Collaborate... an excercise in frustration!

Between waiting for updates and checking for changes that take AGES. Does anyone actually get anything done with this?

Then there are the times where you waited two hours to pull some updates and the download bar gets stuck at 98% for a day so you cancel.
Then there are the times when you get an inexplicable 'cannot get revision from server' or it gets stuck in 'transfer queued'

This is happening to us all the time on different projects and different computers. The only time collaborate seems to kind of work is when you pull revisions right away. Got forbid you are three days late, you will be left out of the project cuz Collaborate can't handle it.

Seriously Unity, get your act together.

 

Im having all sorts of issues too... works fine for a while then all of the sudden my unity wont open cause "%"/$ collaborate is stuck waiting for some network IO to finish...

In all honesty its getting on my nerves... there are free services out there with less problems.

If at THE VERY LEAST it did not bring the entire editor to a halt...

 

@Aeonvirtual, @tcz8, I share your pain.

Few months ago, I started a topic called "is collaborate abandoned" considering it was (and still is) in beta. Someone from unity answered me with a message full of banalities about how they are working hard to make it better and great features like branching are coming on. I never replied because I never found any polite way to remind him that advanced features are useless without a proper service and that he never addressed the fact that collaborate is worse today that it was last year. (believe it or not, there was a time when we didn't have to deal with "check for changes")

If you're wondering why I keep using collaborate, here are the two reasons.
1) I'm stuck with it like in an old marriage: I mainly work on a big project and it would be hard and risky to move it to an other service.
2) I tried an other service on a smaller project and it was to hard to set up to be a viable alternative when it comes to working with other people. That's an upside on unity's part, you just need to invite your new coworker with his Unity's account Email and you're set. No need for confusing nerdy setups.

Sadly, that last point is one of the rare quality of collaborate. Working with it is like having a stoner assistant. He is always late because he has to "check for changes". You need to check twice that he didn't mess up the order you just gave to him and when you come back from a meeting, chances are you'll find him hanging around in front of his unfinished job because he got lost or forgot he has something to do along the way.

I'm not making that up or trying to be funny, I lost many evenings watching a movie in my office because I had to babysit collaborate by pushing the "publish again" button every half hour. I've had better download and upload experience in the early 2000 on questionable peer2peer services. Today, I'm paying for a service unable to "publish again" on it's own. At this very moment I'm trying to send a selection of assets changes on collaborate: my request is ignored and it keeps trying to send everything. If I'm tired and don't watch it closely, it will send faulty assets I don't want to send to my coworkers.

The sad thing is, this service isn't that bad. 99% of the issues I encounter during more than a year have nothing to do with it's core component. The problem lies in the interface which is utter crap. It contradicts itself everyday, is as practical and reliable as a match during a storm, and lacks basics features like a f*cking "cancel" button on that "check for changes" loading bar so people could actually work instead of watching it for five minutes.

That's why I don't expect Unity to deliver on their promises. Correcting these issues is an easy fix, and the only reason they never did must be because this service isn't worth the investment. I just wish they'd be honest about it because I regret betting on them.

Obviously, if you know of any service that is both easy to setup, and reliable, I'd be happy to hear about it.

 

Hi and thanks for your anwser.

That's going to be a problem because, as a professional, I have to send big publishes like when I add some assets from the store and I don't get to choose my internet connection. Most of the time I'm at the office with 50/50Mb but I also have to work from home with a 1Mb upload, or from clients offices, or in the train...

Also, when it comes to older versions of Unity, we are only talking about the last 10 months and so far, from 2017.3 to the current 2018.3b5, I didn't find any where collaborate does work properly. Actually, the more it goes, the worst it gets because bugs are pilling up.

I'm currently on the latest beta and the only issue I have with it is collaborate's horrible experience: every time we update, it recompile and re import the whole project. Compared to last year when it was still a beta, not perfect but we didn't have to deal with such a time drag.

Example with my Tuesday experience. This weekend, I did some script changes on my project from home. During the morning, one of my coworker sent some assets he downloaded from the store. I needed my weekend changes earlier than planed, so I took control of my home computer, and first updated it with my coworker changes before I could send mine.

It worked until this point. After that, collaborate somehow decided he had to send back changes on some assets my coworker just created. Weird, but whatever, I knew nothing was changed and it was fresh from the store anyway, so I sent it as such. It never succeeded.

So, I tried something else, just sending my script. I select them, r-click, collaborate and publish. As usual, first try is ignored, so I do it again. Usually, it works, but not this time, it is impossible to send a selection, it's the whole stuff or nothing.

So I start an upload again while I'm gone for a sandwich. It fails. I try again while I'm eating said sandwich. Still failing.

I ended up exporting my scripts in a package and Emailing them to myself. My computer was stuck on check for changes so my coworker took them and uploaded them.

There is more. Before I went back home, I our daily work on it so my home computer would be ready if needed. But no, it failed. Collaborate somehow decided there are conflict on some files relative to the morning update my coworker did. Except the files don't exist on my computer.

Final solution, restore to the last update (after saving my changes just in case). It didn't work and I had to restart Unity, wait for check for changes, and then restore.

Of course, these issues don't happen all at once everyday and I take responsibility for the fact we are working on a beta. That said, only one of the problems we encountered is new ans specific to 2018.3b: all the others have been common for month now and I know from experience I am not the only one. I've seen it on many computers and other connections. The big issue now is that we have to deal with new bugs on top of old ones.

For example:


In this instance, we can see the collaborate windows disagrees with the history. If I was to click update on the right, I would get an older update and not the latest. Annoying but manageable. Except this daily common bug has been left for months, and we now have a new bug on top of this one. Updating cause Unity to re-import and recompile the whole project. So if you aren't careful and use the main menu instead of the history, you have to do it twice and easily lose half an our while unity is fully unavailable.

These are not acceptable on a professional tool. I have a new team member joining us this week and he is already tired of collaborate because working with it is as fun as walking on a minefield.

This is not a feature request, this is me asking for a guaranty and a date about this mandatory fix on something that should not even exist en a beta.

I hate to do this but I have to remind Unity that this is not a free service or a beta, this is a payed feature that I cannot use because you are not finishing the product I am monthly billed for.

 

And "check for changes"... just like that. I wasn't even using collaborate or anything close to it. i was simply working on my scene, minding my own business and I get kicked out of my workspace leaving being an unsaved scene with halfway done modifications.

 

We just upgraded out project from 2017.2 to 2018.1 and collab is so much worse! . Now takes 20+ minutes to update a 4.4mb update. I have a fibre internet connection of 70 down 20 up.. We are paying over $200/month for this rubbish..

I cannot believe you looked at this and said "hey this is working perfectly , lets called it finished, and its so good lets charge extra for it!"

 

Hey Prodev. We have a similar problem after updating from 2017.4 to the latest beta 2018.3b with improved prefabs. Updating from collab have unity "compile" for an unreasonably long time even for a <1MB update. This is ruining our productivity.

I opened a thread about it in the beta section. (Case 1082552) Collaborate takes forever. Please contact @LeonhardP about this. I reported that bug from the beta and this could be linked to something else if you also have that in 2018.1.

Here is the issue tracker link to that issue. https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/collaborate-updates-take-a-long-time-on-big-projects.

Keep us updated, with you having the same issue, we should be able to cross references and find that bug soon.

Thanks.