Unity Collaborate Developer Diary #1: Exploring the New Design

Branching would be good, I like the simplified UI for those that are not comfortable with branching. Hopefully you can keep a simple "my work" and "team work" branching abstraction or something so that I don't have to teach artists how to branch and merge.

 

The design seems to recreate many existing source control UIs out there but within Unity - which has good & bad points.

The fact it is tied to your cloud storage solution makes it seem like it is mainly a way to charge for storage space however. If it was just a UI that could attach to any git/svn/perforce server as well as yours it would be better.

 

I'm a little bit confused. This looks like a new frontend and backend. Will this work on 2018.4?

 

Branching, the restore function for individual files (viewing older versions of files in the editor), as well as a larger dropdown window were the things I was missing from the first version of Collaborate, so it's great to see all of that getting addressed.

I didn't see it in the videos, so pardon if it's already there, but an "Include all" button for the Advanced View would be nice so we don't have to include every file individually.

 

I have to say, this is the only thing our team cares about with regards to progress on Unity updates right now; even more care than when nested prefabs came out. These collab updates/features look amazing.

However, if referring to the past with Unity's team history and communication about how they are working on something within collab and then waiting a year just to be told "nothing yet" doesn't have faith or excitement too high just yet.

Has there been a major shift in priority on this for Unity to focus on, or should we sit back and continue to get used to/deal with the existing plethora of collab issues?

Certainly not trying to be cynical here but it has been a very rough year+ with Unity development, leaving a slightly regretful feeling towards Unity Teams. We definitely have strong hopes.

 

In the history view please allow us to view the diff of a file in the commit. We see which files have changed however there is currently no way to see what those changes are. Would be very good if we could select a file from a previous change and do a "view changes".

 

Sweet!

 

Used Collab since many years because it's easier for my team to use.

I seriously miss SourceTree when I'm working on Unity (vs when I'm working on other stuff with Git repositories). The history is SO CLEAR and it is SO EASY to go back to a commit or to open a file to an old state. Collab is a pain. I really hoped that Collab 2.0 would change everything. The only thing it did is remove the "Checking for changes" and the "edit/move" bug but added loooooooooooooooooong rescan phases that sometimes break for no reason and everything became more lame and buggy than it was before.

I'm now looking for a replacement tool because updates take so long to come that I don't think it will be production ready before at least Unity 2021. And when I'm saying "production ready", I don't mean out of Beta, but working fine for our everyday needs. You know, like not letting a bug that removes your content on the server when you are doing an edit and a move operation at the same time during 4-5 years.

My suggestions are : fix Collab before thinking about the UI. Then open a tool like SourceTree and learn from it.

 

I've read the developer diary and the features sound good, but the focus on UI has me worried that Unity doesn't understand the abysmal state Collab is in right now. There are project-ruining bugs and crashes that are costing people hours or days of work, things like improving the UI shouldn't be in the priority list until Collab works consistently and is battle-tested.

I've used Collab now on 6 prototypes and one long term project with a team of several people, and so far I've found it to be a massive time waster and a headache to deal with. It causes delays all throughout my team's workflow, doesn't always actually sync us correctly, and frequently just completely breaks with no indication of what's wrong. Most of the time you open the Collab window it throws a very helpful "Something went wrong" error (even if it then proceeds to work correctly), and sometimes the index randomly gets locked.

Sometimes Unity will crash while updating and delete loads of your files or just completely brick your project, and the only way to recover is to delete your local copy and re-download the whole thing. I've heard of people encountering these issues only to find that the version stored on Collab's servers is also missing files and their work is just gone.

Then there's the "Checking for changes" dialog and its V2.0 "Scanning" equivalent. It can take upwards of 15 minutes on one of my projects and as far as I can tell it has literally no reason to exist. Other source control systems don't have to scan the project for minutes at a time, so what exactly is it doing?

When there are conflicts, we have to choose each file individually and it takes several minutes for each one, and most of the time it just doesn't do anything anyway. Clicking the light blue "see all in project" link to view all the conflicts always shows nothing. Restoring to a previous build on the Collab History window never works, and the "Go back to" for earlier builds also never works. And for certain tasks the Collab window won't proceed in the background as for some reason it's waiting for Unity to have focus before proceeding.

Like everyone else here, I'm not trying to be cynical. I pay for and use collab because a simple built-in solution that works for all of my staff regardless of technical skill is highly desirable. I honestly don't need branching or merging scripts, or diffs, because we have workflows that avoid conflicts. I just need everyone to be able to push their changes to the server and stay updated with everyone else's changes without spending an hour out of every work day staring at loading bars and completely breaking everything at least once a week.

 

^ Couldn't have put it better.

 

Thanks for the detailed responses to my feedback. I think most of the issues with Collab come from Unity rolling its own tech for things that already exist, so I do believe that the new system based on Git LFS should resolve most of these problems. I want to stress how urgent this problem is though, you're currently charging for usage on a collaboration / source control feature but you don't have a working production-ready system yet.

I'm looking forward to the developer diary, but is there any ETA on when we might get this feature in our hands? Even a ballpark ETA would help me figure out if it would be easier to change to a working tool like SourceTree and invest in developing new workflows for it and training staff to use it. If it's coming relatively soon, I'd rather just work around the problems for a while so I don't have to force artists to learn Git commands etc.

Many of us don't need all the advanced features or fun stuff or a perfect UI. I would hope you'd release it in some form once you have a functional and robust repository experience, even if it's single-branch and fast-forward only, and then focus on the UI/UX after. Is that possible?

 

Honestly collab is pretty good as is just with some bugs (as is meaning not the 2.0 version). I hope it doesn't get overly complicated as this is a feature where quality is the feature. Make it work please.

Thanks.

 

I agree, we are very happy that you are working on this replacement system but we need to take decisions here. Why dont you pick a release date and stand by it? And while your at it give every collaborate users (paying) a 50% rebate until things are fixed? You know, anything to allow us to make a decision here or some incentive for us to wait cause frankly, I'm running out of reasons to keep using Collab. I'm going to have additional users withing a few months and this will be too messy.

 

I feel your pain @Kreep. We dropped Collab, over a year ago, because of the issues. We ended up going with AWS Code Commit (includes 50 GB for free), and I personally use SourceTree for the front end. It's a great combo.

 

CodeCommit is fantastic, though sometimes it's a little awkward with requiring fetches more often than other services I find.

And Yep. Completely losing faith in Unity in general here. Out of the insane amount of ludicrous issues with unity editor and their 'stable' versions that we constantly find workarounds for, and Collab with it's pathetic slow development on VERY serious issues, and hype-ups on "Have something by <x> time". Now cloud diagnostics are goofy/broken.

You guys are seriously full of it. That's my stance at this point. I thought Adobe practices were disgusting but Unity is having someone hold their beer these days.

 

Engineering resources at Unity should not be spent replicating Git and Plastic SCM when those platforms/products already provide good version control to studios that need it.

I don't see how its possible to service both the hobbyist customer base that needs something better than manual dropbox backups, and professional-grade studios.

The current Unity Collaborate product seems totally fine for the former type of user. Its just very misleading to name it 'Collaborate', it should be called 'Unity Backups' instead.

I know that every department in a big corporation wants to be a profit centre, but the engineering resources should be redirected elsewhere, and a small team maintained to keep 'Unity Backups' running, and maintain integration with other version control systems. Plastic SCM seems a good candidate to become the 'official' Unity-recommended version control system for teams, with Unity taking a cut of the subscription revenue, in return for helping with documentation and integration.

 

WhOOOoooo I like that. Free is good for a startup!

I completely agree with that. They should have just added the required UI changes to allow versioning and comparing diffs in scene and the inspector.

Then you make the whole thing GIT compatible and allow users to configure whatever provider they want in project settings.

They could even have sold COLLAB as their own "easy & auto configured" git solution and just used the same open source code everyone else uses that would have been maintained for them FOR FREE.

This would have allowed pro users to use in house servers.

As a droid once said: Does not compute

 

Alright, it's been months with no response, no ETA, and no updates from Unity. We're beginning a new project and I need a working solution, so I've now been forced to cancel my Unity Teams subscription and set up a Perforce server. It involves re-developing new workflows and retraining my staff, but at least it works today. We don't even have a ballpark ETA for the new version of collaborate, and the current one isn't fit for purpose.

 

Cheers, we had to make a business decision and move to Perforce anyway. When you say New UX, is it just a UX overhaul or is the back-end now using git-lfs and has been battle-tested in live projects? The main problem with Collab for small teams isn't the UX explicitly but the fact it consistently breaks even when used correctly and can destroy days of work or entire projects.

 

Hi @StaceyH, how is the 'doing a series of “Developer Diary” posts' coming along? As far as I know, Developer Diary #1 from July the first is the only diary entry, and a single entry isn't a series. Now I am worried that no diary entries for more than five months means not a lot of progress...

 

What is that timeframe?

When can we potentially have a collaborate that doesn't freeze the editor for 3 minutes every 10 minutes?

Is it going to be a year? 2 years? 10?

 

The answer is right there, any future version of Collaborate will just be a reskin of one of those services. Just start using Plastic SCM, it does everything than Collaborate can do 10x better.

 

I'm fine with that, the issue is when?

For a new project, I'd surely use something else, I'm somewhat hesitant to change versioning systems mid project and lose whatever history we have (although... it's kinda buggy, and sometimes gives me the wrong files, so maybe I'm holding on for no reason...).

 

The article that this thread was about said that the basic functionality was working, but they needed to work on the UI.

That was now over a year ago...

 

Collab Is dead for good.

 

Dead or not dead, Plastic SCM provides a superior product for end-users and has Unity compatibility. Just setup your ignore files at the start. It doesn't make sense to yearn after some kind of Collaborate 2.0 when the theoretical features it may offer already exist with Plastic right now.

I've shipped a full release and 5 major updates, including a separate branch for Nintendo Switch using Plastic. The biggest problem was one user having a very slow internet connection, and not setting up ignore properly at the start, but apart from that it has been great and Collaborate is just a bad memory

 

I've been terrified of switching away from Collaborate because my previous experiences with Git and SourceTree were so frustrating. Merge conflicts and frustration all over the place. But we switched to Plastic SCM this week and it was very smooth and powerful. SO much less annoying. You can even merge scenes that two people worked on simultaneously. Very impressive. I should have switched years ago.

 

Well, now we know why they were only focusing on the UI. The entire back-end is probably going to be ripped out and replaced with Plastic SCM.

 

Hallelujah!