Hi,
Simple issue, when doing dev in Unity… UVC is picking up a variety of files as having changes when none were done. There’s some behind the scenes stuff triggering that a user doesn’t want.
A good example of this is loading in a new scene, UVC is saying the .lighting file has changed. (I didn’t touch it I just loaded the scene in). This is cumulatively extremely frustrating to have to constantly undo these auto unwanted micro changes.
Other examples of files popping back up as changed when I would never ever touch them are
MiscllanousSettings.asset.meta
or
GvhProjectSettings.xml
As frustrating as it is, this isn’t too bad when you have a small amount of files, but if you had a big dev session and changed many things this becomes a total minefield to navigate of “did I change this file or not, is this important” etc. As an artist we touch upon many parts of a scene/ model/ textures/ materials/ shaders and all their meta files get included. It can easily hit 100 files to have to sort through.
Are there any known solutions for stopping these random auto changes? Or is this just the best we have and we have to deal with it?
Hi,
If you submit some changes to a file that doesn’t contain actual changes, UVC won’t create a new revision for that file in the repository.
Anway, the best approach is using “ignore.conf” rules so you don’t have under version control the files that should be local and you don’t want to checkin changes. If you are using a Unity project, as soon as you create the workspace, there will be an “ignore.conf” with the default ignore rules. If the file is already committed, you can delete it and keep it as local, and finally add it to the ignore list.
For files that need to be under version control but you don’t want to checkin changes, you can add these files to the “hidden_changes.conf”. This way, if the files are changed, they won’t appear in the “Pending Changes” view.
Also, in the Plastic GUI → Preferences panel, you can configure the “Pending Changes” view to only consider the files as changed if the file hash has changed (instead of the timestamp). But this will make the calculation of the pending changes slower.
Hi, how much slower are we talking?
If there are a large amount of changed files, will the impact be very big or is it a few extra seconds each time you open plastic?
I was getting sick of having files like GvhProjectSettings.xml be modified every single time I look at my pending changes list, so the hash setting you mentioned is going to be a necessity for me going forward.
If you review the Plastic client logs (C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\plastic4\logs), we can check the details of the pending changes calculation time and where the time is spent.
If you enable this feature, Plastic will need to check not just the timestamp but also the file hash one by one in your workspace. So the time will depend on the number of files in the workspace and the disk speed.
I recommend you to run a test and review the new behavior. You can always change the setting back when necessary.