Updating hardware: Unity license is invalidated

Unity Engine
1

Hi there,

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I couldn’t see a better place!

So after updating my Mac the other day and having my license invalidate itself, I became a bit worried.

I change my hardware around frequenty and do a fair amount of modifications. Even if I decide to leave my machines alone, I find that I am prone to equipment breaking and needing replaced a couple of times a year. I feel like I’ve lost ownership of my machines a little bit as I don’t have the same freedom to customise.

My questions are:

  1. What part of the computer do the licenses tie themselves to?
  2. with all the changes I make, am I going to meet difficulties re-enabling Unity? (I have not yet attempted to validate my install again as the machine remains likely to change again.)
  3. Surely I’m not the only one- Does any one else here modify their machines? If so, have you encountered any difficulties with your licenses?

Thanks,

2

I did when I got a new computer and installed unity. I used the same license file and It didn’t worked. I guess It changes the license file itself so that it contains the computer configuration. This way you cannot use the same license on multiple computers.

3

  1. not known, if it were it would be useless if it were. But its save to assume that the harddisk on which its installed, mainboard, cpu and similar ‘static’ informations which don’t change regularly (or if they do you should potentially plan further ahead and do bulk updates for core hardware to minimize them) are used not meaningless stuff like total harddisk space, number of disks or RAM or GPU.

  2. I don’t think so as it should still be identifyable as the same system by a human, unlike the computer which can’t identify it.

  3. yes but so far I never had to reenable it and i upgraded gpu, RAM and the raid on which unity and windows used to be installed.

4

It only takes an e-mail to get more license activations, while a little inconvenient you can easily plan ahead by sending the e-mail before doing the upgrade and getting that activation ready for the new machine.

5

Well, I’ve dropped them an email. I will probably wait until I’ve finished updating the machines before getting the license reactivated again though. Hopefully I won’t have any issues.

Unity deactivated itself on my Mac machine after Snow Leopard was updated. I did do a bunch of other updates to the machine, too though.
I don’t reckon Mac Modders are too common, so it might just be that the Mac licenser does perhaps use the GPU? Sounds odd, anyway.

Also, Dreamora- I forgot you frequented these parts. Good to see you around.

6

Hehe yeah mac modders are limited, potentially even a thing of the past if we go by the Mac Pro rumors floating around at the time.

The SL update can’t be it unless you updated from Leopard to Snow Leopard or from SL to Lion. In the later case though you could get around it by copying out the license before applying the upgrade to lion and then just copying it back in (its lions fault for crippling it not unity or pace), so if it stopped working along an update / upgrade then pretty surely related to one or more hardware parts you changed.
Problem is its impossible to say which one as http://www.paceap.com/ does not mention even the slightest thing at all for example.