Renaming Scripts in 2023.1.6f1

[Kurt-Dekker]

Whatever solution you decide on… that should not matter if you are using source control.

Otherwise, thought experiment: you do 100% of the things correct and “something” somehow still changes your GUID and some little script deep inside some Prefab now fails.

How would you know?

How could you fix it or even find it?

The answer is simple: source control.

PROPERLY CONFIGURING AND USING ENTERPRISE SOURCE CONTROL

I’m sorry you’ve had this issue. Please consider using proper industrial-grade enterprise-qualified 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.).

You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

Prefab links keep getting dumped on Git pull

There really isn’t any fix because git works perfectly with Unity when configured properly. Best practices involve saving your work and closing Unity before using git. But if you understand how Unity does and does not flush changes to disk (or at least ALWAYS do a save-project), you can get away with leaving Unity open. The only thing linking EVERYTHING together in Unity is the GUID assigned to a script or asset. Name is irrelevant. Only the GUID connects it. This GUID is in the meta file. I…

I usually make a separate repository for each game, but I have some repositories with a bunch of smaller test games.

Here is how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

2 steps backwards

Yeah, what Praetor said is it… Debug.Log is your friend, and also since this is animation related, you can open up the Animator window when you expect the animations to go, and actually visually see where the state machine is, see which state it thinks it is in. You can combine this with Debug.Log() output at the locations where you set the animations to be what you think they should be, and that should lead you to some intel. I highly recommend setting up git source control. It really plays ni…

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

When to make a separate object or class/script? Help me think like a programmer! (Example in text.)

This is a reasonable initial approach. The problem is you have listed the parts, but you haven’t really listed how they interact, and even if you did, it’s still sorta up to you how to organize it. Only YOU will know how to organize it, and the only way you can tell is to do the work. I recommend this: first, develop ALWAYS with source control (such as git), and every time you get even the slightest thing working, commit those changes with good commit messages. Then move to the next thing, c…

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

Your techniques to share code between projects?

I have found that bundling your own code into DLLs only serves to slow down your workflow. I base this on several years of experience dealing with other teams well-intentioned packaging mishaps. With games, it is almost always useful to reach into library code, make a temporary tweak to isolate a problem, and then revert it. With DLLs this is impossible, making workflow harder and more brittle. I prefer to share source code at the C# level. That way I can reach into libraries trivially and inje…

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

Removing IL2CPP_cache from Project

Not sure what you are "auto generating" with... I usually start from one of my other projects, or a gitignore example online, and reason about all the parts inside it, and start from there. Like any other configuration change, after you make it, pay attention for a while to make sure it is what you want. You can always clone the repo somewhere else to verify that the correct files are being tracked. Doing so to a brand-new computer is the acid test to make sure you can still bui…

Generally the ONLY folders you should ever source control are:

Assets/
ProjectSettings/
Packages/

NEVER source control Library/ or Temp/ or Logs/
NEVER source control anything from Visual Studio (.vs, .csproj, none of that noise)

Setting git up with Unity (includes above .gitignore concepts):

How to Git with Unity

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. Digital storage is so unbelievably cheap today that you can buy gigabytes of flash drive storage for about the price of a cup of coffee. It’s simply ridiculous not to back up.

If you plan on joining the software industry, you will be required and expected to know how to use source control.

“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards

SCRIPTS OR ASSETS ARE MISSING OR BLANK

Some info about Missing script warnings, broken prefabs, GUIDs, renaming GUIDs, etc:

Problem with Git and missing scripts

If you delete a script and recreate it, Unity will produce a new .meta file, with a randomly chosen guid. The guid inside that metafile is what "connects" the script to the prefabs / scenes / assets. Here's an example, with the guid fortuitously underlined with a red squiggle: [7024801--832060--Screen Shot 2021-04-10 at 9.13.40 AM.png] What you need to do is look in git history and find out what the original guid was for that file (the one you deleted when you deleted the script), then m…

Scriptable Object data not read after loading editor.

The linkage between a scriptable object instance and its script is twofold. For one it is the GUID contained in the .meta file for the script, but the other requirement is the class and file naming requirement as you list above. For instance, this is my StartingShips scriptable object: (StartingShips.asset, NOT the meta file) %YAML 1.1 %TAG !u! tag:unity3d.com,2011: --- !u!114 &11400000 MonoBehaviour: m_ObjectHideFlags: 0 m_PrefabParentObject: {fileID: 0} m_PrefabInternal: {fileID: 0} …

Scriptable Object data not read after loading editor.

If you rename the class from within visual studio, the currently infuriating state of that function (for actually the past decade, going back to Monobehavior) is that it renames the .cs file but does NOT rename the .cs.meta file. Therefore, Unity throws out your original GUID, which you MAY have already used, and creates a new one when it creates the new .meta file. It is the single most Fisher-Price non-professional feature there is in Unity. It is probably responsible for more bugs and lost …

EVERYTHING in Unity is connected to the above GUID, which is stored ONLY in the metafile, and hence why the metafiles ALWAYS MUST be source-controlled.

When Renaming: It is super-easy to inadvertently change the GUID by renaming outside of Unity. Don’t do that. Instead:

• close Visual Studio (important!)
• rename the file(s) in Unity
• in Unity do Assets → Open C# Project to reopen Visual Studio
• now rename the actual classes, and MAKE SURE THE FILE NAMES DO NOT CHANGE!

If you are NOT using source control while you do this, renaming files is an EXTREMELY dangerous process. Use source control at all times so that you can trivially revert if you miss a critical step and damage your project.