I Highly Recommend You Don't Use Unity

I was using the built-in grid/palette system, I was trying to do something, messed it up, now my entire scene got messed up. I was like "its ok, I can just undo it", well, Unity decided to automatically close on me, and guess what? The engine saves without you saving it, so after coming back into Unity, I couldn't undo it.

No way to load up a previous save from earlier in the day or previous day. Pretty sad you cant yet you could do that with some games back in the 90s.

Would be nice if Unity only saves after we manually save it so stuff like that can't happen.

I guess you get what you get with a free program.

1/10 is my rating of the engine.

 

You don't source control?

 

Congratulations, you've learned you need source control. I recommend using git LFS with gitlab.

 

its not coding. its within the GUI itself. And to make matters worse, I lost my palette. Since i still have all of my code, if I really wanted to, I can just start over with making the scene again...but thats just a waste of time.

 

in all kind of works/areas that can be happen.

it's part of the work, six years a go, my HD crashed and i'm not telling my friends or co-workers, "you must not use a hard disk" or "dont' buy WD hard drives".

it's only my opinion.

 

The thing is, you should also have unity files (scenes, prefabs, assets) in source control.

You can't cleanly merge them but you can and should commit them so you can rollback them to a previous state if things go south

 

It's hilarious that I saw a "Unity needs to auto save" post maybe 3 weeks ago, and now I'm seeing a "Unity shouldn't auto save" post.

Sounds like you just need to accept you messed up and not blame the engine. As everyone else has mentioned, source control exists for situations like this.

 

setup git with LFS. It will only take 30 minutes.

nothing in software is trustworthy, all this stuff is created by people who are obviously total morons, so you just got to do it. I'm sure these issues you are having aren't related to your workflow so let's not even consider that, but definitely set up the source control because then you can just get back to the work in a few minutes every time the engine fails.

 

Congratulations. You've achieved what virtually everyone who has ever used a computer has achieved. You've lost data due to a failure to back it up properly. Failure to back up your data will always eventually lead to data loss. If it wasn't Unity it would have been something else.

Now that you've experienced failure it's time to learn from that failure and start backing up your projects. Version control is the recommended way to properly back up source code and Git is one popular way to do it.

 

I did a quick search, it seems this mistake of not having version control is so common, that there are thousands of memes.

In fact it bailed me out this morning as I'd made some changes and screwed my rendering up. I couldn't for the life of me recall where or how. But not to worry. I use source/version control.

Life is much easier when I don't even have to back up.

 

Use version control.

Doesn't matter. You ALWAYS use version control, and you ALWAYS save frequently.

 

I know I'm just piling on, but source control isn't just for code. Using source control has been the software industry standard since as long as I can remember. If you had been using source control, the worst case scenario is losing only the work done since the last check in, and you'd be back working within a few minutes.

If you don't want to do source control either do frequent backups manually (just make a zip file of your project folder and copy it off your computer), or just accept the risk that you will lose some of your work at some point or another. The same kind of thing can happen with any dev tool, from Photoshop, to Premiere, to UE4, etc.

 

Plastic has some kind of artist versioning too.

 

A couple months ago I was working on a song demo in a DAW. I'd nearly gotten it finished when it stopped saving, and I tried to overwrite a save and it totally messed up. I had to completely remake it. It was my fault for trying to force an overwrite when it wasn't saving, but source control would have saved me from having to remake it completely.

 

Everyone is spot on. This is just a natural part of developing content in general. I personally would've liked an autosave feature back when I was using the engine heavily, but autosave /no-autosave doesn't really solve the underlying problem.

Though I have almost messed up my LFS source in the past, so it's not bulletproof.

Never thought to use it for music too. I should keep that in mind.

 

Long time ago I was looking through drawing tutorial videos and there was some sort of art training school that has this training exercise.

1. The instructor asks trainee to make a rough digital painting. It takes (at least) an hour or two, I believe.
2. The trainee brings in the painting, the instructor looks through it and then...
3. Erases half of it and saves it over. Then asks the trainee to do it again or fix it.

I do not recall what their reasoning was, it was something along the lines of "not getting too attached to the results so it won't make you blind to your mistakes".

However, massive data loss is something that occasioanlly occurs. Normally if you did something once you can do it again, but going through the motions again is not very entertaining.

Related:

Spoiler

 

For the record, I believe my own data loss record is one year of work lost to a botched cd.

Once upon a time there was a small team of people trying to make their own game from scratch, which failed, and the team dissolved.

That cd was the last copy of the resulting engine along with source. It is still lying around somewhere, utterly unreadable.

It is fine, though. These days with a modern engine it is possible to clone that project in a month. If not in a week.

 

I went to my sprite editor, I tried to slice an image, then something messed up along the way and it brought my entire asset from the Project section and onto my canvas and replaced everything I had on there.

I would have just simply hit undo, but Unity decided to randomly close on me after.

 

So what?

That happens in all leading game engines. Source control is not optional. It's unfortunately never going to be 100% stable. We know this after decades of work on different engines. Just a thing to live with, so we all use version control. For extra stability, don't use betas.

Lost work happens to all devs once, then never again. I wish it was a case where Unity would be 100% stable but for that to happen, Unity would have to be capable of doing a lot less.

 

Yeah, I actually did wind up changing a couple things so in the end it may have helped some. But those first few moments of realization that I'd have to redo the work were painful.

 

I just use it for everything that takes more than a couple of sessions. Even stuff like documents go in OneDrive or Google Drive or similar, which have rudimentary single-file versioning built in.

For complicated stuff it's worth the effort to learn a tool such as Git. For simple stuff you don't need to, just use storage which already does it. Either way, if you have an internet connection then these days there's rarely an excuse for losing important data these days.

Keeping your data safe is a part of basic computer literacy, as far as I'm concerned.

 

Every game engine I have ever tried (and I tried a large number of them before and after I finally came to Unity) has crashed on me with most of them crashing during daily use. It's not just the engine either. All of your apps and even the operating system (in spite of how good they've gotten over the years) can crash without warning.

 

And there's power breaks, hardware failure, theft, hackers / viruses, and all sorts of other stuff that can happen, too. Even if software was 100% reliable, that's not enough to keep your data safe.

Whether you think it's your fault or not, gone is gone.

 

I guess the game development is democratized all right.

ROFL.

 

I developed BHB: BioHazard Bot over multiple years and I didn't use source control at all. Never had any issues. But of course, that was back in the day when Unity was actually reliable...

 

Just because you can run across the busy highway fifty times without being hit by a car, it doesn't make you right, it makes you lucky. You still should use the overpass.

 

Even manual backups are fine. Just someone... save something haha!

 

....Which would not be a problem with source control.

You messed up, don't blame the engine blame your working method. Its 2021, if you are losing data in this day and age and don't have a backup - then thats on you not the software you are using.

All software breaks, all software crashes. Backups mitigate this.

 

And don't forget to sync your commits... I get emotional thinking about the work I lost because I only committed locally because syncing had errors I was too lazy to deal with and kept putting off for months.....ughhhhh

 

Oh right so I was just lucky for 5 years was I? ok lol

As if increment saves and manual backups aren't a thing. See the thing is, Unity used to be stable enough to where you could work that way quite comfortably, and it was more than enough for my needs at the time. Even after learning version control I still enjoy working that way sometimes when I have some one-off prototype test and I don't feel like cluttering up the perforce depot. As an artist turned coder, I got used to increment saving and manual backups ages ago and it hasn't failed me yet.

The problem with preaching "just use version control!" as the solution to everything is that it gives Unity more wiggle room to be lazy, makes it easier for them to handwave/ignore certain bugs, making the need for version control a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Because hey, who cares if Unity is less reliable than it used to be, everyone is supposed to use version control anyways! You'll be fine, Unity can fix problems later (if ever)....which in turn increases the need for version control, which decreases the pressure on Unity to fix stuff ASAP, which increases the need for version control, and the cycle continues.

Quite frankly if it wasn't for all the Unity users that DON'T use version control, Unity would be in a much worse state than it currently is.

 

Yes. You were lucky you never needed to look through code or comments you had written about said code because you didn't keep a backup for literally every single commit to the project.

A common theme I see from people who talk about how they've successfully lived without version control is that they believe it's only useful for backups and that's simply not the case. It's so much more than a backup system.

 

I agree in general but i dont think people griping on forums is what keeps the unity team on the ball.

 

I am just quoting this for emphasis.

Also, hardware fails and stupid mistakes happen. (I wiped an active project folder once because I was in wrong terminal window). Backups and/or version control are simply requirements if you care at all about your work. If you work years and never use them as a rescue, great! It's that one time you need it, you recognize the value. BUT, you don't have to learn from you own mistakes, it is more effective to learn from others. Every developer will tell you of the value of backups/vcs. Accept it and move on.

 

Or your computer gets nicked. Or happy times with water happen.

 

And you assume I never needed to look through code or comments, or that I think it's only for backups, based on...what exactly?

I personally coded everything in BHB: Biohazard Bot myself. Meaning, I personally coded all the game mechanics, the file saving system, the custom gravity physics, character controllers, camera controller, state machines, AI, objectives, scene loading framework, menu system, music player system, text dialogue system, scene transitions, object pooling, weapon system, projectile behaviors, HUD, the achievements handling, custom input handling, and everything else. Timeline hadn't been added to Unity at the time so for the cutscenes I made my own system.
I didn't use any 3rd party gameplay frameworks or templates. There was even some code that made it into the final build that was literally the Unityscript code I originally wrote when first starting the project (converted to C# after it was phased out).

So yeah actually I did have to look through code and comments I wrote. It was a multi-year project

 

Not the people griping on the forums so much as the waves of silent users that email Unity for this bug or that crash or submit angry bug reports. People on version control aren't in as much of an angry panic when something breaks, they may not even submit anything at all.

Remember too that there's lots of artists using Unity and Unreal who want nothing to do with version control and the technical crap that goes with it. And if Unity wants those artists to use Unity over Unreal, well...

 

There's not too much "technical crap" that goes into setting up GitHub though. Brackeys, as shown above, even explains it in a very short hand holding video.

If someone doesn't wanna get into the technical side of something that's as simple as that, then they really shouldn't be using a game engine.

 

I wrote "comments" but I meant "commit comments" not "code comments".

Seeing how it's only had two reviews in the four years it has been available am I to assume you're one of those people who don't believe in marketing either? Or was this just a portfolio piece? Or made for giggles?

Modern VCS hosting providers have made it so simple that if you can create a forum account you can create a version control account. Likewise if you can figure out Unity and/or the average content creation tool (including ones as simple as MS Paint) you shouldn't have any trouble picking up a client for Git.

 

I'm about as non-technical as they come and I managed to setup Git LFS and use it everyday. Really glad I do, it brings great peace of mind.

I was intimidated at first and even considered getting some help to set it up. But finally I just spent like 3 hours reading through the tutorials from Git and then setting it up was really easy. It took like 20 minutes.

It would be nice if unity just magically worked and never crashed, but it is where it is now and it's not going back to what it was. Personally, I'd rather invest the short time it takes to use version control versus waste so much time sending bug reports which are almost certain to be not acted upon. Like why am I going to send bug reports for complex, project related things, when the most basic UI stuff is bass-ackwards? I only want to help those who will help themselves first.

At the end of the day, whether the software sucks or it's great, you have to manage your time so you can get the work done. Not using version control today because five years ago you feel like you didn't need to, and instead of learning version control you think bugging a team that has been dropping the ball for five years... seems like poor way to manage time.

 

Look it's simple.

Some people will want to use insurance and some won't.

 

Which is fine right up until their decision impacts someone else and I'm not just talking about them losing data and affecting someone else they either work for or with. Unity attracts new developers very easily and they can be very impressionable.

 

There's also "git bisect". You'll probably need it once per year, but it is incredibly useful.

There isn't a lot of technical crap. You'd need to learn 3..5 commands you'll be using all the time and that would be it. And that's in situation where you do not use GUI extensions that are frequently provided.

 

There's always a chance that a program will fail, in this case it was Unity. Best advice is to always back up your projects. Source control is really helpful too.

This video was really helpful Thanks!

 

I didn't use source control in Unity for years. I still don't use it for anything below a certain size. Often I just export the unitypackage and upload it somewhere.

Version control is fine and all, but its additional advantages over manual backups are subjective. And it's another point of entry for complications and issues.

 

How many times do you backup your project per day?

I can easily produce up to 20 entries to version history per daily work, and you almost certainly do not backup your project manually that often.

Basically, version history allows you to pull any version that ever existed from the abyss, revert to any state that has been recorded, and see what exactly has changed.

Doing the same with manual backup is less convenient.

 

I usually don't need to remember 20 version histories to be able to reproduce exactly what I did that day, unless the project is big enough, in which case I use version control.

I should back up daily, but it's usually more like after every few days. There's a small risk there but I can easily get rid of it if I want to.

Organizing the information about what has changed into a coherent format, especially when you're iterating on some creative task, is often time consuming and not that effective. At a certain point in a project's lifetime, I'm much more interested in tearing around the codebase, prototyping bits and pieces, seeing if X or Y works or turns out as good as I think it would. In that scope, it's much easier for my workflow to hold the state of the project in my mind, at least for that day, and disregard any bugs that might crop up that are irrelevant for determining the basic structure of something.

Certainly toward the end of a project, and especially when a deadline is looming, there is no room for this kind of fast and easy workflow. But toward the beginning it enables things to evolve in a much better way.

 

It means you can lose several days of work. I can lose several hours at most.

But you don't need to do any expensive organizing. You write the thing, you test the thing, you commit it to version control, and add a message to it. The mesage could be "I did the thing". And here you go, it is organized. It will remain on the log, it will record what you changed exactly, it will record your message, and it will record when the change happening. Then you can pull up list of changes for the project, list of changes for individual files, and when something breaks, you can bisect and determine when exactly the problem was introduced.

And that's what git branches are for.
You make a branch, test your idea, then if it works out you merge it back. If it doesn't work out, then you original branch is still available in pristine state. You can switch between them at will when you want, it is safe.

You really gain nothing by sticking to manual backups. You do make your workflow more complicated and more error prone, though.

I did work without version control, but that was years ago, and I see no reason to go back to this kind of workflow. There's no gain.

 

Do you work in a team?

 

No, if I did I'd certainly use version control if there was more than one person with access to the unity project.

The point I'm making is not that version control is bad, but that in certain circumstances, it's unnecessary and unwieldy. If someone is suffering as a result of not using it, then the correct answer is to start using it.

 

I honestly never thought "Its better to have backups than not" is a hill some people would choose to fight and die on. I really thought this is just common sense.

I see a lot of random arguments being made about usability of vcs etc, none of that matters. Its simple, either have backups and never worry about data loss, or don't have them and then feel the pain when you finally do (and everyone eventually does) experience it. There is no middle ground. You are either safe from it, or have not experienced it yet.

Everything else is just noise, and when you finally experience the pain of losing an entire project, all the arguments you made for not using vcs will seem empty like the noise they are.

P.S This is not talking to anyone directly or meant to offend anyone, just aimed in general to anyone on the fence or not convinced about the importance of backups. Again, crazy to even have to say that sentence in 2021 software development world, but here we are.