The asset server pricing is a bit too high. Not only do you need a PRO version for each team member, but you need the asset server license for every team member as well!
Using subversion with the project ends up with a lot of problems. My team finally found a loophole of combining subversion with dropbox in a funky way to work with my small team of 3.
Small teams are getting owned with the way the assets are made. Anyone have a better idea of team sync?
Otherwise, I think maybe server pricing being available for basic and having X amount of connections would be a better license…
For instance. $500 dollars allows 5 people to work on an asset server from any version of unity… That’s much more worth the pay versus my current situation…
(pro ($1500) + phone devices that we ‘wish’ we could have + ($500) asset server) * 3
Yeah I sent the Unity guys an e-mail with this exact statement. I agree $500 per person is to high. For it to only be available in pro, That I don’t mind so much but I can see reason for wanting it in the standard version too.
I don’t think the pricing should stay the same and just allow more users as I’m on a two man team right now and $500 is still to high for me to justify.
Maybe just reduce the license cost to $100 as that’s more scalable and a darn sight more reasonable.
The other issue I have with it is there’s no ability to trial this service. I’m not going to drop $1000 on something I haven’t used before.
Yeah it feels wrong to pay that much for versioning, which has always been free for us when we were using Quest3D.
And we are not alone. There were some gripes about it in the Unite presentations too.
Versioning is free and comes as part of Unity Pro, only requires that you enable it in the editor so the .meta files are generated required for VCS usage.
You can trial it, at least it was possible in the past, but you had to request temporal trial licenses back in 2.x days (I’ve a license now so not trialed it in U3 etc)
My proposal on this was to turn Unity’s data files into text data, so they can be used properly with existing version control systems. People are voting for it here.
I then suggested that they implemented real-time multi-user collaborative editing on the asset server to give reason for people to still consider buying it. That’s something you don’t get with version control systems like svn or git. From what I understand, they are experimenting on multi-user editing in NinjaCamp.
The solution for now for non-Pro licensees is to use unity packages as that is the most fail-safe way to collaborate.
Yeah even with pro, one of my friends is having an issue with sync and conflicts. The asset server is the ultimate solution from what it seems…
So as a community, is there a way to petition such a thing (lowering prices)? Does that work in feedback?
I mean as everyone is kind of on the same track here, if the asset server was 100 bucks per person and available for standard, due to the troubles I’ve been through in the last 6 weeks - I’d totally be throwing down 300 bucks right now for my team.
Any ideas on how we can try to grow this awareness?
~DisTurBinG
Also an idea to mention, if they went my way with (X users for X bucks, Unlimited for X*Y bucks),
I’m sure the people who have already bought it getting instantly (unlimited users) would be satisfied.
We use it all the time, no problem commonly.
The only thing that can cost hair at times is when there is misscommunication on who is responsible for which binary data (scene / prefab) or user errors on commits
And this limitation exists independent of what you use, even with the Asset Server this does not change. There is still a major missasumption on what AS gets you and what not going by the past threads on the matter:
It does not offer any kind of concurrent editing
It does not offer merging for binaries
Has no branching / tagging
What it has over regular VCS is a more artist friendly implementation and it syncronizes the caches so that you can use MAX files with artists syncing commiting and all others even without max see the mesh fine. But thats kind of where it ends difference wise to SVN / GIT
Requesting a drop of price can be done but I doubt that anyone is going to care for it. If UT feels that it would do better at lower price they will lower it, otherwise not, even if every single user requests it. You aren’t in any different position than the freeriders that want pro features in free basically.
Indeed but not much to do at least with SVN which only stores whole change sets instead of distinct change actions.
GIT stores deltas differently, as such it should theoretically be more capable at handling collisions, but never tested it indepth as I just recently found a usable git client that would be an option for the team (smartgit, tortoise git wasn’t really enjoyable for non-techies ) and transfering the small nothing of 10 tags, 2 projects and a good 10GB midway through a project isn’t reasonable nor funny
We use dublicates of scenes and prefabs with dedicated responsibility to reduce the occurance of collisions quite good commonly.
Have had AS long before VCS support happened too, still happen to use it from time to time and on the project I’m part of its considered that we might switch over to from SVN due to the funny things that can happen with SVN if a commit is done wrong or folders get copied in unity or moved and alike where someone will then invest half an hour to hours to defuck ™ the repo so the rest can work again too
I technically don’t consider it overpriced, but undersupported. If the finally add branching visual scene - prefab merging as its offered in other engines with integrated versioning (without concurrent world editing), then its adequate.
But I’m unsure if the long vacant job offer has been filled for exactly this, the AS programming, having checked the job listing for quite some time
No offense, but if you need Pro licenses for every team members AND asset server licenses for every memeber…it’s laughable. Inevitably, any team larger than 2 could simply create their own asset server (or outsource the job to Indians) and it would be worth it (especially if the team is quite large).
Perhaps I am a bit confused as to what the Asset Server does-- but I assumed it helped a team work on the SAME project? It’s not like you couldn’t just host the project on a central machine and allow others to open (and edit) it from that machine, while everyone is on VOIP. Or you could handle it the most traditional way with post-it notes and a whiteboard, lol…
There are a boatload of ways to handle this, and while it is nice to have a centralized middleware which handles updates instantly, it is certainly not worth $2000. At any one moment you won’t have to send 100GB of files to another person in minutes (assuming you could do this anyway with the AS, lol…) so really, there’s not even much for a need for this if you can organize with other tools which can provide similar structure and organization.
I don’t see any reason everyone needs a Pro license (although I’m not entirely familiar with what a Pro license gives besides better Water, hehe!) as others can code in Free and send what they have to the Pro. No reason to force a team to spend thousands of dollars just for the asset server.
I second the fact that if you can’t trial it, there’s not a high incentive to spend thousands to buy it.
Even if you have a 100 person team, outsourcing won’t make sense as you don’t have the deep hook into the asset data etc
The area where AS goes is beyond what you can access with editor scripting at all.
But yeah UT has caused some “gap” on how adequate the price is when they added VCS to pro instead of adding it to AS licenses only.
As for the price: Be happy that it is sold standalone and that Pro does not cost $2000 per seat including it by defualt as you do on all other engines that have integrated versioning where its not optional to buy it, thats at least my pov
that $500 is quite high for what it offers and not offers at the time is out of question (recommended myself a $100 price tag when they actively told all AS licensees to be stupid morrons by making VCS support a pro features and not an AS only feature) but none the less I doubt it will drop into a $100 range (thats what the upgrade from U2 to U3 cost) especially given there is VCS support for all who want to not pay. But I would assume it will either finally get full asset merging and potentially some concurrent editor capabilities or drop to $200 - $250 per seat. (that it will remain per seat is granted as selling the server per project is not workable and one time will not happen with undefined numbers of users, thats not offered for any professional VCS solution. Also its still rather cheap if it were fully featured, perforce costs muhc more and the same goes for MOG complete which I see as viable alternative for teams with artists etc which costs $15+ per seat and month)
There is something wrong. I’m sure people with money were able to buy this product, but if they are to stay a true indie game engine, I at least would hope for the AS to be available for non-pro stuff.
As someone stated, one person having a pro seat (for what he needs to do) and some of the others using basic seats, the collaboration is needed.
I see nothing but pro’s in dropping the ‘PRO’ requirement out of AS. If the engine wasn’t as good as it is, the collaboration portion would have killed me weeks ago. This whole ‘manual locking system’ is very annoying…
Anyways, with merging techniques with standard repositories, the idea of changing the format for the levels will still cause problems when it comes to merging them with SVN, etc (rarely). And when that rare point comes… It will be very annoying to attempt to fix unless it’s a fairly readable file.
I think I read somewhere before where people can work on the same level at the same time, is there a plugin / lib for that out there atm? Because the true problem is the levels for sure and if everyone had a server hosting to work on a level at the same time with their team while it synced the assets of those levels, that would be fairly cool.
Similar to the hero engine (multi people in same world working on it)
Anyways, I think best bet from these responses is that we need to probably start a ‘wish’ of dropping the pro out of the AS.
Big or small, anything greater than 2 people need this to same time… When it comes to even bigger studios, that’s an even more ridiculous price, as someone stated previously, almost better to make your own scripts to do that with the money you would loose.
The proper term would be ‘If you have a successful enough studio’, as an example pricing for only 5 people is 10k…
I still don’t see why a smaller sized teams need this, or why a larger team couldn’t make their own way of handling this (if they are indeed that large, they’d have a lot more power and capability on a single task) although the larger team might already have pro, so I guess that’s different.
Still, I don’t see the point. If you can’t work LIVE on the same level, the AS is pointless. Just keep your project on a single server where each user can edit it. Is this not possible?
Right now if I need help or want to assist, I rather zip up my asset folder and place it on a server for others, or I upload the specific script or asset. There is nothing that cannot be uploaded in such a time where another cannot get it immediately, unless they’ve never had the project before AFTER it was heavily modified with bulky assets.
Sure, the Asset Server would be nice, but at the same time that’s not attempting a unique version of the asset server such as hosting the project on an editable server. $7500 for 3 people to have the asset server this just isn’t worth it in my opinion. Save the money and use your own server.
You just forget the point of versionning.
You don’t want to loose time on some stupid tasks even in a big team.
I think you should google versionning because I don’t think you understand the purpose of the asset server licence.
Even for bigger studio, 500$ by people is not nothing.
If you have 30 people, it cost you 15 000 $.
Unity is not made to be use by a big team. That’s the big flaw of unity.
If there is a cache problem when you use SVN as a versionning tool, Unity should fix it.
