Hello, the Unity Toon Shader is labeled as “experimental” and a page about experimental assets says that these packages are “not supported by Unity”. What does this quote mean exactly? And does this mean I cannot sell a game using it? The shader has been getting developed since 2020 but I have no clue when it will actually be finished. One last question is: If I use it, is there a chance that my game breaks in the future because of it if it gets deprecated?
There is a bit more information about it on the github site. Unity normally has a bunch of experimental packages. This mainly means that there is no guarantee that Unity will keep updating it or that they won’t completely rewrite it and it won’t work with your project anymore. Looking at the current state I’d say work on this has stopped. It seems to have the standard Unity Companion License so I’d expect that it’s fine to use. Even if it’s experimental and Unity has abandoned it, the package is still probably better than a lot of the other options on the asset store.
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Thanks for the response. The license does sound reassuring but are you sure that the project has stopped? The documentation was updated a month ago so Id like to believe
You can check out some of the stats on the Insights seconds of Github. Looks like there are still some updates but it seems like minor updates. I noticed that this is forked from unity3d-jp/UnityChanToonShaderVer2_Project back in 2024/01/26 and became an official Unity package. Sounds like support for Unity-Chan Toon Shader 2.0 ended and moved to Unity Toon Shader. I’d say Unity will probably keep working on it since it’s changed to a package but I’m not sure if they’ll ever move it out of experimental. This is normally because as soon as it goes out of experimental they have to be a lot more careful with releases to make sure it doesn’t break. It would be great if they do, I’m a fan of toon shading. I did a Arc System Works style shader in the past. The Unity Toon Shader looks really good, I might try using it in the future.
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Yoooo I stumbled upon your shader while searching for info on this one, didn’t know it was yours which is cool. Gotta say, this toon shader is the bomb too. I messed around with it a little bit and it’s very customizable, especially since it makes implementing the black outlines so easy, I was just worried if it was gonna break in the future
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“Experimental” means the package is not really meant for use in production yet because it’s new and (still) in early stages of development. You can take it and give it a try, but it likely won’t be stable enough for actual use in a game that is pending to ship soon. Unity may also decide to stop development at their sole discretion at any time.
These kind of packages are not supported by Unity, which means that, if you stumble across an error or bug, Unity won’t help you solving it.
That being said, the latest release on GitHub is from December (at the time of this writing). I wouldn’t say that work on it has stopped, but it’s definitely not regularly maintained either - judging by the releases.
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