on GDC nothing will change except the number from 5 to 2017. Since this is the last month for the remaining perpetual license holders to jump aboard to new versions I would assume they would have shown every possible shiny thing there or in blog posts to get remaining people in the subscription boat.
"It costs way too much time and energy for most people to upgrade their projects, and we see no reason to artificially not give you features as they come out just so we could justify a new major version. "
And yet by switching to the yearly versioning people kind of expect each yearly version to actually have the big feature updates.
Bladobe and Autowreck do it, and its lame, infact the only thing I can recall from there versions now is each yearly version is bug infested mess with generally mediocre improvements. Where they break things that worked fine before. Then they get to 2016.5 and the .5 update is usually a bit better. But still broken things to be found, then you have the update1 or ext update… what a mess honestly
Not saying it can’t work maybe Cryengine will catch up with its 5.x releases and we can compare their 7.0 release too what might be Unity 2020 hindsight edition 
/thread
At least you won’t be getting two to three years of big features all at once. 
I like what I’ve seen so far. Not super keen on subscriptions in general, the only one I currently have being Allegorithmic, but I do like the iterative process Unity is settling into. There are still bugs, nothing is perfect, but they’re iterating at a faster pace (more frequent patch & dot releases) than most subscription companies I see.
No company is going to release a perfect bug free product, and the smaller incremental changes introduce less risk. Look, for example, at the people that upgraded from Unity 4.x to 5.0. There were a lot of wholesale changes, broken (reworked) APIs… and even with the script updater it was a significant amount of work to upgrade projects. Only after all of that work was done did some of them realize there were some showstopper bugs in 5.x.
With an iterative approach, you’re hopefully upgrading more frequently, spending less time doing the actual project changes (if any), and it’s much easier to abandon the little bit of work to go between dot releases than it is to give up weeks of man-hours to do a full suite release upgrade.
The whole point of going to 2017 was to get away from the big release model. So expect nothing big.
The most dramatic thing that should happen is the huge flood of perpetual users claiming they’ve been cheated on the forums. Including a couple who somehow never knew subscriptions were coming.
There still will occasionally be breaking releases. PhysX will need updating. Graphics cards will be able to handle better lighting models. API will change. But these should be predictable and well telegraphed.
IMHO the…
UI/UX could do with some major work, e.g. just look at the size of the menu’s now or 3D artists going from blender/<3d package> to Unity’s controls.
Unity API, still we have the monolithic MonoBehaviour class with it’s array of disparate On() method calls on top of a GC system that you then have to strap a Pool Management System to… does anyone else just want a PooledMonoBehaviour class or even better a Pooled, Mono, Scripted and Behaviour classes.
2017 could also usher in a new .net platform with improved game friendly GC.
What about AI, this has to be one of the most lacking areas of Unity at the moment and they did just hire a Deep Learning AI Guru?
What you said doesn’t make any sense because they don’t really do that anyway, its already been how how they intend to keep doing things supposedly… only now its a year version number scheme… I can look at 5.0-5.3 as buggy and glad we are past those versions, as it was only 5.4 onwards when things got better in the bug/performance department.
Now when its 2017.x or update x, instead of 5.x, or 6.x…doesn’t sound as as good to me…ofc it could be like unreal and go past .10 to 4.15 which yknow when do they get to 5.x at 4.99?
So I guess it gives marketing something new to work with. Ooh 2017.2 is out. or 2017 update 2 this is really good release… even if it needs to have an extra 3digits to represent the year standing out… see at least with 5.x I can be like well it was only 5.0,5.1,5.2,5.3 that were not so good, while 5.4,5.5 and 5.6 have been good. With the year used in the number scheme it kinda taints all releases in that year if one update wasn’t that good. I point it out because I think sticking in a year number on a product while releasing updates constantly over that year doesn’t make any sense at all. Where I can look at 5.4 being a good release, I don’t expect I’ll look at equivalent of a 2017.4 as good… so to me it makes even less sense than how they do things already, at least a Unity 2017 tshirt covers the entire year and not just a few months
also your uninstallers are broken Unity, my startmenu folder has some remains leftover from past versions where its not removing everything it put on…
http://i.imgur.com/7dY5lAH.png
interestingly can see from 2016 5.3-5.6 was covered… so about 3 big updates in a year, will that continue?
#if UNITY_2017_1 UNITY_2017_2 UNITY_2018 UNITY 2019_3 ooh great extra numbers to add to the clarity…
#if UNITY_2020 Unity CTO comes down on unite stage in a pair of angel wings high as a kite
anyway its another one arowx topics, they should probably be locked before ppls to start saying things in them, all that matters is good tools and features to use really 
Sure they do. By “big features” I meant introducing new systems or completely replacing existing ones. Switching from Beast to Enlighten would have been big regardless of whether they used the old system or the new yearly system. Unless they kept them in the code base at the exact same time but that could have introduced it’s own problems.
Remember “big release” is not the same as “big feature”.
They used too. 5.0 came out with
Moving away from this is a good idea.
It’s not a marketing push, it’s a legal one. Changing the version number gives them a clear end to their obligation to perpetual users.
And the drive to subscriptions is an engineering push, not a marketing one.
Maybe.
However, I have to say Unity’s support plans for the “final” perpetual version 5.6 are exactly what I hoped for.
Unity 5.6 including all patch releases will be available to perpetual users and a promise to support 5.6 with bugfixes for a 12 month period really is all one can ask for. Thank You, Unity.
Maybe some day the “Special Offer” in the forum header even will link to some nice deal instead of a Sorry page…
Most games don’t need or want to have deep learning in games, so why would they waste their time\money doing that? I think when the improved path-finding comes in then it will be fine. As a cherry, they could add some basic AI state machine but I would rather leave that up to us to do.
Forget it. That hire is for marketing and analytics.
AI in games is one of those areas where you have to know what you’re doing to get anything useful, even if the whole architecture is built for you.
So he/she could probably help setup a simple AI framework that could provide fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, neural networks, behavioural trees in an agent based package with a visual node development system without even breaking into a sweat.
Most helpful for me at this moment in time would be to remove all obsolete stuff from the manual. I’ve lost a lot of time as a new user thinking “that sounds like what I want” only to find that it was only in an older version. If something is obsolete, it seems pointless having it in the current manual except maybe on a “Things removed page” that has links for the obsolete stuff to the older manual. I really don’t want it teasing and misleading me when all I’m looking for is the current way to do something!
Are you sure as I’ve just searched for Obsolete and only found around a dozen hits in the API documentation?
It should be as easy as adding a legacy toggle to the manual to prevent searches finding obsolete or soon to be API calls.
Yeah I’m sure. I tend to browse the API and follow links rather than searching so often find myself on pages like:
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Component-rigidbody.html
which doesn’t appear in a search for obsolete!
Not sure if they have all been subversions of 5.5 or whether they went back earlier, but it’s sure annoying…
Edit: It’s probably not helping my retention being exposed to a wrong and right answer in close succession either. Maybe there’s only a few pages I see a lot of!
That simply won’t happen.
Sure, maybe the new GC comes out eventually… and yeah maybe it will be a bit faster / more efficient.
But I can absolutely guarantee you that you will never be able to skip “defensive programming” (meaning really looking out for what you’re allocating).