I did a bunch of work on a project yesterday, newly converted to Unity 4.3
When I finished up, I reenabled syncing to Dropbox (it’s off while I work) and it told me that it was syncing over 180,000 files. I left it overnight and it did it’s thing.
I’ve just checked the project, and it looks like there’s a whole lot of files somewhere in there that shouldn’t be there:
I’ve looked through the Library folder etc and can’t spot anything out of the ordinary.
Anyone have any thoughts? Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a command that works on MacOS which will return each directory and its individual file count.
EDIT: Okay, I’m a dummy. I just re-ran the command in the Library folder and it’s definitely in there somewhere:
Anyone know if I can delete that stuff? I did redo the occlusion in all my levels as part of the work yesterday. Looks like the new version of Umbra doesn’t clean up after itself?
Okay, I went ahead and deleted these files. Everything seems to work fine afterwards, so they definitely seem to just be some sort of temporary file generated while baking occlusion in Unity 4.3.
Unfortunately, there are so many of them that you can’t simply “Move To Trash” or “rm *” them. The following will work nicely though if you find yourself in the same situation (this is for MacOS obviously):
I think unity now does incremental occlusion culling. So every time you place/move an object he will do some change.
Perhaps that’s what those files are?
Yes, these files are related to occlusion culling. The name “umbra” refers to an area of space that is occluded from something. (A shadow’s volume is its umbra, occluded from the light source.) The “umbra cache” files are created/recreated on the fly, apparently.
I would just teach my version control system that they’re uninteresting. For example, add *.umbracache to your svn:ignore properties. Unfortunately, it looks like DropBox has no such setting at the file-extension level. You can tell it to exclude folders in the Settings > Advanced > Selective Sync area.
That doesn’t really explain why there’s 200,000 of them for a 17 level game? Seems excessive. Also, occlusion is working fine now that I’ve deleted them all.
I’m still sticking with the theory that they’re temporary files that aren’t getting cleaned up when they should be.
There are almost 200,000 of these files for my six level demo. I have a fast PC and it says it’s going to take over an hour to delete them all. Is this huge number of files really necessary?
Bump. It’s been almost 5 years and this is still an annoying problem. Why are these all separate files? Can we do one binary per scene or something instead?
I’ve noticed these umbra files too. Makes backing up your game a royal pain! Top that off with the asset store cached files and we’re talking gigs of garbage to delete.
Don’t use dropbox to sync Unity projects. MOST of it is chuffy transient files and is the sole reason that Unity can INSTANTLY drop into play mode when you press a button. If those files were not present, pressing PLAY would require minutes or even hours before you could play, just like the bad old days when we “made a test build.”
Instead, join us all here in the year 2021 and consider using proper industrial-grade source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.
Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).
As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:
Here’s how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:
Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:
Share/Sharing source code between projects:
Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:
Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):
It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place.
“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards
Why would you scan these? Do you add any 3rd-party code or executables? You really should exclude your project folders from virus control and only scan whatever 3rd-party you’re adding to it, not the whole stuff all the time.
It was full pc scan didn’t know they are there an old project with huge map had 750k of these individual files. To note one of my projects did contain infected files but it wasn’t the one with all the Umbras
Oh and yes when I first started learning to code I used third party codes to help learn coding some of these might of been malicious. I don’t use any third party code gpx sprites or 3D models any more so i can delete my earliest projects (which I had been sentimental to) without actually caring about losing some feat of game development lol