General thoughts and suggestions

Hello everyone and congratulations to the Unity Collaborate team for making an integrated VCS for Unity! (at last )

It is very good to have functionality like that embedded in the Unity Editor.
Also a big thanks for focusing on ease of use. It will be a great help for programmers out there. Not few a time I had to explain over and over again what to do, what to avoid and how to do something or not do something on many VCS GUIs out there. Pretty much everything is now just a button's push away.

I have crawled around the forum and seen quite a few suggestions, but I thought I'd write a few lines here to express my feelings and maybe a few more suggestions about the new feature.

It's very easy to clone an existing project in your disk via the project selection window popping up when launching the editor, but I was lost (for a second or so) when I tried working on the same project again.

As soon as I opened the editor again (after cloning the project the first time) my intuition was to visit the "In the Cloud" tab to resume work on the project. I was surprised to see the "Choose location for new project" window popping up. I knew that even if the project was cloned on my disk, the whole project was in the cloud. What I did the previous day was to make changes and upload them in the cloud. A programmer might understand this but other sectors, no so tech savvy (no offense) might clone the project again in a new folder, or even the same one!
I actually just tried doing that and it worked, but the way it worked might be prone to loss of work. I selected the existing project's folder on disk as the new project location and the editor erased everything in there and refetched the project from the cloud. In case I had done some work there and hadn't had uploaded the changes, it would have been gone. It would be nice to see that a project already exists on a disk in the "In the Cloud" tab. Also a confirmation dialog when trying to fetch a project in a non empty directory would be great. Even more since Unity will erase everything in it.

I see that there is no way to see the diff of the files right now (using b19), only reverting and uploading them. The external diff tool selection is grayed out, so I suppose it has not been implemented yet. Also the embedded diff tool is not working for me. Has it been implemented? Is it available?

As it has been mentioned in another thread, it would be great to have the ability to upload specific files instead of all changes made. That might help in situations when different Unity versions are used by other teammates (happened a few times).

It would be also great to have a diff tool that will indicate changes in picture files (as it has been mentioned too). I'd also love to see that for whole scenes! Side by side scene diff! With an option to select or revert specific changes to game objects in it.

Some kind of integrated issue tracking would be good too, but there are far too many tools out there that do this thing already.

For the bugs section I had the following issue: I installed beta 5.4.0 while having version 5.3.4f1. When I fetched my first project from the cloud, I tried opening a script file by double clicking it. Normally Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition would open but both MonoDevelop and Visual Studio opened. That happened twice, the first time I installed b17 (first beta of 5.4.0 I tried) and later on when I installed b19. I checked the selection in the Editor Preferences and VS was indeed selected. When I reselected it (switched to MonoDevelop and back to Visual Studio) the bug disappeared.

MonoDevelop showed a error message about a GUID not being correct. I will try to reproduce it (I'll need to reinstall the beta version again) and post the image here.

That's my 2 cents so far. We haven't been pushing the limits of Collaborate yet, but we will do so in the near future

Sorry for the long post.

Keep up the good work!
- Ioannis

 

Also what could help me out tracking the diff issue would be maybe the type of file you were trying to do a diff on. thanks

 

Thanks for getting back to me guys.

Philippe I tried again the issue I reported above, and I saw that unity created a new project inside the already existing project.
Meaning that If I have a Collaborate project named TestProject in the cloud, stored locally in the folder C:\TestProject

• If I select C:\TestProject folder as the destination to download the project from the cloud again, the project will be cloned in C:\TestProject\TestProject.
• If I select C:\ as the destination, the new project will be created in C:\TestProject 1

which means that what I said is wrong. So don't mind it.

I filed a bug for the case I wrote that both VS and MonoDevelop open up when doubleclicking a script file. Case number 802761.

Thierry, frankly I'd say that viewing diffs is not working on any file. I was trying to diff the GraphicSettings.asset file, but a few moments back, I tried viewing the diff of a script file. Both occasions, reported that I have not set any diff/merge tools. and prompted me to check my Unity Preferences.

On the preferences though, the Revision Control Diff/Merge selection is grayed out.

I'm using 5.4.0.b19 yet, since I cannot get a decent download speed to get the fresh b20 that was just released. When I get it, I'll try diff-ing again and I'll let you know.

 

For the diff, you could install WinMerge, when you will restart unity it should be detected.
Out o curiosity, is it possible that the project you are working on have have a space in the path somewhere?

 

Yes it actually does have a space. The Project name has a space. "G:\Onar Studios\Unity\Test Collab Project"

I will try WinMerge. But I also have P4Merge for example. Will it be an option to define the merge tool we want? I suppose yes, since it's in the Preferences. Right?