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Maintaining a stable version of Unity while keeping up the pace of innovation

March 15, 2016 in Technology | 3 min. read
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Placeholder image Unity 2
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In response to recent user feedback, we’ve decided to make a full public beta of Unity 5.4 available in addition to our current stable release (5.3.4). This is a direct result of our decision to focus on improving quality, and always deliver stable releases of Unity.

Balancing the pace of innovation and the need for stability has always been a challenge; especially given the mixed feedback we’ve received, which depends largely on what phase of development a given project is in.

Regardless, we've been busy shipping updates to the product since the launch of Unity 5 one year ago. We’ve added new build options and features as well as introducing a quarterly release cycle with frequent minor and patch releases. We also launched our public roadmap.

Today, in addition to the stable release of Unity, we're making a public beta available to all our users:

5.3.4 is our latest stable release. We are focused on continuously improving the quality of editor releases, and we’ve been working hard to ensure this is a dependable and stable release, so we encourage you to upgrade. We will continue to work on further improving the stability of Unity 5.3.x with additional minor and patch releases over the next 6 months.

5.4 is our public beta. With a focus on and commitment to stability, we’ll be making Unity 5.4 a public beta to allow more time for testing. In fact, moving forward, Unity betas will be available to everyone, including Unity Personal Edition users. Read more about what's in the beta here.

Once we are confident in the quality of our public beta, it will be promoted to a stable release. From that point onwards we will begin shipping minor and patch releases for the new stable release of Unity (e.g. 5.4.x), and we'll also continue to provide patch and minor releases for the previous release (e.g. 5.3.x) for a few months.

This approach to releases will allow us to make new features available faster and ensure that everyone who wants to check out our latest tech can do so. But more importantly, by opening up access to betas and enabling everyone to provide valuable feedback, we can ultimately work towards ensuring that our releases live up to your expectations.

As Unity coverage and usage skyrockets, the diversity of applications made with Unity continues to grow, and with them the number of edge cases that our QA passes may miss. We very much appreciate your feedback on releases and encourage you to file bug reports both on betas and on stable Unity releases using the Unity Bug Reporter accessible through the Help menu.

We’d love to see lots of you open your projects in the Unity 5.4 beta. It contains a wealth of performance improvements and upgrades to the out of the box visual quality you can achieve with Unity. We hope and expect that your Unity project can benefit from these many improvements right now.   

We are fully committed to delivering the highest quality product possible, and we look forward to shipping new releases to you in the coming months.

March 15, 2016 in Technology | 3 min. read

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