How to work with a team with baseclass?

Right now we are still in the research process and we have never used unity before. I would like to know how to implement a workflow where each member of the team will work in different games but will use the same base class. We are porting our games from flash. How we work there is we have a base class/game engine class that we all use. It is saved in our network drive and that folder is linked with our project files. Only one member of the team can edit that class. So when there are changes that needs to be implemented on all the games we only need to tweak the baseclass, then republish the games. How can this be achieve with unity? or is it even possible?

Several options:

Source Control

IMHO by far the best option is to use a source control system that support some kind of “external repository”, that is another repository that is put into an place within the “normal” repository. Git can do this, as can Subversion (just to name two widely used free-of-charge systems. Unfortunately, neither of them can enforce writing policies. But a good common sense and communication in your team can solve this).

There are plenty of resources and howto’s to read about Source Control Systems and Unity. But its worth the time. Definetely! My personal favour would be with Subversion, as it seems to have slightly less trouble integrating with Unity. (E.g. Git has some problems with empty directories and associated *.meta checkin/delete wars…)

Symbolic links

Although it is possible to use symbolic links to point to shared assets, I would recommend you stay away from this. Unity doesn’t seem to really like symbolic links…

Manual Scripts

Just write some batch-files or executable code that copies files around. rsync.exe and stuff… You can write an editor script that checks and copies the files on every start of Unity, for example…

Then again… why not using pre-existing code like Source Control systems that are made for exactly this reason? :wink:

DLL projects

You could put the “common base classes” into their own project and just copy the DLL over to the other projects. I recommend this IF AND ONLY IF you are not having any non-abstract MonoBehaviours or other classes derrived from UnityEngine.Object in your base classes. Every time you recompile the DLL, its a gamble whether you loose all your references to these classes in Unity scenes.

But it works great for tooling libraries and also reduces the compile time of your main project (which can become a minor headache for big projects. If you are used to C++ its still blazingly fast, but compile times of several dozend seconds are not uncommon).