Collaborate doesn't work with accent marks and other special characters

Hi,

I'm the lead programmer on my project and this problem is driving me kind of crazy. Unity handles most files with accent marks and other kind of special characters like commas just fine, but Collaborate does not. I'm not even going to try to describe the problem throughly because it is incredibly obvious, simply add some files with these chracters to your project and try to download from scrath the project on another machine (or on the same machine after removing thee project). These files appear as modified. When your try to change their name from unity it hangs up for minutes or crashes.

These kinds of characters on files should be avoided, and I do fix them and never upload them. However the art team doesn't seem to get that, and has recently uploaded a folder with a comma in it, which forced to change it from the explorer manager and that triggered me having to re-upload 1.6GB of files to the server because Collaborate couldn't figure out that was a name change.

Honestly, Colllaborate is really broken and someone should fix it. I can deal with random disconnects, with 1-2 minutes of startup because for whatever reason it appears to be doing a linear search on the files while hanging the user, I can deal with me having to download the patch I just uploaded from time to time. But this situation with the accent marks is just too much.

 

Well, that explains a lot.

I've had this issue on one computer for month with collaborate keeping marking some assets as changed. I now realize they were assets with special characters.

I'm trying to change it and already lost half a day of work on that because collaborate handle it so well that it get stuck on errors or simply crash the whole editor. I now have to revert all my corrections on specials characters because collaborate doesn't work at all anymore.

Brilliant! As usual with collaborate...

 

Thankfully my assets where from the art team so changing it from outside unity didn't break anything, but for others that is a huge pain... this should be fixed ASAP.

 

Considering Collaborate currently have all its features broken, that won't be fixed.

 

We're currently paying for it, because otherwise we can't work in parallel. Is there any other system? Github for Unity was really broken last time I tried.

 

Same here, I manage a +60GB project and can't move it on a new VCS without making sure it can handle it.

I tried Github these last days, not "github for Unity" but "github desktop". It works fine and we even managed to merge a scene which was cool but Github's policy towards big files is very unclear. They tell you the storage is unlimited but you need to use git LFS for large files. If you do you need to pay extra, I didn't and it works anyway . You need to configure it manually through command prompt and have no way to know if you did things correctly or not.

So even if it works a my 5GB guinea pig project, I have to leave Github because it could stop working any time and is very user unfriendly for any non programmer.

This week I think I'm going to try Plastic SCM as Playmaker's team recommended following collaborate's issues. They are officially handling large files, have an optional friendly UI for artist and if you look in your Unity settings, they are a pre-configured VCS which is a good sign.



They do have a one month free trial so you should check it out.

I'm crossing my fingers because Collaborate became so bad that my company is bleeding money. I can't wait to be done with it.

 

Hi @TX128! Do you happen to know if your artists are typing these accent marks into their filenames or if they're copy-pasting them in from an ISO Latin 1 encoded document? Because of how UTF-8 works, byte encoding with french characters in ISO Latin 1 is considered an illegal encoding, which could explain why you're running into these issues.

 

Hi @ryanc-unity
1- He types them up
2- It shouldn't matter (?), should it?
3- All the characters I'm talking about are part of ISO Latin 1 (ISO/IEC 8859-1).
4- Comma is part of ASCII

I've had problems with:
002C -> Comma
00C0 - 00EF -> Characters with accent marks, I can pin point them more specifically if you need.

 

I can try that if you want, but I think I failed to communciate the most important part here: I'm talking about file names, not file content.

edit: the characters I talked about were based on looking on the table, not on 'empirical' data

 

We're both running Windows and Unity, before going to sleep I'll run some tests, but isn't it weird that it also fails with a comma? It is standard ASCII after all.

 

Weirdly enough I can't seem to be able to reproduce this with the comma now. But it has certainly happened with a comma on a folder, and on rename it crashed unity.

Is Collaborate written in C# or C++?

 

I would actually bet money whatever is wrong is in some assumption part made in C++ when handling names of files. Is there any hope for Collaborate to become partially open source? Otherwise I think I can't do much else apart from reporting this issue as is

 

Correct, we are using windows 10 with latests updates. We just updated to Unity 2018.3.5f. Before that we were using 2018.3

I'll check later the collab code. Because honestly the fact that it takes minutes to updates files with a few couple KB amazes me, encoding problems aside.

 

Just in case you might want to sahre this problem with someone the steps to reproduce should be something as follows:
-Setup a new project with collaborate etc
-Create a file with an accent mark or some other non-ASCII character. Example: baño.cs
-Download it on another computer.

Expected result:
The download finished alright and the computer where the changes have been dowloaded has no differences.

Real result:
The download finished alright and reports no problems, however the file baño.cs is recognized as either new file or changed, even though it clearly was not modified nor changed on the second machine.

 

Example of the problem today:

 

And when trying to fix it: