can’t see unity selling many copies of their asset server. it should work on pro and free and be 50-100 dollars per person, then maybe just about everyone will pay up, leading to more users using unity, more collab, etc.
At the moment we’re looking at unity 4 options for collab and we’re just not interested in 500 per person. Not at all, sorry.
What alternatives exist with the same ease of use?
I think I recall hearing this is 100% legal.
http://www.assetserverhosting.com/
Asset server hosting between 15 and 50 bucks a month. Most projects should not need much more than a GB, that goes for $15/mo.
When I first started out on Unity I thought the same; so as a Mac user, I hunted out the nicest SVN client I could find - which happened to be Cornerstone Cornerstone Mac Subversion (SVN) Client Download | Assembla. As pretty as it was it just doesn’t match up to the integration and ease of use Asset Server delivers. SVN doesn’t deal with serialising and diffing assets very well, just code, which is a real bother. I ended up shelling our for Unity AS and it has saved my skin many a time with quick easy reverts, diffs etc.
Agree it’s expensive but it’s a great asset (ho ho) for any developer.
As for assetserverhosting.com - you still need to buy the client…
Yes, that just makes it so you can run the asset store if you don’t have a server you can put it on. You still need to have a way to push the changes.
It’s like git. Even if you have a paid repository, it’s nothing unless you have a git client installed. In this case, a very expensive git client.
Client? What client? I thought it was just the server and then Unity Pro. There is a third piece?
Ah i see. I thought they somehow had a license that allowed them to sub-license.
Nope.
I’m only really going to more or less repeat what Bork had to say. Cornerstone is about as nice as SVN gets and it’s still nowhere near as nice or as Unity-friendly as Asset Server. However, if you’re “just not interested in 500 per person” then I guess Cornerstone is your next best bet, although even that assumes that you’re all happy to work on OSX only. The fact that Asset Server is cross-platform was one of the main selling points for me.
Git works with Pro and basic/free and costs $0 per person. My personal project, using Unity Basic (iOS + Android), is currently sitting on BitBucket for team collaboration, where we’re also using the task tracking tools, and it’s made things much nicer.
Having said that, my company bought the Asset Server a couple of years ago when Unity didn’t play so nice with external version control, and $500 per seat was well worth it. Thanks to the added flexibility it offers we now use Git for version control despite the interface not being as nice as the built in one, but we still plan on using the Team licenses - and possibly buying more -for the Cache Server.
Forget functionality, what it comes down to is whether the time or the money is more important. Once saving the time is more important than saving the few hundred bucks per user (which obviously depends on a bunch of factors specific to your team) then it’s an investment you should make sooner rather than later.
I worked on a project that used https://xp-dev.com/ and then us pc guys used http://tortoisesvn.net. Not sure what the mac guys were using as an interface but the team was mac and pc users.
I use dropbox with one other guy. I think it works okay you just cant both be working on the project live at the same time it will screw things up and probably things up when you update (infact its not much good at all).
[insert smartassed knowitall type answer that the op would give to anyone else asking such things here]
Hehe, true.
But still, he is an actual real life indie dev so if he can’t/wont pay that much for licenses its unlikely any of us will… though its been around for a while so I guess Unity must be selling some, but presumably this is for TOB so they are all indie devs and why would any others have more or less money to spare then them?
IMHO; The Cache Server is worth the 500$/seat alone.
The Asset Server is more trouble than anything else. Is okay for projects with 2 / 3 developpers and small amount of assets… anything bigger it starts to corrupt. At least, that’s my take on a multi-Gb project spanning multiple Unity versions and over two years of development. I don’t want to make a general statement, it’s just my experience.
In our current workflow/versioning setup, we use Plastic SCM (which is awesome) with the Cache Server. Over a month of production so far, ~300 commits, ~80 branches; No problems encountered. Add the task-based workflow (using trac in our workflow) and the fact that it’s free for under 10 users; No brainer.
I don’t see any advantages to the Asset Server anymore. The Cache server is worth it though.
Thinking about it… The Asset Server IS something Unity may be able to create as a “cloud service” and charge a monthly fee for…
“Renting” Unity licenses is not extremely viable because it’s easy for teams to just develop the full game and then just rent for the month they want to export. This forces only rentals of the core Unity Pro license to be viable under year-long contracts.
But… the asset server is something that you cant just activate at the last minute… if you grow dependency on it you need it every day of the project, from start to finish. EVEN as a one-man team you may end up using it… so… a Hosted-By-Unity Cloud Asset Server that provides “free” seats (well, just included in the monthly fee) would be much more viable for everyone, the Unity and the indie developer.
100% agree with both points here. The Cache Server is great. The Asset Server…not so much. I’ve have had pretty much the same experience when using the Asset Server.
Thanks “Starsman Games” and "Thinksquirrel ".
Booth of you are speaking form my hard.
The asset Server is not working functional.
I was not able to connect to a Windows server form a mac Unity editor.
Now we are using Mercurial with 4 people without any problems with Big projects.
And the Cache server saves damm much time , we are developing for IOS and andorid and importing a project over and over → Now like instant no waiting times.
We have a 3 man project with mercurial hosted in bitbucket for free. Out project is ported to iOS, android, windows and mac.
I would love to have Asset Server, but at $500 per person it is ridiculous. Instead, what I do is I checked out my project 4 times, one per platform, If I want to work on IOS open the folder with the IOS copy, if I want android, open the android folder, etc. This does not cause the dreaded importing asset storm.
when I make a change, I push it to bit bucket, and then simply pull on the other copies.
Nowhere near as nice as having Asset Server, but thousands cheaper.
That said, the ability of unity to work with external version control is what ultimately prompted me to buy it. Before that was available, I was looking for a replacement.
I agree it’s too pricey.
There are many viable alternatives out there.
My favourite being BitBucket.org and the Mercurial repo.
Sorry, but that’s a setup issue, not a software issue. Asset Server may (does!) have its problems but It’s perfectly possible to have Asset Server running on a Windows server and connect from a Mac.