A weekend Hackathon with Collaborate

Wanted to provide some Collaborate feedback from a college-level Hackathon that I held this weekend.

Overall, Collaborate worked well. The students last year worked with github and it was a terrible experience for them. They were able to get setup and have their teams (sizes 4-6 people) on Collaborate within 30 minutes - easy.

Now for the things that didn't work well:

• Collaborate gets confused when someone renames a file outside of Unity. Moreso you'll get the issue where people cannot commit or checkout and it isn't clear what the source of the problem was. This was particularly troublesome for the artist as many times their workflows had them changing things outside of Unity.
• Collaborate needs a menu option to force it to look for changes in the repository. As the teams got closer to being finished they were updating their projects very often and Collab wasn't updating itself fast enough to know that their were new files in the repository.
• Collaborate gets stuck often and you need to restart Unity to get things going again, but its not easy to tell that its stuck unless the other people on your Collab team complain that you aren't updating your files or not fixing your bugs
• The Services tab seems to frequently come into focus
• There are no branches
• There is no way to make a file "local" or otherwise have it ignored
• Its still not clear how to resolve issues with multiple people working on the same scene. This was more critical as many times you couldn't click on the buttons to resolve conflicts. This was probably the more difficult thing for the students

 

Hi @gregorypierce, thank you so much for the awesome feedback! I hope that the teams were able to make lots of cool games and I'm glad that so many of them enjoyed using Collaborate!

• In 5.6 we've updated our error messaging around renames to be more helpful when there are conflicts. Now you'll be able to see the conflicting file path. We're still working to improve this process so that users can more easily unblock themselves in these situations.
• Thank you for the suggestion! I'll pass that request along to the team.
• Would you mind going into a little more detail about how Collaborate is getting stuck? (Are publishes/updates taking a long time, is Collaborate slow to let other teammates know that there are changes to pull, are teammates forgetting to save their scenes so that they can push their changes, does opening a large project take a long time and seemingly freeze Unity?)
• That bug is a super annoying one but it has been fixed for 5.6.
• Branches are a feature request that we're actively working on. It's still early in the development process but we'll update here with any news regarding branches.
• An ignore file is a brand new feature for 5.6, but you can give it a try using the Collaborate Preview Build, along with many more features!
• The team is also actively looking into ways to simplify the process of scene merging. I'm curious what you mean by there being instances where they "couldn't click on the buttons to resolve conflicts". Did clicking "Choose Theirs" or "Choose Mine" not do what was expected? Did the teams use any third-party diff/merge tools to try and resolve the conflicts manually?

Thanks again for the great feedback!

 

On the "getting stuck" what would happen is that Collab seemed to just stop checking for updates from the repository. Some of the students would look in their Collab history and it would say that the the repository was updated 10-11 hours ago when people had been consistently checking in. Out of the class of 18, 3-4 of the students exhibited this behavior.

As far as the merge issues, the interface elements would literally not respond to mouse click events. They would have to restart Unity to get Collab to start working again or in 2 instances - unlink and select the project from the cloud. Since it had a lot of assets, this would take a considerable amount of time and this led to a lot of consternation (and a couple of team members just electing to stop actively committing to their team).

The teams overall did a wonderful job given that I started teaching them Unity in earnest on Friday and they started coding 'fulltime' on Saturday.

 

Thanks again for all the great info!

Quick note about the first item in your original post. It's not recommend that users rename assets outside of Unity. The big concern is that they'll forget to also rename the meta file for that asset, which can confuse Unity (and to a greater extent, Collaborate) resulting in more errors. I know that some artists might not be used to that kind of workflow and I'm sorry to throw a wrench in their process.

In response to "getting stuck", that sounds like that might have happened during an unexpected service outage that we had not too long ago. When did your students work on these projects? These kinds of problems should be greatly minimized and we're working on more preventative measures to insure that these kinds of outages don't last very long.

Yikes, that's not good! Was it Unity in general that wasn't responding to mouse clicks or was it just the Collaborate Toolbar (the Collab menu at the top)? You mentioned that some teams had lots of assets. Do you know roughly how big their projects were (1GB, 5GB, more)? There are times when Collaborate can cause Unity to hang when opening a large project (over 4 GB). We're in the middle of adding a temporary fix for 5.6 that will pop up a progress bar when Unity needs to wait on Collaborate. We'll definitely have that problem fixed before Collaborate comes out of beta.

I'm very glad to hear that the teams took to Unity and Collaborate so quickly! We love hearing success stories like this so thank you for sharing. Please let us know if you come across any more issues or have more feedback!

 

When the students were getting stuck, that would have been last weekend (Feb. 17-19).

The mouse click issue was exclusive to the Collaborate Toolbar. The projects weren't large at all since they were Hackathon projects. All definitely under 1GB in size.

We will let you know if there is more feedback as we're gearing up for another couple of Hackathons in the next 60 days that will both be utilizing Unity.

 

That sounds like it coincided with a service outage that we had during the last weekend. I'm sorry that it coincided with your hackathon . If you could, would you mind having the students in the next hackathon try submitting bug reports when they run into any weird issues like that again? (The best way is to go to Help->Report a bug inside of Unity). Their logs can come in handy when debugging the problems they come across.

Thanks again and best of luck on all your students future projects!