Bug Prefab changes not loading from Git Pull

It has been many moons and many Unity versions. But i am seeing one specific issue over and over, almost consistently. But i cannot seem to make a reproduction case, so thought i would share.

I work with my team in a Unity project through git.
Randomly, assignments in a prefab or scriptable object, will not appear on other people's machines. It will then cause a nullref on build, or during running of a build or even when running in the editor.

To resolve, you find the file having the missing link. Delete it, or make a change.
Go to git, revert the change or un-delete the file. And then it magically is set up perfectly. No git change required, it was fine all along. (a reimport of the offending file might also help, but it's been inconsistent for us)

We are not doing anything strange, prefabs are saved as intended, meta files are comitted, etc. The fact that sorting it out, and no git changes happen, proves it is not an issue on the user side. Something in Unity is not having any of the git changes from time to time, causing new additions in references to just become unassigned when loading it on a different machine from git, Unity open, or not during the git pull.

Anyone have any light to shed on this?

 

This process absolutely works rock solidly.

Two possible things come to mind:

- your AssetDatabase may be corrupt - in this case, right-click project, Reimport All

- you are letting Unity "see" the folder while git is still changing out files from a branch switch.

IDEALLY you should close Unity and change branches, reopen Unity.

IDEALLY you should never have Unity open in any way when operating with source control.

PRACTICALLY you can keep Unity open, just don't give it focus until the directory tree is completely changed.

Also make sure you turn off the background asset update in Unity, whatever they call it these days in whatever version of Unity you are using. That may start the import before git has finished changing all files out.

Anyway, it does work, we do it all the time, we do get glitches but it's always one of the above two possibilities and easy to resolve.

Here's my Unity/git source control blurb if you want another checklist:

PROPERLY CONFIGURING AND USING ENTERPRISE SOURCE CONTROL

I'm sorry you've had this issue. Please consider using proper industrial-grade enterprise-qualified source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/prefab-links-keep-getting-dumped-on-git-pull.646600/#post-7142306

I usually make a separate repository for each game, but I have some repositories with a bunch of smaller test games.

Here is how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/2-steps-backwards.965048/#post-6282497

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/whe...grammer-example-in-text.1048739/#post-6783740

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/your-techniques-to-share-code-between-projects.575959/#post-3835837

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/removing-il2cpp_cache-from-project.1084607/#post-6997067

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-git-with-unity

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place. Digital storage is so unbelievably cheap today that you can buy gigabytes of flash drive storage for about the price of a cup of coffee. It's simply ridiculous not to back up.

If you plan on joining the software industry, you will be required and expected to know how to use source control.

"Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later." - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards

 

Thanks for the feedback. It looks like we are doing most of those things.
So the only one i can check is the "process in background" toggle. And otherwise people will have to close unity while doing git things.