Projects between 2 people HELP

We’re currently working on our first unity title, trying to learn a good work flow and get to grips with unity.

We’re a two man team (one programmer one artist) who work remotely so need to come up with a good and easy way to work together using unityPRO.

Currently i’ve been prefabbing then packaging for most things like updated terrain and other assets which seems to work reasonably well, although using that method to update camera and its scripts does mean re-connecting some scripts targets and then deleting the old camera.

Is there a better way I should be doing this?

Also there does not seem to be a way to pass the project settings or render settings to each other should either one of us tweek them, what would be the best way to do this?

Does anyone recommend the asset server in this instance? reading the manual it does slightly put me off “If you have never used Source Control before, it can be a little unfriendly to get started with any versioning system.”

Thanks
Kinl

Version control is always a good option, but it does take some getting use to. Of course for version control to work, all members of the team need to be able to access the same server.

With a 2 man team, it might be ok, to just manually version the whole project. Just copy/create a new (versioned) project directory when you need to send a update, compress the directory and send it over. Point the open project tool at the uncompressed directory and that’s it. That will work as long as you’re not doing too many micro changes. Typically, the developer is the “master” implementation, incorporating new art assets alongside the code, and also doing all the builds for testing/distribution.

Hope this helps,

Galen

I would also recommend using version control (SVN) for keeping both up to date. It is also nice since it works as a backup on which you can fall back to older revisions/updates if anything should happen.

Ask Unity for a trial license of the asset server. You can easily see if it will work out for you (and sounds like it should)…

Are you speaking from experience, or in theory? My understanding is that SVN (or anything that isn’t Asset Server) is very difficult to use with Unity because of all its automatic modification detection and the information it keeps in Library and Temp folders.

Well yeah it looks very messy with the Library and Temp folders. But since it’s the Assets that I’m concerned about I only commit/update that folder.

Haven’t tried the Unity Assets Server though.

If you only store the contents of the Assets folder you will lose all import settings and GUIDs of assets. This means that all prefab links and material references will be lost if you lose the Library folder.

The Asset Server came about for that exact reason. Other benefits of using it are that the client is built in to the editor and that it handles binary assets much more efficiently than traditional version control systems.

Ah, I’ve never had to do a full recover, only brought back some scripts. So as long as you commit/update the whole project folder it should be OK, but messy then?
Guess the Assets Server is worth a look.

Thanks for the advice, we may well try the trial of asset server.

The main problem is we both like to tweek settings as we’re going along, so maybe asset server will be good for us.

When you use the asset server follow these guidelines (or suffer hair loss)

  • don’t delete from the project view, go to server, local, mark for removal
  • before you commit, update from server