Hi guys, I am not sure if this is all placebo,but I am developing a terrain tool that works with huge terrains (hundreds of km2), and it creates a number of large data-files for internal tool-use only. And, I feel the editor is slowing down due to these files simply existing in the project folder?
The files has the extension “.raw”, and I notice Unity insists on processing them and adds an unwanted .meta file for each one. Is it somehow wasting time on managing these raw files? Things are truly slowing down a lot as the terrains grow, but it could also be due to the Unity terrain files, that definitively will need to be managed by Unity. I’d want to make sure the .raw files doesnt add to the burden though.
One obvious fix is to put these data-files in folders outside the “assets” folder, or in streamingassets, but that is not elegant as these raw files are accompanying other Unity-files, like terrain textures and terrain assets, that SHOULD be processed. Typically there would be multiple terrain projects alive at the same time. So, it is very convenient and tidy to keep them together, then it is easy to do a clean delete of a terrain project folder without having to chase down the dependencies for example, and many other things.
So, I wonder:
Will adding my .raw files (of massive sizes, tens of gigabytes) really slow down Unity? The .meta generation is suggesting Unity is monitoring them and any changes (they are changed frequently by the tool)
If so, is there any way to mark these files to be ignored by Unity, similar to GITs .ignore list?
The links had a lot of useless posts though, about SSDs being faster than mechanical ones (duh! Does anyone actually need ten posts about this obvious fact?) and other stuff, so I just copy in the useful info here in case others needs the info:
Hidden Assets
During the import process, Unity completely ignores the following files and folders in the Assets folder (or a sub-folder within it):
Hidden folders.
Files and folders which start with ‘.’.
Files and folders which end with ‘~’.
Files and folders named cvs.
Files with the extension .tmp.
This is used to prevent importing special and temporary files created by the operating system or other applications.
I did test to put a leading . before the files I wanted to exclude, and it works well. These files also did not show up in the project files list though, probably because in some OSes the leading dot means hidden, but that is fine. I can always just use the File Explorer if necessary to mess with those files.
Just out of curiosity;
Are your ‘.raw’ files actual photo raw’s or something other proprietary?
Haven’t tried to import raw photo in Unity myself, but I’m thinking unity supports this and tries to import your files as textures.
If this was the case and your raw files were not actually raw photo data intended as textures I think you could just change the file ending to something else that unity doesn’t try to import.
Does the effect disapear if you place the files in a folder named “Resources”?
Unity should not process those as extensively as to produce meta files and they remain within the assets directory.