Official Collaborate will soon be upgraded to Plastic SCM

Hi,
I've received an email to tell me I've had my project moved from Collaborate to Plastic and in Unity Editor I'm getting the error in Collaborate to tell me that my project has now been archived. So I believe the cloud migration has happened.

I now need to do the local migration, so have updated to Unity Editor 2021.1.25f1 but I'm not getting the Plastic Migration wizard pop-up when I start, which I understand is supposed to happen from the instructions on-line.

Am I misunderstanding or is there another action I need to take to kick off the wizard.
Is there anyway to kick it off manually?

Thanks Ben

 

Hi, I would like to know what it means that "the full history of collaborate" will be migrated and that the history takes up storage. How much space is that exactly? I don't want to be badly surprised by the end of Februar and like to do a quick calculation on how much storage we would need. Can I see the size of the history somewhere?

 

The history will be added as a differential bonus: https://forum.unity.com/threads/col...upgraded-to-plastic-scm.1188592/#post-7726323

 

I'm in the same boat. Got this email about the auto conversion, but nothing happens if I start any Collab project. I still see the "Collaborate" tab.

 

I've just moved to version 2021.2.0f1 and that kicked off the local update straight away. It doesn't look like 2021.1.25f1 works with Plastic or at least not automatically.

 

Thanks -- I tried it with 2021.2 and indeed... now the upgrade dialogue appeared. Thanks for the hint, seems that the info about the required Unity versions is not quite correct.

 

Hello. I am working on my project for 5 years now and I'm doing it in unity 2018.4 - I will release my game soon, march is the date. I can't use collaborate anymore now - why did you guys do that? I'm really afraid nothing will run anymore if I update to unity 2019. Is there a way to get Plastic SCM working on unity 2018 as well?????? Guys I really hope you don't break my project with that. Why are we forced to switch to that if we have older unity version!?!?

 

I was force migrated to plastic SCM and now I get
"an existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host" every time I try to checking my changes to Plastic SCM.

Edit, nvm, this error seemed to go away once I clicked on the settings menu for Plastic SCM and actually installed Plastic SCM in the editor. Slightly strange it was not installed considering my editor migrated Plastic SCM and allowed me to attempt to upload without detecting installation first.

 

I am being forced to change unity versions as collaborate doesn't seem to be working anymore so I am forced to move to a unity version that works with Plastic. While trying to find a version that doesn't completely error out with my current setup I somehow corrupted a file. I wasn't thinking to backup my current project because normally anytime I mess something up I can just pull a fresh install from the collab but since that isn't working to force everyone to move over to Plastic, I cant pull a fresh install. So now I get the fun of troubleshooting how to fix my current install. I am mainly annoyed because I pay for the service just to get screwed over by it. Not impressed with Unity's services on this one.

 

I am in very similar situation. Using 2018 LTS. You are supposed to use the Plastic SCM Cloud Version client if you are on 2018 or older. It is a separate app outside of Unity but it links all your changes.

Actually mine is not working, but it might be the way I set it up. I can see all my previous Collab changes, but I can't do anything with them. Will be reaching out to their support.

If Unity and Plastic are reading this, it would be really helpful for a video for people with older versions of Unity ? I can only find videos with the editor plugin versions posted.

 

I'm freaking out, here, @marie-unity - I have a project which is version 2018.2.7f1. I don't have any of the files locally due to a recent hardware failure, and when I try to add it in Unity Hub, it isn't listed (a lot of my older projects aren't) - how can I download it so that I can update the version?

 

Can you point me to some documentation about using unity with GIT, we are hating Plastic SCM as much as you can hate something.

 

We had to upgrade our unity version in order to migrate to Plastic SCM, and a bunch of things broke. Wish Unity gave users the option to stay on collab if they were already using it

 

This is the moment Unity starts going downhill. Oh well, there are other engines out there.

 

I've been using Collaborate as my version control and I've paid for Unity "Cloud Storage" every month to extend the space for 3 years. Now you said it's fair to force users to turn off Collaborate to avoid the "Plastic SCM" banner showing up. And you said this does not count to force users to use "Plastic SCM"? I am completely lost.

 

Hello, is the timeline still relevant? We haven't yet received the mail that our repositories were migrated to Plastic and the 28th of February is approaching and I don't know what that will mean for our unarchived projects. As a last resort I will have to manually migrate the projects if nothing happens in the next week or so.

 

Do we have any choice over when this happens so that it won't coincide with important deadlines like a launch out of the blue?

 

If unity teams is going away next year should I keep paying my unity teams advanced subscription for my 25 GB in plastic or should I start paying Plastic?

What happens to my data in plastic when unity teams goes away. Will I need to quickly pivot to paying plastic some completely different amount of money when that happens? Or should I be pivoting to paying plastic instead now?

From the description it sounds like we keep paying our unity teams advanced subscription for now, and we get our same storage size on plastic, but then at an undetermined time this year unity teams will be shutdown at which point we will have to go to the plastic SCM website and sign up for a subscription there at whatever price they decide. Is that accurate?

I'm just trying to avoid losing access to our cloud storage and history because we didn't know who to pay and when.

 

Hi @marie-unity

So things did not work as expected.

I have a lifetime 50GB subscription in Collab, i asked about this here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/col...upgraded-to-plastic-scm.1188592/#post-7605985

Now I've transferred to Plastic SCM and I currently have 33gb in the cloud and am getting asked to pay 10$.

I contacted Unity through the Plastic SCM contact us link about a week ago but didn't hear anything back, the only thing I'm getting is more reminders to add my creditcard or my data will be deleted in a month.

Please take a look at this issue. According to Unity, we will never pay more than what we paid before the migration so I should "at least" be getting 50gb on plastic, even though 50gb on Collab was worth a lot more.

Thanks

 

What is going on? I did not ask for plastic
Collab works just fine
Tried to migrate anyway - and as expected Migration not working. Stuck in no-mans land........

On critical time line.
please roll-back this much unneeded migration

 

I'm newish to Unity, and in the process of getting my first Unity game ready for release (iOS and Android first).

I've been generally been over the moon with Unity, it's exceeded my expectations - but this step of automatically archiving a collab project, and forcing us to Plastic SCM, and also forcing us to upgrade the Unity versions is absolutely unbelievable. I'm stuck on 2019.4.21 as it gives me the best, most stable performance on iOS and Android, yet I can't even use that with Plastic SCM. Why? is 2019.4.32 so radically different that Plastic SCM simply wouldn't work on 2019.4.21? Come on.

Is there any kind of workaround that would enable me to install Plastic SCM on 2019.4? And if not, when is Cloud Build Standalone available, and is that going to work on 2019.4.21?

Again, I'm kind of in disbelief. Cloud build has been working beautifully, I just tried to publish some changes to the app which is about to go to preorder on iOS and got the "Your repository is locked" message.

Surely it would make far, far more sense to give users the option, or at least only force new projects to Plastic SCM? It seems fairly common that people have found a stable build of Unity that works perfectly with their project, that may not be one of the Plastic compatible versions, and that upgrading the project to a Unity version breaks any number of things.

I tried searching for Cloud Build Standalone, and there is nothing to indicate a release, even though one post suggested it would be available towards the end of 2021.

 

Thanks for the reply Ryan. I apologise if my post was a bit OTT, but as you said the timing is pretty horrendous, as I've been working round the clock to get the game ready for preorder etc, then this happened which threw a pretty big spanner in the works

Regarding Unity 2019.4.21, I would definitely like to contact the relevant teams about why I decided to stay on 2019.4.21 and am reluctant to upgrade, yes.

My first Unity project is a fairly ambitious one - a big open world driving game (64km2 map, with over 128km of roads) that uses addressables to stream assets in and out, and works very well even on mobile. It's one of the reasons I've been so happy with Unity actually, as the performance has exceeded my expectations, coming from my own cobbled together engine. Especially with newer Unity functionality like Addressables, DOTS, dynamic resolution etc etc.

In order to maintain the performance on a game that is pushing mobile devices to their limits, I am relying heavily on dynamic resolution with Vulkan and Metal. It works really well on Android (not so well on iOS because of the incorrect frame timings, but I think that's Metal's issue) and one of the things I'm doing to maximise the performance is the old console trick of scaling more in the horizontal axis than the vertical one. It works really well to bring the pixel count down, with a minimal hit in visuals.

Annoyingly 2019.4.21 is the most recent version that supports this.

2019.4.22 was updated to only scale in 5% increments for a speed boost, but obviously this speed boost doesn't come close to closing the gap to the huge boost I get being able to scale more in the horizontal axis. So basically I get significantly worse performance on Android, post 2019.4.21. 2019 has proven the most stable on iOS too, which surprisingly is more prone to crashing than the Android build, which never crashes.

If it only scales in 5% increments that's fine, but please allow us once more to scale the X/Y axes by different amounts, it's incredibly useful, especially on mobile GPUs.

 

I have a project nearing completion on 2018.4.32LTS. I just discovered that we can no longer use collab?! This is really going to set me back to upgrade or switch services. I'm also not happy about paying for this service and storage for 3 years to have it pulled out from under me.

 

Thanks @Ryan-Unity - In each email you have the "Contact us" Link that leads to https://create.unity.com/plasticscm-contact-us - that's where I contacted you. But I'll create another Ticket here: https://www.plasticscm.com/support

 

as u expected, this S*** starts to spit bugs and bugs.

Why you forcibly update collaborate to this? I can't understand. Why u put devs to bugs hell and waste time?

so, how to resolve this error? restart, did everything but not works.

 

I thought I might as well go all the way and upgrade from 2019.4.21 to the so called LTS version of 2021 - 2021.3.0. After taking a few hours to convert to 2021, I find out it's unusable as DOTs isn't even available for 2021 yet. Any idea when the new Entities is going to be available for 2021?

Upon updating to 2019.4.38 instead, PlasticSMC prompted me to convert the collab project to PlasticSCM etc, all seemed fairly easy and user friendly.

Only one big catch - editor performance is horribly slow compared to before.

I have a 5800 and 32gb of RAM, and now changing a serialised field value on a prefab takes literally a few seconds to autosave the prefab file. Quite a frustrating experience, especially when making constant adjustments to various sliders. Before it was essentially instantaneous.

Is this a known issue, and is there any setting that can rectify this newfound sluggishness? Does Plastic do significantly better with text or binary?

 

Is unity build version 2020.3.23f1 supported with PSCM cloud?

 

I am a teacher at a college, and this is a disaster for my students in Game Design I. I TOLD THEM to BUY subscriptions to unity Teams to make collaboration easier since most version control software has steep learning curves for artists and the pricing is not bad for barely three months of development (most of my students are majoring in design, not programming).

Now I feel like a fool! I did not know this was coming so soon. My poor students purchased Unity teams, Collab was great for them since it is simple and sits inside of Unity, but now they are forced to learn a whole new software only two weeks before their project is due. They literally woke up to this in the middle of developing their very first game projects.

This is wrong. It's not the right way to treat consumers of a service. It would be different if it was free, but it is not.

A simple fix would just be to allow projects to continue using Collab until a cut off deadline, rather than saying "hey, you must use this now- it's better, so don't worry!" Do not tell ME what is better for MY projects. For my students, Collab is superior to Plastic because of it's simplicity, and being forced to switch suddenly is hard on productivity and morale. As both a teacher and a creator of small game projects, I would never dare do something like that to my own teams or my students. I cannot think of a better way to make a team furious. Software evolves and that's something you need to be prepared for, but we have version control for a reason- newest is not always best. I have enjoyed Unity for years, I've never wanted to switch engines, but this is disturbing. This is the only post I've ever made on the forums but I had to sound off on this. Please do better by the many types of people who use your software.

 

This was the case. They announced last October that Collab will be terminated this spring.

--
Is this some free college or something? Why the software license isn't in the price otherwise? I'm guessing this is one of those places where the students bring the toilet paper too.

 

sFTP file transfer and zip editor archive are good enough, if having unlimited traffic and web storage on server side hosting. Else generate again the cached 3 gigabytes per project of artifacts and temp takes long processing, again.

 

They said it would terminate may 31st? It’s not even May yet. This only affected one team and tbh I’m wondering why. I asked them if they agreed to migrate to plastic, but they claim they did not get any prompts, just an error in Collab. Since it’s actually only affecting ONE team it’s not as big of a disaster as I thought, but it’s annoying for that team.

Some students CAN get unity teams for free at my school. It’s still a paid product even so. Money IS tight where I work. They would make the students pay for toilet paper if they could, and in a way they do- it’s called tuition. You pay to attend colleges. But would the situation be any better if they weren’t students but independent developers? Which they might be very soon? The economic condition of the college and my own choices as a teacher make this a bigger problem I agree. I should probably start teaching GitHub rather than ever relying on the (in Unity’s own words) inferior Collab system. But it would still be a problem either way! Come on, you upgrade a product by throwing an error in the product you just made obsolete? At best it’s rude.

 

Admittedly, English isn't my first language, but this sounds to me that you can only EXTRACT your data FROM Collaborate until May 31, not use it.

 

This is incredibly disappointing, rip good collab, hello garbage plastic waste

 

You are right, meaning there’s no clean date for the plastic update like I was assuming. The updates are “rolling out” as we get closer to the deadline. Why would you roll out a new software like it was a software update? It seems really strange. I was not nearly as aware of this as I should have been. Other teams are coming to with this and they are confused thinking they “broke Collab.” F*** me I suppose and anyone who dared to prefer the straightforward simplicity of Collab. It’ll be missed.

 

This would have been such a simple solution, and significantly more “human” aka “humane.”

 

Okay, last comment on this, because I have a feeling you are bending over backwards to misinterpret the entire situation.
Unity isn't rolling out new software. PlasticSCM isn't new, PlasticSCM for Unity isn't new. They are converting thousands (well, probably tens of thousands) of repositories from Collab (git-based) to PlasticSCM (plastic based, obviously) and they are bringing through files too, sometimes many gigabytes worth. They cannot do it at once.

Look, Unity announced this way before, they gave ample time to act, they made ways to fairly easily migrate your projects to other git-based services. They sent emails about this move, wrote blog post, made several forum threads about it and they are fairly active on real support threads to help people to migrate their repositories either onto Plastic or other services.

I think they handled this migration better than the entire Collab service throughout its existence.

 

If they're going to force this awful migration, at least make it work. In my project, it constantly bugged me to migrate to Plastic, so I did, then it kept bugging me, and I did it again, and it worked a little bit. Now, it doesn't even let me in the Plastic window, it's grayed, I literally can not use any form of collaborate on my project.

 

I, too, am a professional game developer, but I also teach game design at the collegiate level as an Adjunct professor. I suggested that my students use Collab this semester instead of Plastic for the simple reason that, as they signed up for the Unity Student Plan, they would have FIVE Collab seats per team versus the THREE Plastic seats that Unity seems to be providing. There has been zero update (at least that I can find) that details how Unity will treat its Student Plan members in terms of how many seats they will provide. Most Student teams (and, like you, my students are design focused and not engineering focused) are a minimum of five people precisely _because_ they are just learning and are on very tight development cycles (one semester if they are lucky and usually it's much shorter than that - most likely mere weeks for development). I had to spend an entire class working through students updating their nearly complete projects from Collab to Plastic with only one class left before their final project is due. Horrible Horrible timing and not great communication as to how Unity is planning on handling their educational outreach.

 

Like @kt245 above, I, too, teach game design at the collegiate level as an Adjunct professor. My students are design focused and not tech/engineering focused, so I love to have them use Unity for several reasons (visual scripting, Collab built in, and the Unity Student Plan among them). I suggested that my students use Collab this semester instead of Plastic for the simple reason that, as they signed up for the Unity Student Plan, they would have FIVE Collab seats per team versus the THREE Plastic seats that Unity seems to be providing with Unity Teams. I'd like to know what the plan is, moving forward, for the Unity Student Plan and how many Plastic seats will be available for student teams. Most Student teams are a minimum of five people precisely because they are just learning and are on very tight development cycles (one semester/fifteen weeks if they are lucky and usually it's much shorter than that - most likely mere weeks for development). There is strength in numbers and, as teachers, we generally try to have larger student teams so stronger students can help support the weaker students (and they all have strengths and weaknesses in different areas, so building larger teams helps balance projects).


How is Unity planning on handling their educational outreach in terms of version control for teams? It would be very detrimental for students to have to ask them to pay for a few individual seats when they are just learning (and teams of three might be fine for more advanced students, but not at all when they are just starting out and need as much support as they can get).