My Experiences With Collaborate

Hello I am a developer at a small studio and we have recently started using collaborate. It has been about two weeks now so giving my first impressions of it. We have a couple of projects that we have shifted over to it for different reasons.

We made the decision to shift the first project over due to multiple artists needing to place models into the scene and make changes repeatedly. It has worked great for that as long as no one makes changes to the scene while someone else is. When we got it another programmer and I messed around with working on the same script and was pleasantly surprised at how well it handled merging our changes.

After shifting a project over to collaborate we have also started a prototype that is completely maintained by collaborate. Considering that its a small project and we haven't been pushing anything too far on it that project has been fairly smooth.

One weird thing we have experienced is that when we started we were still using gitlab and source tree to maintain another source control just in case. But in the middle of last week all of the projects we have on collaborate stopped being noticed by that source control. We have yet to really look into this but we intend to.

List of things we want
branching
easier reverting
allow multiple people to work in same scene
display differences in a conflict better

 

Alright so a couple of weeks in now we have a couple of people in the office working with collaborate right now but have not seen a reason not to move everyone over to it. We were worried for part of a day when we all couldn't get it to work a week ago then found it was just collaborate was down. Then today one guy was having issues for a half hour pulling down after updating to the current version Unity.

 

Is he still experiencing issues pulling, @sbob322 ? If he is could you please submit a bug and ping me the bug # so I can take a look at his editor logs? Lets get him back up and running asap!

 

We are good now it was just for that half hour then it started working on its own.

 

That is never fun, but thank you very much for the update! If you run into issues again, please don't hesitate to reach out @sbob322

 

Alright well we have been getting used to collaborate and figuring out its tricks here. We typically have 3 of us working on the same area and are making sure we do not step on each others toes. One thing of note we found is that when you have a second instance of unity open (a different project) that even though collaborate noticed the changes the ui window for collaborate wouldn't display anything so you couldn't update. Just closing the other instance of Unity fixed this. Another issue we have noticed is after pulling down from collaborate if you hit play while the circle is still spinning in the bottom right Unity hangs. The last issue we have been having is that sometimes after moving a script to a new location in the project it might get duplicated in its old location causing conflicts.

 

Catching up after being in Copenhagen last week:
- multiple instances of unity has always been a bad practice, but one that was used frequently. With more and more of Unity (ie. the home/launcher window, Services window, Asset Store, Collab Toolbar, etc) using npm packages, it now has a greater effect. Fun fact: the editor.log writes to the same location, regardless of which editor you are in. For example, you can get 5.3 and 4.6 logs in the same editor.log!

-script compiler hangs. This is a known issue and I am sure excited to report we have a fix and are in code review as I type! woo!! Because the bug was down to the Mono compiler the review process is a little longer. We don't want to break anything

-duplicating scripts. Would you be willing to submit a bug for me if you get that error again (from the machine with the duplicate)? That is a nasty bug and I want to kill that one asap! Just ping me the case # if you do

Thank you so much!!

 

Latest hurdle we have been dealing with is rolling back on a publish that we don't want. So far we have been handling it with our second source control by rolling back to the publish we want then committing it there. Then we pull down so collab will let us publish again. Then with the other source control we throw away the changes we do not want. Is there a better way?

 

Currently, you are doing it the best way with Collab as it is today. Know that we have a Collab Preview coming soon with a rollback feature in its early stages. I'll ping @quixotic (Collab PM) so she knows you are eagerly anticipating a better/smoother/faster way!

As always, thank you for the feedback. We can't make a better product without it <3

 

Haven't made a post in a while but all this week collab has been acting weirdly. At the beginning of the week if i tried to pull down a bunch of different commits at once collab would hang and say the yamal tool failed or something like that and not pull anything down. My solution to that was to pull each commit one at a time oldest first and it would work but very slowly. These were not large commits or anything that was causing conflicts. Currently it is still running very slowly on pulling down commits or pushing them up. Running windows 10 Unity version 5.4.2p4