Upgrading To Unity 2019.4.2f1 LTS Baseline

[Interkarma]

Within the next couple of days, Daggerfall Unity's baseline Unity version will be increased to Unity 2019.4.2f1 LTS (Long Term Support). This will be the final major engine upgrade leading into Beta through 1.0 and foreseeable future.

Some reasons for keeping engine up to date are:

• Apply all engine fixes since current baseline of Unity 2018.2.21f1.
• LTS versions have 2 full years of future support and are considered the most stable baseline for supported games. DFU's current 2018.2.21f1 engine version is now legacy.
• Core developers and modders can take advantage of new engine features.
• Sets a unified framework for all developers to work around from now to post 1.0 release.

The next builds 0.10.25 will be identical to 0.10.24 with the exception of engine upgrade. There will be no DFU-specific bug fixes or features included. This means that 0.10.25 will be an optional upgrade for next 1-2 months so that modders have time to upgrade their mods (if required) and repackage for new engine version.

Regarding mods, we found no impacted mods while trialling upgrade to Unity 2019.3 in an earlier test branch. But the only way to be sure is to release a widely available version for everyone to play with. If users experience mod issues on 0.10.25, they can roll back to 0.10.24 as there are no other changes to the game.

I'm working on upgrade now and will post more news once new builds are ready.

Note: 0.10.25 builds are now available on Live Builds page for testing.

[Interkarma]

The Unity 2019.4.2f1 LTS upgrade branch has been prepared.

https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfal ... -4-upgrade

This will be merged to master on the morning of 10 July 2020 (Australian Eastern time). This gives everyone time to install Unity 2019.4.2f1 for future development and modding. Any core developers with the ability to commit direct to master, please do not do so until upgrade branch has merged.

New builds for 0.10.25 will be released on weekend for general testing and feedback.

[Interkarma]

The master branch on github has now been updated to Unity 2019.4.2f1 LTS as the required Unity version.

https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity

Developers - Please update your editor and sync latest changes. All future PRs will need to be compatible with current master.

Mod authors - Please update your editor for building future versions of mods against master code. I will release 0.10.25 builds over weekend for testing mods. Previous tests showed excellent compatibility with existing .dfmod packages. Hopefully no issue once new builds go live.

[King of Worms]

I think this way of implementing the newer version of Unity is really good. I wonder if it will also bring some performance increase, even if minor. Anyway, thanks for this and good luck with the smooth transition

[Magicono43]

Thanks for the heads-up IK. Not sure exactly what features 2019 Unity builds add, (besides use a tuple in C# possibly?) but I hope to have a clean transition from the legacy version to this one. Once again, thanks for the update.

[Interkarma]

Current versions of Unity have deprecated building for Linux Desktop 32-bit and Linux Universal. It is only possible to target Linux Desktop 64-bit in Unity 2019.4.2f1 LTS builds.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/feedbac ... et.577897/

Starting from Daggerfall Unity 0.10.25, Linux 32-bit and Linux Universal will no longer be available. New builds will target Linux Desktop 64-bit only.

Other 32-bit platforms (Windows x86 and MacOS Universal) continue to be available for builds. If Linux 32-bit ever becomes available in modern Unity in future, which seems highly unlikely, I will make this build available again.

[Ferital]

I just upgraded to Unity 2019, everything works perfectly! I especially enjoy being able to use Visual Studio 2019 with DFU codebase now, since I've also been using it at work for over a year now.

[Hazelnut]

Nice work, we've been waiting for this for a while. Hoping it clears up the hangs on exit issue with terrain jobs...

[pango]

Beside the (already mentioned) occasional seam in messageboxen, the only problem to report, on Linux at least, is the change of scale for mouse sensitivity: I used a sensitivity of 2.0, now I have to crank it up to the max allowed (8.0) to get roughly the same experience. That's not too bad, I can cope with that.

And it seems to fix a lot of geometry/collision issues

[DigitalMonk]

Does this also mean we get linear lighting, and that Post-Processing's Eye Adjustment will look awesome now? (Sorry, I'm at work and don't have stuff set up to play with it myself right now...)