Version Control takes way too long to find stuff to check in

[ATMLVE]

I try and use unity’s version control and it is just non-functional. But I’d love to make it work.

The problem is it just takes way too long to ‘search’. When I have it in the editor, it just slogs down everything. I have to disable it or remove it to be able to use Unity.

When I use the external window, it just spins and spins and spins trying to find changes. If I leave it running and come back, it has finally gotten results. I hit ‘Check-In’, and it starts spinning more. I come back later and there is a popup ‘file xyz is no longer on disk’. Check-in canceled, go back to spinning looking for stuff to check in.

Recently I just noticed this:

My task manager shows well under maximum usage, with this tool being one of the hungriest even with unity editor open and running. I have a pretty decent ordinary PC that can run modern games.

My project folder is currently at 20GB. Half of that is Packages and Library, which I have ignored in the config file, as well as some larger folders in the assets like audio and scene backups which I’ve set to ignore to try and fix this problem.

What am I doing wrong?

Also why can’t I find anywhere valid to put this

[Kurt-Dekker]

@ATMLVE

I try and use unity’s version control and it is just non-functional.

^ ^ ^ This mirrors my own extremely limited experience with UVCS. However, some people swear by it and think it is the best thing ever. I suppose the truth is somewhere between those two extremes.

Personally I wish Unity would stop making “other things” and get back to making a great (and greater) game engine, rather than trying to ALSO do things like source control, an extremely well-solved problem.

Personally I use git. For large files you might want to look into git with the LFS extension. This lives completely outside and apart from Unity and once configured correclty, works flawlessly forever and ever. git does have a steep initial learning curve but it is also the de-facto world standard for distributed version control.

PROPERLY CONFIGURING AND USING ENTERPRISE SOURCE CONTROL

I’m sorry you’ve had this issue. Please consider using proper industrial-grade enterprise-qualified source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

Prefab links keep getting dumped on Git pull

There really isn’t any fix because git works perfectly with Unity when configured properly. Best practices involve saving your work and closing Unity before using git. But if you understand how Unity does and does not flush changes to disk (or at least ALWAYS do a save-project), you can get away with leaving Unity open. The only thing linking EVERYTHING together in Unity is the GUID assigned to a script or asset. Name is irrelevant. Only the GUID connects it. This GUID is in the meta file. I…

I usually make a separate repository for each game, but I have some repositories with a bunch of smaller test games.

Here is how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

2 steps backwards

Yeah, what Praetor said is it… Debug.Log is your friend, and also since this is animation related, you can open up the Animator window when you expect the animations to go, and actually visually see where the state machine is, see which state it thinks it is in. You can combine this with Debug.Log() output at the locations where you set the animations to be what you think they should be, and that should lead you to some intel. I highly recommend setting up git source control. It really plays ni…

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

When to make a separate object or class/script? Help me think like a programmer! (Example in text.)

This is a reasonable initial approach. The problem is you have listed the parts, but you haven’t really listed how they interact, and even if you did, it’s still sorta up to you how to organize it. Only YOU will know how to organize it, and the only way you can tell is to do the work. I recommend this: first, develop ALWAYS with source control (such as git), and every time you get even the slightest thing working, commit those changes with good commit messages. Then move to the next thing, c…

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

Your techniques to share code between projects?

I have found that bundling your own code into DLLs only serves to slow down your workflow. I base this on several years of experience dealing with other teams well-intentioned packaging mishaps. With games, it is almost always useful to reach into library code, make a temporary tweak to isolate a problem, and then revert it. With DLLs this is impossible, making workflow harder and more brittle. I prefer to share source code at the C# level. That way I can reach into libraries trivially and inje…

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

Removing IL2CPP_cache from Project

Not sure what you are “auto generating” with… I usually start from one of my other projects, or a gitignore example online, and reason about all the parts inside it, and start from there. Like any other configuration change, after you make it, pay attention for a while to make sure it is what you want. You can always clone the repo somewhere else to verify that the correct files are being tracked. Doing so to a brand-new computer is the acid test to make sure you can still build the project. …

Generally the ONLY folders you should ever source control are:

Assets/
ProjectSettings/
Packages/

NEVER source control Library/ or Temp/ or Logs/
NEVER source control anything from Visual Studio (.vs, .csproj, none of that noise)

Setting git up with Unity (includes above .gitignore concepts):

How to Git with Unity

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place. Digital storage is so unbelievably cheap today that you can buy gigabytes of flash drive storage for about the price of a cup of coffee. It’s simply ridiculous not to back up.

If you plan on joining the software industry, you will be required and expected to know how to use source control.

Source control does require learning, but there are TONS of tutorials and courses and online reference.

You should strive to use source control as confidently as you use your file/folder system.

“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards

[ATMLVE]

Thank you very very much, this is extremely helpful! You’re right, probably better I learn git if nothing more than for the experience regardless, despite it being imposing to learn (as opposed to the “unity-friendly” “easy” Version Control)