I am having issues creating and reading projects from our Apple xSan, which I do not have when I’m working on my local storage. As our collaborate storage is backed up nightly, we would like to take advantage of this and work exclusively off our xSan. I have searched thoroughly through the forums and could not find a solution. Is there any workaround I can deploy on my Unity to make it work?
I included a snap-shot to help illustrate the issue I am encountering - mainly that there are no visible assets in the Unity project even though they are clearly there when looking in the folder.
Honestly, I would appreciate if there was a more complete answer than that, if one exists. That is to say, why does Unity expect that? Why was it not designed to run over NAS - when a lot of studios do precisely that? In the studio I work in, Unity is literally the only professional software that cannot work with files directly on the server - and most of the rest are video-production-related, so it’s not like there are bandwidth issues at play here. Frankly, it makes Unity seem like a non-professional application in this context.
If you are working in a “studio” you probably will not work alone on the project-> You will need Version / Revision control software
If you are not using it , you are in kind of a big problem.
For example: Unity is designed to get evens form the OS if a file has changed in a folder , so unity can react to is and re-import it properly. If you are working on a network drive you will not get this events , and that will probably not the only problem you will get.
@fffMalzbier correctly describes the reason Unity expects the project file to be opened on the local file system. Also, only a single user can open a project at a time, so having a project living on a NAS, where a different user may attempt to open the same project makes no sense. Our professional customers use revision control systems as a way of sharing a project across team members. That’s a scenario they are pretty familiar with, since most teams will already use such systems for source code management. PM me if you want to discuss this issue in more depth.
You guys are talking about this as if it was a design decision. It very obviously isn’t - If that was the case, then why does it behave like a bug? Why doesn’t it pop up a warning, “Unity is not designed to access project files on a NAS”? No, this is a bug.
I’m a single developer among a sea of animators and artists. We have no use for a team license. Our NAS, unlike my local machine, is automatically backed up offsite regularly.
You do not need a team license.
We use mercurial ( http://mercurial.selenic.com/ ) for source control , backup and transport between different machines (IT’s FREE).
It operates outside of unity and is lot more reliable then the unity asset server.
You can have the mercurial server running on a remote server that can be backup-ed like you normally do.
Even on projects where only one person is working on, its smart to have this security to be able to go back if something went wrong.
For your suggestion for an warning if unity is loading projects form a network drive., sound like a good idea but I’m not so sure if unity can detect it.
The point in having the xSan is not necessarily about sharing project files or team work. It is about having a centralized server that contains all the shared assets (Models and textures) that needs to be backed up daily. We have all professional studio application working like that from avid, nuke, photoshop, and after effects.By working on the xSan server we are preventing duplication of assets when imported to Unity. I understand from the thread that there is no solution to the xSan problem - is this something that can be worked on?
Dear Lermanico:
I’m a developer in a company where avid, nuke, Photoshop and Maya is used in a very similar way as in your case, we have a central server for the project data. But the programmer have a different workflow and thats normal and without that different workflow with an SVN server it would be impossible to work, and we had lost probably 100 hours of work without this solution.
If you like you can make regular Backups on your xSan server but working on the xSan server is not an option. Its not a bug or missing features, its by design.
There is probably the reason that around 95% of the developer use a version control system.
I thought I addressed this already. If it was by design, it would have a warning or dialog box saying so. The way this issue manifests itself is as a bug. It’s a bug.
Great , now that we all agree its a bug ,we can all send in bug-reports and post on http://issuetracker.unity3d.com/ .
That way unity will fix the bug if they think its possible / worth doing.
