Audio references keep dropping

With 5.2.4f1, 5.2.5f1 and 5.3.x (including 5.3.6p7) I have found that saving a prefab of depth 3, audio references continue not to save. While the editor is running, it's fine. I can open, pause, replay, etc. Shutting and restarting Unity the public audio source references still seem to be there.

If I copy the prefab to another workstation, and add the meta and prefab along with resources, etc. from the same path (setup from an SVN repo to be otherwise identical) 3 of the references are empty. It is like the old version is saved, not the new.

The same thing occurs when any of our team tries to add elements or replace these - including if we commit the file via SVN, etc. They are in place on the original project, but the repo contains an "old version" which seems to have frozen several updates ago.

This seems only to happen if the prefab is nested, however for our project this is highly efficient.

Obviously destroying and rebuilding a prefab which has 60 components each with their own attribute sets every time I want to do some tweaks is not something I want to do.

We've been getting past this (for now) by taking snapshots and ensuring each team member is manually comparing the object but that's a short-term workaround.

On a second project with 5.3.5 we are now finding the same thing, with a much smaller prefab with only 10 audio references. It simply refuses to save or be usable on another machine.

I have experimented also with 5.3.6 p7 and the behaviour / issue is the same.

I am suspecting that this is somehow due to the "mixed" setting for asset serialization. We have experimented with text serialization in the past but this caused abnormalities with our localization systems and numerous buttons started losing attributes (i.e. buttons were suddenly named long integer values and lost their Input references).

Has anyone any ideas or advice? This is very frustrating and we've been trying to resolve this for weeks.

 

Setting project settings to Force Binary, then saving the prefab resolved the issue. I was then able to return to "mixed mode" and it continued to work. It is almost like it was "stuck".