Version Control Perforce: Inspector becomes editable w/o checking out

I’ve been trying to use the integrated Perforce integration for months, but it consistently and constantly stops working for me.

Upon starting Unity, all prefabs are checked in and are not editable unless you do a check out on them as expected. However, after between a few minutes and a few hours, some prefabs that are not checked out become editable and no version control operations can be done on the prefab as all version control right click menu items are gray.

When this happens, the version control settings indicate that I am indeed still connected to my Perforce server, and hitting the refresh button or connect button again does not fix the situation, only closing and re-opening Unity fixes it.

This is super bad if I don’t realize that I have not checked out a prefab and start editing it because even after restarting Unity to fix the perforce state, it results in local changes on my disk while Unity thinks there are no changes to the prefab I edited and does not try to check it out or otherwise warn me in anyway. This could be build breaking to other team members who have only some of my changes and not others. The only thing I can do to fix my state now is to “Reconcile offline work” via perforce tools, but this can be incredibly slow for large projects and remote servers.

Help please … I’ve had this issue since Unity 4.5, and I’m currently using Unity 5.1 and I’ve been reporting it to Unity for months and months and have gotten no response on it whatsoever.

  • Unity 5.1 running on Mac Pro OS X 10.10.3
  • Perforce Server running on Mac Mini OS X 10.10.3
  • Perforce Server Version: P4D/DARWIN90X86_64/2015.1/1073410 (2015/06/11)
  • I’ve also tried server version: P4D/DARWIN90X86/2014.2/962050 (2014/11/13)

Please see Unity Issue Tracker - [Perforce] Unity fails to checkout project assets since it seems to be the same issue and a fix will be in an upcoming 5.1 patch release.