I’ve downloaded the 2020.2.0f1 today on a mobile connection, burned to data plan, wasted half a day to upgrade the project to the new version, finally find out that the package manager doesn’t want to download the new versions of the assets I have in the game.
It shows that the asset downloaded on my computer is not the latest version but there is no download button anywhere.
Is a bug?
Just great, not the first one,
Now I need to wait for a NEW version of the entire unity development suite to be released and download everything again.
Every time because I need some small fixes I need to download 99% of the same data all over again, not to mention that half of my hdd is full of slightly different copies of the same files for each version installed.
And you can’t delete old versions because your old project may not work with newer versions
And then, when 2020.2.02f will be released I guarantee some other bug that worked before will appear and the cycle will repeat.
In the professional software world, generally this is taken care of by using source control. I use git because a) it works, b) there’s TONs of support out there, c) it’s free, and d) I cannot even think clearly without having all my assets safely parked in source control.
When you are contemplating a new version of Unity, make sure you have committed everything, make a fresh upgrade branch and then do the upgrade.
Once the upgrade has succeeded and you have a build, it is now up to you to re-qualify your program, ensure that it runs okay on the new version. For our team this is a full QA pass cycle. For casual gamedev, perhaps just play a level or two.
Only once you have attained confidence that the upgrade worked do you go forward and merge the branch back to master/develop and consider your project updated.
Given that upgrading any software, even free software, ALWAYS involves paying the above set of costs, don’t just upgrade on a lark or because you saw a link spew across the top of your browser that says “Unity 2020.2 is here!” That is not being a professional software engineer.
If you can’t tolerate a bug here and there, why aren’t you using the LTS releases, and why would you ever jump on a .0 tech release? That makes no sense to me. Using the bleeding edge means there will be bugs, always, period full stop.
Fortunately disk space is extremely cheap today, and source control means you don’t even need to keep projects on your local disk you aren’t actively working on.