Cincinnati - Game Art

Initial Post: Thanks for having us on board with Collaborate!
I make art and teach Game Art at the College of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning at University of Cincinnati.
Downloading and installing Unity 5.4 tonight.
Will be running on a MacbookPro with NVidia GeForce GT 750M with Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit, 16gb ram.
Have Bootcamp installed, so can test it with MacOS also if needed/desirable (don't use the Mac side often).
My research project is a single-user 3d project, and I will work with a small team of artists and assistants.
Meeting with our new, project-dedicated sysadmin tomorrow to introduce him to "Collaborate"!
I will ask him set up an account on the forum, so he can also communicate/receive information.
We will discuss installing/using Cloud Build, Analytics, and Multiplayer also.

Next week, after Spring Break, I will introduce Collaborate to my game art class and to my research assistants.
In the class are three additional projects, each with about 5 team members:
Two are 2d games (one is multiplayer), and one is single-player 3d.
Most of the students in class use Macs (about 25% use Windows) for Unity.

Thank you very much!

 

thanks! great to be here! we have created four projects and added users to them, but my students are not able to get the collaborate tab to come up in their unity5.4 installs. is there something we are missing? do I need to register them individually as collaborate users somehow in addition to listing them as team members?

my students are not yet able to log onto this forum yet either. could we get that functional? thanks y'all!

 

murphy's law - as soon as I ask the question, I find the answer. the students are uploading and sharing the projects with each other now. next is to get them onto this forum. to prevent clutter on the main thread, I will suggest that they post under this thread (Cincinnati - Game Art) for the moment, until we earn our way past noob status.

 

seems like I still need to get the students permitted to post in this forum; is that possible?
when they come to the forum url and log in with their unity email id's, they get the following message:
"Unity Community - Error
You do not have permission to view this page or perform this action."

thanks for any guidance you can give about getting them permission to read and post here. thanks!!!

-benb

 

hi, got the list sent this morning. thank you!
so to report:
three student teams have been oriented on Collaborate. Their projects/games each are due to be completed by april 25, so they are in crunch mode. two of the teams have begun to collaborate with Collaborate, and it has enfranchised some team members (2d artists, custom scripters, designers) who felt like outliers previously, since they did not hve a copy of the project and really couldn't keep up with its progress; because now they have the whole project, they can see what is going on firsthand, in detail, and they are better able to recognize how to improve their own work relative to the whole. also, one team member explained it was helpful to transfer the project seamlessly between his home desktop and his laptop - to facilitate transitioning between working alone and meeting with the group.

one team has opted to not use Collaborate yet, because the team leader is concerned it may break their project, since he had a traumatic experience back at the 4.5-4.6. he is concerned that 5.4 will break functions, so he is building with a prior version. he was also concerned that updates by various members would overwrite each others' work destroying good work with bad. a class discussion of making periodic (daily) local backups of master-edit "project settings" and "assets" into a new folder named by date followed.

an additional project, underway by two grad students who have not used Collaborate yet, was reported by the students to have had a number of functions broken when they upgraded to 5.4 (they did that to get the enhanced cinematic image effects). among other broken functions that they reported, they said the first person controller was broken and had to be rebuilt (which may have been tricky to do because of reconstructing the image effects on the attached camera).

my take so far -
1. it will be helpful for the Collaborate team to have 5.4 become solid/stable/in-common-use.
2, also helpful will be ensuring and assuring users that their content is safe in Collaborate
3. to facilitate number two above, some sort of automated "history" or "save backup" would be nice.

 

Have your students checked out their project's history? See here: http://docs.unity3d.com/540/Documentation/Manual/UnityCollaborateViewingHistory.html

There they can use "restore" to go back to any day or any particular submission. They will get the project in the exact state it was at that previous publish. There isn't an easy way of bringing that forward, but they can copy it out, update, and then copy it back in. (Future feature: make this workflow better)

Do you know what functions were broken when they upgraded? 5.4 is in beta and it's really useful for us to know what issues people are running into, there's a forum for it here: http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/5-4-beta-forum.97/

 

hi arisa,
i will def look at the project history and have them check it also. that sounds exactly what they need, so they dont have to worry about overwriting work accidentally without a restore capability.

i will ask the grad student with the broken stuff in 5.4 to report in detail on his busted functions to the forum you mentioned (.http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/5-4-beta-forum.97/).
thanks!
-benb

 

(Hello, this is Ben's student Ryan Tinney using his log in) So we have been using Collaborate on Unity and it honestly has been a dream. It has made version control so easy and I really like it. So the only issues that we have encountered so far is that when there are 2 copies of a prefab or scene there will be some problems with getting the working version. For example we had 2 scenes name YellowWorld and when my teammate uploaded his version of YellowWorld it said that there were two versions and he picked his, but then when I updated my game YellowWorld was missing everything he put into it. He reloaded it from a saved file and then I got the updated level just fine. Another issue I noticed is sometimes I will work on a prefab and make changes and publish them, but then I will update from someone else's update and the changes I made to the prefab were deleted. I'm not sure why. One last thing my teammate Megan was having troubles with collaborate where she got a major bug and collab broke, she has used some of the tips you sent her to get it working again, but now is unable to publish any changes she has made. Other than that I really like collab and wish to keep using it

 

[Hi this is Alex Healey another student of Ben's under his account]

My group has had a lot of success with using Collaborate and have not run into as many errors as the other group, though we have had several times when one member would update their changes and another will download them, but they wouldn't be able to see any changes. The updated version of unity would have the new assets and changes but the one where the changes were downloaded there appeared to be no changes. I don't know what solved the problem, but eventually we were able to get the troubled unity to see the changes it downloaded after multiple restarts. We were looking at two versions of unity both with the green checkmark but only one had the updated changes. If this happens again I will tell you more info.

Aside from that Collaborate has been very helpful and we're very glad that we get the opportunity to test it for you!

 

Hi Ryan, thank you for the info! For the merge issue, will you file a bug and give me the number? To do that click
"report a bug" from within the editor under the help menu.

For Megan, will you ask her to open up the Services window and see if that helps? Assuming no, will you have her open a bug and send me the number? Opening a bug that way, sends along the editor log and other helpful info for understanding the problem.

 

Hi Alex! That is a weird issue, thank you for uncovering it. If that happens again, will you open up your Collab history? (Do this through the Collab toolbar and the icon on the bottom far left or through the menu Window > Collab history) Take a screenshot / check to see if the history tells you that you "got" all of the first that were sent to you, and the click "report a bug" from the help menu--then post the ticket number here. This will make it easier for us to reproduce and fix!

- After you've reported the bug, to get back into a "good" state, try clicking "restore" from within the Collab history. This will blow away everything and pull you up to the latest changes. It should fix your problem, if it doesn't--let me know, that would mean something else is going on.

And thank you for beta testing for us!