Hi,
Sorry if this post exists but I wasn’t able to find it via searching.
Today I updated Unity from the website main page, and got version 5.0.0f4 which had a ton of problems like our Game Play Scene being empty and crashes when building for iOS. I think this must be an old version that wasn’t updated on the website properly. This is even downloaded through the download assistant on the main page.
This page:
Has a download assistant that installs 5.0.0p3 which seems to not have these problems.
The patch-releases are hotfixes; if you have issues that are fixed in the patch versions, you can download them there.
They have not yet gone through the full QA and may contain regressions, so they don’t recommend using those versions if the fixes don’t affect you.
Every now and then (roughly monthly), they got rolled out into the regular releases. If you follow the patch schedule the fixes in the p3 will be included in next week’s installer.
@cannon is correct. The patch releases are pushed out faster to give people quick access to fixes that haven’t been tested as thoroughly. Eventually those patches get rolled up into a dot release so it will be something like 5.1.
Ok, thanks. But I’m still a little confused about the f builds. Also why an f build would cause an entire scene to appear empty and cause the iOS build to crash during compiling scripts phase.
“f” denotes “final” meaning it is the actual release build for that version. Previously they were “b” for “beta”. It’s pretty much like this:
“b” = beta
“f” = final
“p” = patch
Unity 5 for example is on “p3” which means patch 3. Eventually all of the patches will be rolled up and a new main version will be released that will be something like:
5.1.0f2
I’m not sure what the number after the f denotes, it is something that is decided upon (based on builds, maybe based on the number of CTPs) before release.
If you need a bug fix you’ll want to use the patch releases, if you desire something that has been more rigorously tested, use the release build from the main download page. Personally, I think the patch releases are the way to go if you have a specific bug that needs a fix.