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Defining a minimum Unity "Project Version" for multi-member team?

A topic by scottnm created Jul 24, 2022 Views: 485 Replies: 2

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Let’s say I’ve got a team of multiple game devs working in Unity.

Is there an easy way to setup the project so it requires a minimum version of the Unity editor and not a specific one?

The scenario I’m thinking about is multiple different people who each use the same major/minor version of the LTS Unity editor (i.e. all devs are on Unity LTS 2020.3) but some maybe be using different patches (e.g. one dev has 2020.3.16f1 and another dev has 2020.3.24f1)

It’d be convenient if I could find a way to say the project requires 2020.3.16f1 and the dev who uses 2020.3.24f1 doesn’t have to go download a separate unity install.

It’s frankly probably pretty minor. Likely not too hard to just tell everyone to go install a specific unity editor but I’ve been surprised that the Unity Hub doesn’t make downloading arbitrary versions of the Unity editor easier. It’s trivial to download the latest LTS patches but if someone on our team sets up with an older LTS patch I’ve gotta go manually look through the Unity archives to find it which is a bit of a pain.

Related question: are there best practices for managing unity versions on a team? e.g. for any new project always use the latest LTS patch and ask all devs to download it? or leave a link in your project to some unity LTS version to make it easy for all devs to find the same version of the unity editor?

I might be overthinking this, but thought I’d ask in case anyone had found a way to alleviate this potential tripping point.

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Midnight Spire Games2 years ago(+2)

As far as I know it is not possible to maintain seamless compatibility with multiple versions. Once you import a project into a new version, going backwards is not supported and can cause problems.

However, I would go a step farther and say that this is probably not desirable anyway. Because each LTS revision is essentially a different code base, behavior between revisions will be slightly different. This can lead to one developer coding something that doesn't work quite the same in another developer's release, or QA assigning a bug to a developer who can't reproduce it. Having everyone on the same release prevents this kind of confusion.

As for how to manage versions, it is really up to you how often to update, but at a minimum I would recommend researching and testing any new version before committing to it. I generally don't update very often unless there's something specific I want from the new version. At some point prior to release, you will probably want to lock down the Unity version to avoid any last-minute engine-related issues.

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scottnm2 years ago(+1)

sounds reasonable.

the part that feels like a nuisance is for quick and dirty things like game jams where everyone already has an install of unity so trying to decide which version to use and then making everyone go download it sounds like a pain…

but it’s probably the lesser of two evils (e.g. finding an unexpected incompatibility between editor versions)

c’est la vie I guess.

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