I just had a very interesting email today. I have sold a number of copies of the UDE to both Windows and Mac users and thus far it has worked fine for all of them… until now…
My latest customer downloaded the same file as all the rest but open opening the sample projects, all scripts in all prefabs are reported as “Missing”. So my question is this: Under what circumstances do files go missing from a prefab?
I know that if you build a prefab and then go and duplicate the script, delete the original and then rename the new one (for whatever reason) then the link is broken. I further assume that if you rename or delete the file before loading Unity that the link will also be broken… Now, I cannot see my customer having done either one of these so I am wondering, under what other circumstances would prefabs be broken upon starting a level?
I know the problem can’t be on my end because neither me not any of my other customers have had this problem, it can’t be compatibility issues with the new Unity because this person is still using 2.5.1 on Windows and I can’t imagine deliberate sabotage from the user end so I am a bit stumped…
I am hoping that if you can give me a couple of causes then I can start working toward finding out what happened…
Upgrade to 2.6 with non-standard assets that get reinserted into the database could cause that too.
Had that on one of my prototypes that basically all custom behavior links were gone after upgrade
But anyone who upgrades technology mid-project has basic dev behaviors to learn anyway so its likely a healing shock
The issue can’t be 2.6 though because the person is still using 2.5.1 and only just bought the UDE yesterday.
Got it yesterday, tried using it for the first time yesterday, got this error yesterday… in 2.5.1…
I myself want to still test it’s compatibility under 2.6 but I just downloaded it last night when I went to bed so haven’t gotten around to it yet…
This is what bothers me the most. The fact that it is still 2.5.1 and it worked for everybody else… so what could this person possibly have done differently that her double click works differently than other people’s double click…
It seems the prefabs are completely broken in that the models themselves don’t even show up. Even the terrain is complaining about not being correctly linked…
Yeah, the lib getting messed up, that’s what I thought, too. I am just a bit confused as to how this could have happened. What I do is I duplicate the entire project folder and include it exactly as is. I especially did it this way to avoid any kind of errors like this… Are you saying that is not a good way to go?
Should I rather export stuff as packages instead of zipping up the entire project folder?
However, that issue put aside, another thing this person tells me is that
Does this imply that Maya is somehow a mandatory install on Windows systems for Unity to run? That sounds a bit fishy… I could have sworn I read somewhere some time ago that for applications to be able to import FBX files into them, the Maya development kit or something or other had to be installed on a system. I never really understood why Maya had to be installed on a system for another program to be able to read a specific file format but since I have had Maya on my system for years before I ever even heard of Unity this has never really been an issue for me personally and I never investigated.
So, did I understand this correctly that Maya (or a part of Maya) is required on a system before any other program can import FBX files??? And, either way, could Maya have something to do with these errors? I gave the customer a link to a previous version of the UDE and that had the same effect with everything just not working…
I am really stumped as to why the library would get completely messed up and clutching at straws here…
Unity doesn’t read Maya files, Unity opens Maya and makes it export Maya files to .fbx, because that’s the only format Unity reads (aside from .obj, which has no animation).
On the one hand I feel I am getting somewhere… and then I realize I don’t understand at all
You say that Unity opens Maya to convert .MB files to FBX, but that Maya doesn’t need to be on the system for it to… Oh… wait, now I see…
So because my models are in MB format, Unity DOES require Maya in order to convert my models into a format Unity understands. No app requires Maya in order to READ FBX? However, Unity requires it to convert my MB to FBX… Now I see…
So now question… I read on the Unity 2.6 features page that Unity now supports a later version of FBX… If this person downloaded Maya 2010 which would obviously have the latest version of FBX also, then uses 2.5.1 to export the MB to FBX, it would be safe to say that the FBX format returned would be to new for 2.5.1 to understand and would thus cause issues… or does Unity request models to be in a specific FBX version when it does the export?
More importantly, if the error between Maya’s file version and Unity’s file version does indeed exist and it is causing the model inside a prefab to be broken or dirty or whatever it is called, would that also account for why the scripts are missing inside the same prefab?
In other words: Download the latest version of Unity to go with the latest version of Maya and voila, load the project and everything is fine … or not so simple?
The problem was that the customer was creating a new project and then copying the stuff over…
Copying between projects… never a good thing
Anyways, thanks. I was thinking there was something seriously wrong here but it turned out to be plain, old, simple, common, every day variety user error so the issue is successfully resolved
