I’m currently working on a smallish prototype project using Unity Free. I absolutely love the feature set that even the free edition offers. But there’s one thing that bothers me to no end. The lack of version control support. Sure you can somehow get it to work with GIT or Mercurial but it feels like a hack. I have a strong programming background and I’m pretty sure even hobbyist programmers are using version control these days. Therefore I don’t think making Asset Server Integration for a SINGLE user a Pro-Only feature is the best way to go. I for one plan to upgrade to Unity Pro as soon as I got something done worth publishing but having to work without version control until that happens is a huge pain.
Any chance that the Unity Team relaxes the asset server limitations for Unity Free a bit in the future?
Or allowing external version control for the free version.
As some of the “Unity Wisdom Panel” partitioners have suggested.
I understand that the version control is a key incentive for an upgrade to pro.
But I would assume anybody that get’s as far as completing something that is worth publishing.
Will switch to pro anyway. I know I will
There is already so much incentive to switch to pro, just think about shadows, batching, occlusion culling, renderToTexture, …
Just give the new Comers like myself a chance to get to the point where I can get a product finished that is worth publishing.
And version control would help that effort tremendously
I guess you have missudnerstood how the Asset Server related licensing works.
You don’t pay for licenses on the server, the server is always unlimited.
What you do is pay per seat that can connect to it at all, but on the client side, not the server side.
As such its technically not possible to only offer “1 user environments”, even less so as the asset server is source available (to install it on linux reasonably at all)
Also as a single user you don’t need version control.
There are things like Dropbox, Filehamster (windows only), Time Machine (OSX standard present) which offer it without you investing extra time in fighting the asset server anomalies.
Of course it is. Give the free version the ability to use the Asset Server or like hallamasch said, make using an external Version Control like GIT (sorry) suck less. True the server wouldnt be restricted to one user but then again it is highly unlikely that a whole team sticks to the free version.
Please do NOT tell me what I need. As a professional (non-game) developer having version control is a must. Period. Those things you have listed are no alternatives.
I don’t disagree that it is a must for a professional developer.
But if you are one, you know that development costs a lot of time and money and someone has to pay that and free riders don’t do it, the free version already gets 70%+ of Unity Pro for free.
Those things I’ve listed are very well alternatives for 1 man shows and that is what you requested as far as I understand.
All 3 result in file versioning to the degree you get it with VCS or the Asset Server as well as 1 man team as neither will enable you to merge scenes, prefabs or any other binary data either for example.
Sure, only FileHamster gives you direct version comparision with the compare / merge tool of your choice, Dropbox / Time Machine require that you copy the current version out to do the delta manually.
If your hint is towards putting it on a global store: FileHamster can do ftp uploads to about anything you could have automatically along storing a new version or you can use the team feature to have it on a network drive etc etc. I’ve been using it for 4 years over SVN and GIT for anything I do on my own as it does its work automatically and on each file change (with configurable amount of minutes between revisions), nothing else so far came up to this granularity without a massive overhead of jumping around to issue new versions manually.
No they’re not. They’re terrible alternatives even for a one man show. I’ve tried uploading and syncing with Dropbox, besides the terrible upload speed you have to deal with, I have had problems with the windows and mac versions of unity’s config files making a mess. Secondly, I don’t appreciate the term “free rider”, because obviously unity chose to go free because they were simply not gaining enough profits. So, who do you think these so called “free riders” eventually become? Paid customers. Complain all you want, but I doubt unity would last very long in the enterprise game development toolset, Gaysoft.
