Small annoying issue: One of our developers checks out a copy of our project and opens it on his computer. Without having done anything, the QualitySettings file is shown as changed in our version control system.
The developer than commits the file, because “hey if Unity wants this setting to be an 8, let’s go”. As far as I understand we don’t really care about this setting because we are using LWRP and Anti Aliasing is set on the pipeline asset and not in the project settings (maybe I’m wrong, but it shouldn’t matter for this issue).
Now, another developer opens the project on his machine and suddenly the setting antiAliasing: 8 becomes antiAliasing: 0 again. I keep reminding everyone on the team to discard files, if they haven’t actually made any changes, but it doesn’t help. Sometimes you do need to make a change, e.g. set softParticles enabled, and suddenly you also commit the AA setting or people simply overlook the file in version control.
After a while this looks like this:
Only two commits of this list are actually intended changes to the QualitySettings file. Everything else is just noise caused by Unity. And this is only one of the many examples of files being touched or changed by Unity, when there is no reason for a change.
I would love to report this as a bug, but I have no clue what this might be related to or what triggers it. Sometimes it doesn’t happen and it also seems to only be a difference between machines. Maybe it is caused by having different GPU hardware, I really can’t tell.
Does anyone experience similar issues or has an idea how we can avoid this?
Files being dirtied like this by Unity is a pretty common issue and I would hope that Unity could implement more serialization tests, maybe also tests that are forced to run on different hardware and compare their results.