So I recently started getting back into unity, re-installed fresh, latest version (5.4.3f1) on win10 - and just dropped roughly $300 on the asset store for a project I was about to start prototyping - pretty excited.
After purchasing, I of course went to the download manager and started downloading what I just bought… except half the assets will not download.
The smaller assets all downloaded fine, anything under ~150mb which completed in less than a minute each roughly, however I’ve got half a dozen larger assets (300mb - 1.5GB) which all refuse to download completely - they’ll get maybe 200mb in before the download progress simply turns to an “Error” string with the tooltip reporting “Error: Recv failure: Connection was reset”.
This isn’t an issue with my internet (uptime of my connection is 5+ months, uptime of router is almost two years) and I’ve confirmed I can download large files (a few multi-GB files from various countries) just to be sure… there’s no firewall issues, I’m not using a proxy, there’s nothing strange about my connection in any way.
This does seem to be a problem others have experienced (eg: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1251081/asset-store-wont-download.html) however I can’t find a work-around, and no one from Unity seems to have addressed it… (been searching forums / double checking things people have mentioned from vaguely related posts for the last two hours)
Are there any known work-arounds? (I can’t seem to find a way to download unity assets outside of the unity editor asset store, which seems bizarre - as being able to use a real web browser would probably fix this - and I can’t find any settings that seem to change how the in-editor asset store ‘works’)
Any advice would be greatly appreciated… currently feeling completely ripped off.
One quick update, this appears to be looking less like a client-side issue and more like a server side issue to me, due to the following observations:
I can successfully download large assets from some authors (eg: I can download the Viking Village sample project and the Adam Exterior environment perfectly, first time - are different assets hosted on different servers?)
The exact same assets that fail to download on my win10 client, also fail to download on my mac client.
The exact same assets that fail to download on multiple internet connections (tried 3 friends connections on my mac, ranging from 12mbit to 100mbit), all totally different networking infrastructure (different modems, different ISPs, no firewall or proxy in any case)
It’s the exact same assets that fail to download every time in the exact same way (though I’ve managed to get lucky on some of the packages by just repeatedly trying to download - 12GB of wasted data on failed attempts, to download one of the 260mb assets seems like such a waste, costing Unity a lot more than it really should need to if they had more reliable downloads, or better yet… resumable downloads)
Edit: Also, exactly the same behaviour w/ 5.5.0f2 (beta)… (which ironically downloads at ~2x the bandwidth compared to asset store, and has zero issues either)
So finally, after further digging & experimenting - I can confirm, this is a server issue - however it’s not Unity’s fault, it’s Amazon’s fault (some of their AWS S3 edge nodes are unreliable at best when dealing with large files, which is already very well known in the industry, but Unity’s asset downloader doesn’t seem to account for this sadly).
I managed to figure out where the uuids for assets are stored / how unity was downloading them (plain HTTP underneath from an AWS S3 bucket) and downloaded it in Chrome, hitting the exact same issues I faced in unity (server just dies half way through the transfer for no reason).
For the time being I’ve opted to manually download assets from AWS using a simple wget script that aborts/resumes if downstream bandwidth hits 0bps - since Unity isn’t built to handle the unreliability of AWS S3 for large files (and even chrome takes too long to time out, before I can resume for the next segment, and so on…)
It’s a pity I had to go through all of this effort just to get access to assets I paid hard cash for. It’s a bigger pity this seems to have fallen on deaf ears, hopefully not a sign of larger issues to come w/ Unity support/community.
Hey, it seems this is happening in countries with bad internet restrictions/traffic management (for example in China). The Asset Store team seem to be looking into upgrading the content servers to work better, but I agree the effort you went through to get your assets is not right. I’m going to ping them now to hear what’s going on, and send over this thread for context. Thanks for giving us all the information!
Edit (after speaking with AS team):
There was an issue of many packages not utilizing the CDN for downloading. This has now been fixed and should hopefully make downloads more reliable and faster. We are also on the brink of supporting a Chinese CDN. It is in the final testing stage and we hope to enable it within a few days.
For what it’s worth, I’m having these issues from Australia w/ a 100mbit connection (though average bandwidth to the US east coast is ~80mbps).
Edit: And just as a quick double-check, I spunk up a t2.nano EC2 instance in us-east-1 (N. Virginia) and tried to wget one of the same assets I had issue w/ directly from the unity AWS S3 bucket - and I see the exact same problem (asset download goes from ~150mbps to 0bps at ~219MB into the ~924MB download).
So this is definitely an S3 issue (reproducibly halting downloads at roughly the same point from multiple internet connections, from multiple countries). Fingers crossed the CDN you’re using isn’t AWS too!
Could you provide me with the exact packages/URLs that caused the halting? The team is going to investigate a bit further. You can PM me them if you prefer.
There were also some smaller assets I had issues with (but eventually after a half a dozen download attempts, I did manage to get them from within unity asset store itself):
Have the same issue with a 2 GB Texture Download right now → https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/6045
During the DL at some point it says error in the loading bar, when i press on it comes “please wait” and nothing happens anymore.
When i refresh i have to start from the beginning and after some time around 60% now it happens again.
Its not my internet connection, i’m in middle europe without proxy, firewall or other DL problems usual.
What should i do now? Try x times with fingers crossed in front of the loading bar until it gets through.
Ok, it worked now, i didn’t touch my PC until it was done. This was a tough one.
The problem is the Amazon AWS content servers they are using . AWS is well known for disconnecting your download on the slightest burp in your internet, so if you’re on a slower, metered, non hard wired connection, many times a download will fail. Github even uses them for downloading ZIPs and cloning, so many times with I get a large release from github, it’ll fail.
