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I know quite a few game devs (side-effect of both living in Malmö and being active on the TiGsource forums) and if there is one common thing I hear about Unity

I know quite a few game devs (side-effect of both living in Malmö and being active on the TiGsource forums) and if there is one common thing I hear about Unity it's how it does not seem to care at all about backwards compatibility, and how upgrades can completely screw over projects. I don't know what the story is with Godot (beyond the breaking changes between 2.0 and 3.0 that was mentioned in the linked blog post) but if that is a lot better then I can imagine that some game devs might be more interested in Godot for that reason too.

dleslie 7y ago
Every version change, even minor revisions, come with a real risk of breaking your compiled asset bundles. From shaders to light maps to referenced classes. It's a huge amount of effort to keep a project tracking Unity version upgrades.
- iamwil 7y ago
  What do people do to deal with it? Are there services / libs that help you do the conversion? Or is it that you can't fully trust them, and you'll need to do that by hand anyway, because you might be one of the exceptional cases?
  - ngold 7y ago
    From my limited experience, download the version that it was made with. Unity has a list of older versions right in it's hub.
iamwil 7y ago
Yikes. Does Unity do forced paid upgrades, so you'd have to deal with the incompatibilities? Do they have a culture of incompatibilities so they can simplify their development and keep the best features and discard the worst?
- dagmx 7y ago
  Unity is both free and subscription based. They make older versions of the engine available in their management app, and projects are linked to a specific version unless you explicitly upgrade.
grogenaut 7y ago
What's funny is I think all of the major game studios that I know of essentially lock game engine per project once they're coding along. It's just expected that you stick with it for the rest of the project. Maybe 1 upgrade mid project. I had heard bungie used to, in the halo days, lock the engine 8-11 months out and the core tech team started working on the next game. The AAA studio I worked for essentially did that 3-6 months out. But those were 2-3 year game cycles. Maintaining a project would be less fun. But it'd be like choosing to do a rails or react upgrade.

dleslie 7y ago

Every version change, even minor revisions, come with a real risk of breaking your compiled asset bundles. From shaders to light maps to referenced classes. It's a huge amount of effort to keep a project tracking Unity version upgrades.

iamwil 7y ago
What do people do to deal with it? Are there services / libs that help you do the conversion? Or is it that you can't fully trust them, and you'll need to do that by hand anyway, because you might be one of the exceptional cases?
- ngold 7y ago
  From my limited experience, download the version that it was made with. Unity has a list of older versions right in it's hub.

iamwil 7y ago

Yikes. Does Unity do forced paid upgrades, so you'd have to deal with the incompatibilities? Do they have a culture of incompatibilities so they can simplify their development and keep the best features and discard the worst?

dagmx 7y ago
Unity is both free and subscription based. They make older versions of the engine available in their management app, and projects are linked to a specific version unless you explicitly upgrade.

grogenaut 7y ago

What's funny is I think all of the major game studios that I know of essentially lock game engine per project once they're coding along. It's just expected that you stick with it for the rest of the project. Maybe 1 upgrade mid project. I had heard bungie used to, in the halo days, lock the engine 8-11 months out and the core tech team started working on the next game. The AAA studio I worked for essentially did that 3-6 months out. But those were 2-3 year game cycles. Maintaining a project would be less fun. But it'd be like choosing to do a rails or react upgrade.