[RELEASED] Asset Inventory - Search Inside Your Assets

Yes that is a windows limitation. I’ll try to see if there are file methods I can use that allow longer paths but moving the extracted cache to a shorter hierarchy is probably the easiest.

The quest to create the best possible asset management solution continuous without a summer break. Version 2.5 was just released and brings many new features and improvements.

Most notably is full Unity Asset Manager support as a new data source, meaning that if you utilize the Unity Cloud for asset management in your team, you can now easily upload prefabs and other complex assets with all dependencies in one go and include also the cloud in your search.

The UI is now fully customizable with 300+ sections you can turn on and off as you like. This means you can define yourself now what should be visible by default and what should only appear when holding down CTRL.

Lots of love went into additional registry package support and overall package management. Last but not least Asset Store update performance is dramatically faster now, many issues were resolved and many convenient features wished for by the community are also in.

Have fun everyone, a great remaining summer time and I hope your productivity constantly increases with the tool. Keep the ideas coming!

[2.5.0] - 2024-08-20

  • Asset manager integration
    • See projects as packages, collections as sub-packages
    • Load project icons if available
    • Create and delete collections
    • Detect and sync deleted collections and assets
    • Use most features available like import, bulk import, preview, dependencies etc.
    • Deep links directly to org, project and asset web views
    • Show file state and version
    • Upload files (single or complex dependencies) to projects and collections
    • Upload preview images if existent
    • Import, upload and sync tags
    • Delete assets
    • Bulk upload, delete and remove
  • UI Customization
    • New maintenance action: Reset UI customization
  • Package handling
    • Add quick action to navigate to parent package from within search view
    • Sort sub-packages into separate list in package filter dropdown
    • Show Unity features as sub-packages
    • Show change log link behind package version of installed packages
    • Use display names instead of technical names in package selector dropdowns
    • Support switching package details between tabs and vertical list
    • Show built-in registry packages as well
    • Trigger registry package refresh when updating index
    • Support installing package dependencies while importing Unity packages to custom locations
    • Ability to restrict package search to name matches only
    • Show indirect dependencies in darker color in reporting view
    • Show shortcut “Install Indexed” button for git packages without need to use version dropdown
    • Make suggested downgrades of packages clearer in UI
    • Show delete package without advanced visibility if package is outdated
    • Properly support updating and reimporting packages to custom locations
  • Automatically capture project dependencies for initial package list without indexing
  • Load purchased items and details from Asset Store much faster
  • New search setting to also search through sub-packages when filtering for a specific package
  • Allow collapsing package statistics
  • Better styling / indentation on Settings tab
  • Hide and ignore width/height/length filters if not applicable to search type
  • Advanced setting to hide package field parsing errors
  • Disallow triggering package actions during indexing
  • Classify more known types as scripts
  • Improve texture memory management
  • Honor existing already imported files
  • Correctly support override scenario for imported files
  • Warn if using older version of Asset Inventory with database from newer version
  • Fix not all registry packages appearing without scanning package cache
  • Fix certain git dependencies not being stored correctly
  • Fix safepublisher for packages potentially containing special characters
  • Fix package samples alignment
  • Fix deactivated sub-package indexing not always considered
  • Fix store metadata not updated if download details could not be fetched
  • Fix sub packages accidentally being requested online
  • Fix list widths when scaling window very small
4 Likes

I just came back from Unite in Barcelona and it was a really good event. And there is a big surprise that was announced during the keynote:

:tada: Asset Inventory 2 is nominated as Best Development Tool for the Unity Awards.:tada:

If you feel that is justified I would be incredibly grateful for your vote. We have come such a long way and the next updates are already in the pipeline. Thanks a lot for all your support from the bottom of my heart.

2 Likes

Version 2.6 was supposed to be a small quality of life update but it turned into utter madness with a huge change log again. There should be something for each of you in there. I am really proud of this version as it tackles improvements to many existing features and extends the tool all over the place all while making it easier to use, faster and better.

  • Preview recreation got it’s own workflow now making it much more transparent what is going on and how to schedule the recreation.
  • Many additional dependencies are now supported (Shadergraph, FBX, Asset Store).
  • Package list columns are finally customizable and many additional columns can be selected and also sorted by.
  • The AI captioning flow got many improvements

And indeed a huge number of quality of life features was added all over the place. Enjoy reading through the change log.

[2.6.0] - 2024-10-07

  • Preview Wizard

  • Shows detailed breakdown of current preview state

  • Rework preview recreation flow to queue mode which can be started, stopped and continued at any point

  • Support single package, bulk or whole database

  • Introduce new preview state for previews where custom images are not applicable (e.g. documents)

  • Include explanations how preview images work, where they come from and what issues there can be

  • Allow reverting custom preview images to those supplied with the package

  • Easy shortcut to open folder with preview images for current selection

  • Fix preview images disappearing in search when scheduled for recreation

  • Fix multiple cases of incorrect preview states when recreating previews encountered error situations

  • Support many additional columns in package view

  • Allow sorting by pressing column headers

  • Support many additional sorting options (by all possible columns)

  • Additional dependency detection

  • Support shadergraph dependencies to referenced sub-graphs

  • Detect referenced textures in FBX as dependencies

  • Make FBX dependency scan configurable

  • Show dependencies from Asset Store packages (where specified)

  • Option to not calculate dependencies upon selection in search view (active by default for performance)

  • New search filter “Image Type” to quickly find normal, metal, emission and other maps

  • Exclude packages the user has hidden on the Asset Store automatically

  • Close import window automatically if all imports succeeded

  • Show which media is selected in package view

  • Allow toggling between tabs and list view directly in package details view

  • Ensure downloads are triggered from the main thread

  • Search assistant showing different ways to search with examples

  • Gracefully handle issues when current build platform cannot be determined

  • Mark packages for reindexing when fixing missing audio length

  • Put packages to be extracted into a queue with progress monitor

  • Support exporting also meta files

  • Show menu entry also under Window/Asset Management

  • New validator: Missing preview files

  • New validator: Wrong dimensions in preview files (compared to intended dimensions from Settings tab)

  • New validator: Check for database corruption

  • Focus searchfield again after adding field from dropdown

  • Allow excluding sub-packages in search view

  • Reuse existing editor login for Asset Manager connectivity

  • Show Asset Manager login information and login option

  • Show sub-packages correctly in Exclude maintenance view

  • Don’t report items in temp folder as existing in project anymore

  • Improve audio detection and preview for files with incorrect extension (causing FMOD errors)

  • Show if a downloaded package is potentially incompatible to the current Unity version

  • Allow redownloading if there are compatible packages

  • New maintenance views: Incompatible Packages, Fixable (by redownloading) and Unfixable

  • Sub-packages inherit last update date from parent package

  • Ensure additional package data (file count, reindex all capability) is available for sub packages in search

  • AI

  • Allow selecting which packages and content types to create AI captions for

  • Switch AI GPU support to pull request 8

  • Allow to bulk change AI captioning

  • Show number of activated packages in AI settings

  • New option to log newly created AI captions to the console

  • Upgrade SQLite to latest bug fix release

  • Auto-create new relative mappings for additional folders containing unknown keys (self-healing after DB reset)

  • Remove “Installed” maintenance view that is superseded with “In current project” capability

  • Clear package filters when navigating to other packages

  • Make ping after import configurable

  • Significantly reduce sluggishness of package view UI when doing an automatic meta-data refresh in the background after selecting packages

  • Show hints how to change the individual locations as tooltips in the Locations section

  • Ability to override journal mode for database for more conservative settings (dbJournalMode)

  • Handle issues more gracefully when copied paths are too long for the operating system

  • Support versions with commas instead of dots

  • Use better method for asset deletion that should result in less internally incorrect state and artifacts

  • Fix potential duplication of packages on initial index run

  • Fix potentially wrong version of an asset being downloaded not appropriate for current Unity version

  • Fix indexed files from archives being stored with absolute paths making it impossible to use from other systems

  • Fix previews not being generated correctly when files already exist in project

  • Fix preview generator not deleting temporarily cached assets anymore filling up disk

  • Fix folder wizard causing exception if some directories are not readable

  • Fix upscaled preview images appearing very dark in newer versions of Unity

  • Fix additional folder wizard leaving trailing slash when selecting root folder under Windows, breaking subsequent usage

  • Fix media folders and archives not honoring request to fix missing sub-packages

  • Fix endless import loop when interactively importing complex assets like Corgi that bring package dependencies and act as a full project

  • Fix “Reindex Now” option missing for packages

2 Likes

Version 2.7 might be the release I am most proud of. All the individual features that were build over the last two years are now really coming together. I was finally able to build one of the most important features: SRP support. It elevates the usefulness of the tool to really new levels. And of course many other big items also made it in:

  • If a package provides URP or HDRP support packages and you are importing assets from it into a URP or HDRP project, the tool will now automatically use files from the support packages to ensure the imported files work correctly and use the correct shaders and materials. Tested with hundreds of Unity packages.
  • Render Pipeline information is now shown for each package and also available as list columns
  • Additional dependencies can be detected automatically now and support for cross-package dependencies was added. The dependency UI nicely reflects this as well and shows where each file is taken from.
  • AI captions are not experimental anymore, can be shown as tile texts in the search results and can also be triggered directly from the search
  • Performance got a huge boost, especially on the search page and when handling larger databases with many packages
  • The technology for animated previews is now in, check it out when previewing video assets which are the first to support it
  • Fonts can now be previewed and filtered for
  • And one of the most annoying issues on Windows is now gone by adding support for long paths

Check out the full release notes and have fun with this new release!

[2.7.0] - 2024-11-04

  • SRP Support
    • Replace dependencies with entries from SRP support sub-packages
    • Support SRP replacement also for main file
    • Support complicated SRP replacement scenarios and make sure to traverse packages correctly
    • HDRP Support
    • Store render pipeline compatibility information for packages
    • Add render pipeline columns to package view
    • Support filtering for render pipeline
    • Allow setting render pipeline in Package Data editor
    • Support exporting, filtering, overriding and editing render pipeline flags
    • Show SRP information in package details
    • Support heuristic to select correctly versioned SRP bundle first
  • Dependencies
    • Support more cases when calculating shader dependencies
    • Support for named spaced custom shader editors
    • Improved dependency resolution of shader include scripts
    • Support analysis of cross-package dependencies (e.g. level design assets referencing other packages)
    • Display cross-packages in Dependency UI
    • Improved dependency UI to split dependencies by package
    • Support files with .asset dependencies better
    • Make auto-deleting unresolveable files from the database optional
  • AI Captions
    • Allow to display AI caption as tile text
    • Ability to recreate AI captions directly from search window
    • Support bulk recreation of AI captions
    • Handle unexpected AI caption results gracefully
    • Allow to AI captioning to continue on empty results
  • Performance
    • Improvements to asset loading, data preparation, GUI redraw
    • Use faster preview image file loading method
    • Load multiple preview images and package icons in parallel (up to 20 times faster)
    • Speed up shader dependency calculation significantly in complex scenarios
    • Hide filterable file extensions per default from type list for performance (use showExtensionsList to reactivate)
    • Add performance tips section to documentation
    • Remove lag when adding tags in search view
  • Upgrade to Unity Cloud Assets 1.4
    • Speed up resolving of assets
    • Improved tagging support
  • Previews
    • Support previews for fonts
    • Generate preview image for videos
    • Animated search preview tiles (for now for videos)
    • Unify preview logic between Media indexer and Preview recreation
    • Automatically mark previews as missing if they could not be loaded anymore
    • Extended validator to also cover animated preview images
    • Make preview recreation more reliable
    • Fix single preview recreation deleting cache folder again
    • Fix NA preview state not being set
    • Fix restoring to original preview images not covering sub-packages
  • Allow filtering for fonts
  • Allow filtering videos by width, height and length
  • Extract width, height and length from videos
  • Support long paths on Windows
  • Ability to temporarily exclude certain extensions during media and archive indexing from creating previews
  • Add hint that downloading assets will revoke easy return permission
  • Move C# sample out of AssetInventory namespace for more realistic use-case
  • Lots of internal refactoring
  • Reduce API exposure to meaningful methods
  • Use more async FileIO in Unity 2021.2+
  • Correctly handle issues with too long paths while calculating dependencies
  • Do not index .git folders anymore
  • Reduce some log spam
  • Fix download visibility for sub packages
  • Fix assets with / not being able to filter for in search
  • Fix “return” not working in manual search mode
  • Fix double clicking on -no attached package- in Package view not filtering correctly in search
  • Fix cases of missing UI customizability
1 Like