I’m having trouble figuring out how to do this effectively. There’s no “Save Project As”. Simply copying files is ineffective. Exporting one project’s assets, starting a new project, and importing those assets does create a project with the same assets as the first, but fails to take the tags and layers with it. Manually entering 62 tags and 3 layers, and setting everything in the hierarchy that uses those tags & layers back up how they go, is a much longer task than simple project branching should be.
I had to re-enter and fix all the tags and layers recently when I upgraded my Unity client to 5.0.0f4 Personal, and it was a pain. Now, they only load correctly when I start Unity by opening the project file. If I start Unity directly, it wants to “fix” my project and destroy the tags & layers again. If I tell it not to do so and I open the project after Unity loads, it fails to load the tags and layers, but exiting Unity and restarting it by opening the project file loads the tags and layers just fine again. So, it’s possible that there’s something weird about the tags and layers that’s causing them not to load properly. I don’t know.
What else can I look at or try?
Solved!
For anyone else having the same issue, to fully copy a project, do the following steps:
1 - Assets > Export Package > All > Export > Name your package
2 - File > New Project… > Name your new project
3 - Assets > Import Package > Select the package you created > All > Import
4 - Exit Unity
5 - In Windows Explorer (or the equivalent for your operating system), navigate to the older project’s folder and go to the Project Settings subfolder.
6 - Copy “TagManager.asset”
7 - Navigate to the newer project’s folder and go to the Project Settings subfolder.
8 - Paste. Overwrite the file.
This is what worked for me, and if anyone else is in the same situation, I hope it works for you too. I found the asset package importing and exporting in another thread on here, but this does not transfer the tags and layers. I figured out what to do for these when I noticed that tags and layers are part of the project settings instead of the assets (which seems very odd to me). A pure copy/paste of the entire project would fail to do what you’d expect it to, but luckily, Unity will accept a copy of another project’s *.asset file.
Thanks to everyone who replied to this question. You helped get me thinking on the right track, even if indirectly.