Search Unity

  1. Megacity Metro Demo now available. Download now.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Unity support for visionOS is now available. Learn more in our blog post.
    Dismiss Notice

Managing Asset Store Content

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by LaJolly, May 13, 2021.

  1. LaJolly

    LaJolly

    Joined:
    Aug 12, 2014
    Posts:
    12
    Howdy! I am attempting to manage my purchased assets a bit more intuitively for my artists by organizing them in a different way then the purchased structure, but I still want to keep the ability to have auto updates from the creators. Is this possible?

    How do other do their project management with a ton of asset store content? All ideas are welcome, thank you!
     
  2. BetaMark

    BetaMark

    Joined:
    Sep 27, 2014
    Posts:
    229
    I tag everything in the store for the category / style / genre of an asset. Those tags are searchable in the asset manager in Unity. I also will add tags for things like "compatible-U2020" if I've personally seen the asset work without error in Unity 2020.x.

    For heavy media (like WAV music packs, high poly 3d) quick browsing, I don't really have a good solution for quick preview and asset finding. Right now, I regularly (about once a quarter) will download updates to any art asset I own into my local Unity Editor and then I try and keep a mental note of what is in each asset. When I am working on a project and I need something that fits what I remember from the asset, I find it and export just the pieces I need for the project I'm working on (after buying enough licenses for the seats in my team, obviously).

    TBH, I'm surprised that I haven't found a better content management system (CMS) for Unity yet.
     
  3. BenniKo

    BenniKo

    Joined:
    Mar 24, 2015
    Posts:
    100
    You can move the assets to a subfolder like /assets/addons. Updated will still work. Somehow unity detects that you moved the add-on to a sub folder.
     
  4. BetaMark

    BetaMark

    Joined:
    Sep 27, 2014
    Posts:
    229
    Following up on my comment about user generated labels -- you do have to scroll down to the bottom of the filters list to see your labels, and if you (like me) have a lot of custom labels, you have to click on "show all" to see them.

    upload_2021-5-14_8-7-6.png

    Also -- I had forgotten about this excellent thread when Unity's own team was asking the community for feedback on the UX for search within Unity : https://forum.unity.com/threads/workflow-improvements-unitys-search-and-filtering-experience.950335/

    There are some excellent gems in the responses as to how other people solve for search -- including a couple that point to the newer Unity Quick Search package: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.quicksearch@3.0/manual/index.html

    I find that it still has many limitations, but its a step in the right direction. If I were going to build a proper CMS solution for Unity, I'd probably build my own search provider for quick search and then bake that in as a dependency for all my team's unity projects going forward.
     
    BenniKo likes this.
  5. LaJolly

    LaJolly

    Joined:
    Aug 12, 2014
    Posts:
    12
    Really? I'll have to test this out but it scares me a bit!
     
  6. LaJolly

    LaJolly

    Joined:
    Aug 12, 2014
    Posts:
    12
    Your advice is excellent, thank you for the links and the input. I was thinking tags would be great as well but yeah it's just more intuitive for my artists I think if things are all together in similar folders. Conundrum! DX Will be implementing tags in any case to help out in the meantime.
     
    BetaMark likes this.
  7. BetaMark

    BetaMark

    Joined:
    Sep 27, 2014
    Posts:
    229
    Note that you have to move them from within Unity (it updates the GUIDs and .meta files invisibly with the actual assets).

    If you move the assets with any other tool, Unity is going to have issues.

    One other caveat that I've run into when moving things around is that if you download an update to a package, updates do *NOT* remove old scripts and old assets that are still on your filesystem -- which sounds like a good idea, except for when you have a Prefab that depends on a texture mesh, or a script that expects another script to still have some methods in it which got refactored to somewhere else and you end up with nothing but errors after that.

    This is why I keep separate projects for each "asset" pack that I'm trying to keep track of -- so that I can have a smaller group of assets to move around and check for updates when a new version of the asset comes out and I need the updates in that new version.