I recently upgraded our code from Unity 2019.2 to 2019.3 and wanted to share my experience. I know it is still in beta. But I really got hooked on the new editor design and the Device Simulator Package.

Device Simulator 👍

The new Simulator Package allows us to set certain device specific properties in the game view so that we can finally iterate quicker over behaviour to adjust for example to ‘safe areas’ and notches.

Assetstore via Package Manager 👍

This new feature sounds small in the release notes but it is a nice improvement over the built-in browser version of the asset store that was rather slow and clunky to use.

Edit: Now it would be nice if we can reference a specfic version of an asset store package via the manifest.json and do not have to add it to our source control anymore. That way we benefit from pre-compilation and reduced compile times. Maybe next time.

New Editor Design 👍

Finally the editor design was overhauled and modernised, flatter, more focused — I like it. As a MacBook Retina user I also very much appreciate finally having crisp icons everywhere. See the comparison below:

comparison old (on the left) and new design (right)

Changes in PBXProject 👎

Looking at the official release log for Unity 2019.3 you will notice my two complaint points about this release are not mentioned there. These are API changes that are not documented in the changelog.

Unity now throws an exception when calling TargetGuidByName of UnityEditor.iOS.XCode.PBXProject with the standard target name Unity-iPhone . This not only broke our post processing in many places but also in a lot of third party plugins.

For us the two most important affected plugins were:

Changes in RenderPipeline 👎

We are using SRDebugger — a great tool to inspect the console and other debug elements during the game even on mobile devices.

To do their frame profiling they measure the start of the frame rendering using UnityEngine.Experimental.Rendering.RenderPipeline callbacks. These were moved out of experimental now (not mentioned in the unity release log, only buried in the SRP package changelog)

I reported the problem in the unity forums but not reply yet, but you can see the fix below:

Conclusion

I am happy with the release, I know it’s still beta but surprisingly stable for me so far. There are no major life-changing improvements but incremental quality-of-life ones ❤️