I’m in a situation where my computer is used for both professional and personal development.
I have some projects from work that I would like to never open with my personal account or with a personal license. If it ever happened it would be an accident I would really like to avoid.
Is there any way to set safety rails for myself here?
For example, in previous versions of Unity3D the manual mentioned the -force-free CLI argument to ensure a project is opened with a personal license. If something like the opposite existed, and the project refused to open if I didn’t have a professional license, this would be very useful.
As far as I know nothing like that exists, but maybe there are some other options?
One very irksome property of Unity Hub is that the project list is stored locally and not scoped per account. So the project menu will always mix my personal and professional projects. To vent a little, the software involved feels like it is designed to maximize the number of people that accidentally violate terms of service.
To be clear, I am aware of that the proper steps for switching from a professional to a personal context are:
Return pro license
Log out of professional account
Log in to personal account
Activate a personal license
I am doing that. But the initials for my personal and professional account are the same. The project list will be the same. In other words, Unity Hub looks exactly the same to me whether I’m logged into my personal account or my professional account.
I don’t want to cause trouble for my employer because I forgot to use the right account once or twice. I would prefer to not have to pay the cost of this kind of constant vigilance.
If nothing else comes up..
change initials in your personal account to something more noticeable?
other random alternatives
use different windows accounts for work/home
modify hub sources to not allow opening projects from work path (with personal license)
and yes, unity is very aggressive if you mix licenses,
happened one time in a company and pretty fast there was angry email and warning about possible account lockdown unless purchase new licenses.. : o
It would simply not have any effect on the project with the exception of when you, personally on your personal computer, make a build for your employer with your personal license. Or you make and publish a build of your personal game with the employer’s PRO license. Though commonly, neither will have immediate consequences.
Otherwise just keep using your employer’s license but whenever you do make a publishable build of your personal project, that’s when you ought to switch licenses. NOT every time. That’s madness!
Consider this:
If you use your employer’s license, it doesn’t matter what project you work on personally until you publish something with it.
If you use your personal license with an employer’s project, there’s no check that I know of that ensures this particular project must only be opened with a Pro license or that sort of thing. The only thing that might happen in Unity 2022 or prior is a change in ProjectSettings turning the splash screen back on. Just watch your source control commits for this flag.
I’ve never given switching licenses any thought between 2015 and 2021, always using the employer’s license when I had one available. But then I didn’t publish any personal projects, just been working on various. For all intents and purposes, there is nobody and nothing that could ever pinpoint that the current project isn’t a prototype or test or real project for your employer but a personal project.
Which license you work on what project really only matters when making and publishing builds as far as I’m aware.
Just one caution here: if it’s your computer that you “lend” to your employer, they get away for free not having to supply you with an adequate machine. It is only expected by freelancers to provide their own hardware, possibly charging the employer for any purchases or possibly even a usage charge (unusual for computers but typically software you subscribe to that you would otherwise not use in your work) Employees however can and should demand an official employer’s machine, and the employer is often willing or even demanding that you only use their machine, partially because of security concerns and also because of this:
If that computer is the property of your employer, by extension of pretty much all employment contracts that I’ve ever had, everything you create on that computer is owned by your employer. So if you make a personal game with or on your employer’s hardware or even just within their offices, it’s legally your employer’s game that you’re publishing and you can be sued for damages and breach of contract and such.
from Unity,
Probably automatic detection, if personal license is used within company network
or especially if register free account with company email.
Yeah, that email domain check I know. I bet this gets installed as soon as you register PRO and henceforth any account using a personal license with that email gets those warning mails. For good reason because the license admins can’t tell if some developers use a personal license.
Ideally you’ll have an employer’s machine, and your own. But in all other cases using two machines goes far too far.
Better alternatives are to dual-install the OS on the same machine (boot into personal or professional environment) or to use a VM albeit voiding Unity support (ie bug reports from VM instances will be rejected).
But I’d say go with the minimum effort, if you need reasonable separation: just make two user accounts. Sign out and sign back in to switch environments while having the same applications available.
ugh same thing happened to me recently as well. I have a lot of random clients and projects I work on, this is pretty much unsustainable in the long term.