Unity 4.6 Open Beta Length

Just a quick question based on this commend on the beta page:

Although Unity 4.6 is a near-complete solution, we recommend that you use it for testing only, and not for content you plan to ship soon.​

While we were hoping for a full on 4.6 release it is nice to have the open beta.

We are trying to determine if we should use 4.6 for a build that plans to launch in a month or two and others by the holiday (nov or so). By 'soon' I know that is an unknown really but is it something that launching a game on this year would be smart to do or stick with 4.5.3. There are some nice enhancements like the optimized GetComponents calls that increased performance that we'd like to use 'soon'!

I guess what is the planned open public beta timeframe? (with the caveat that it could change of course). I haven't seen this addressed anywhere.

 

I, for one, am proceeding despite the warning. I made sure it built to device and everything without issues before I made this decision of course, and I've come across no showstopping bugs. And it's drastically increased the visual quality of the UI in several ways. I mostly decided on this because the new UI functions were pretty timely in our project - I wouldn't do it for mere performance gains, I don't think.

 

I wasn't even thinking about it but this appears to be a solid release. I was hoping to hear it was going to be a short public beta but they probably don't want to rush the UI understandably (api that will be harder to change after launch). I have been using Unity a long time through good and bad releases and all our tests and device tests were better than expected. I have seen some bad releases (early 4's most recently) and never even think about changing in progress projects but was hoping to hear it will be a short public beta for projects being started now. This does mean good things for the engineering side if beta builds are this solid, they did have it in private beta a long long time so probably more solid than most releases.

 

There are three factors in favor of this being relatively low risk for a beta:
1) 4.6 is basically "4.5.3 plus GUI" - if there are major bugs, odds are good they'll be in that area. combined with:
2) the 4.6 GUI is open source, so there's a decent chance that even if there is a showstopper bug, you'll be able to find and kill it.
3) 4.6 has been in beta for a very long while. I'd bet money that there are no major showstoppers left at this point.

 

What I've heard at Unite is mixed regarding the stability of 4.6 right now. I had zero crashes, but the people around me were having a lot of problems. Corrupted colliders, crashing in the UI animation window, and I forget what else I heard. The only bug I'm experiencing is with the demo project where MouseDown isn't always firing.

 

I've been developing with 4.6 open beta now for two days and so far I've not had any problems. It feels very stable like they have rolled all the fixes from 4.5.3 into it, but I could be wrong. Anyways if your going to ship something anytime soon then I don't think it's a good idea to use an open beta because when a user has an issue with your game is it because of your code or because of the open beta?

 

The unity 4.6 beta is quite stable ( there have been around 16 iterations of it so far - this is the 17th I think ) but it is a beta. The very fact it is an open beta means that it is close to get released as a stable version - soon.
It is up to you to decide if you wish to invest some time porting your project to 4.6beta ( find n submit bugs ) or not.

 

We made this decision twice (for two teams). In both, cases, we did a trial period (2 weeks) to test the technology, with a mitigation plan to roll-back should it prove overly flawed. And in both cases, we found the new UI sufficiently capable and robust. We worked around the few crashes and used a few hacks to bypass weaknesses.

It's been months for us. We've long since ripped out EZGUI, and I'm days away from releasing one product, and have a large demo in December for the other. Your mileage may vary.

Gigi

 

You lost that bet. Take your wager and spend it on the App-Store on an Indie game. ... The new UI has show-stoppers, and it also has PLENTY of functionality that is worth releasing.

Gigi

 

Any links to forum posts about them? I haven't seen any.

 

Wait don't just say that and leave us guessing! So what are the show-stoppers that we need to be aware of?