Unity Collaborate is actually.... good. (Even on 2017.4)

UPDATE - NO LONGER ACCURATE - CONTINUED PROBLEMS - DAYS OF PRODUCTIVITY LOST

Hi all,

Wrapping up production on my game (Frontline Zed), using Collaborate with one Freelancer on 2017.4.30.

Whereas in the past Collaborate has been a nightmare, including massive errors when files were deleted and improperly synced, the past couple of months have been fine, even with a lot of intensive changes. There seems to be some kind of basic scene merging functionality too, which is great.

However, you need to treat collaborate right. I'd suggest:

• Everyone on the project has an NVME SSD. 'Checking for changes' (CFC) went from about 40 minutes to 2 minutes going from HDD to NVME SSD. HDD totally obsolete for game development, don't use them! NVME SSDs are very cheap now.

• Minimise your total project size, and number of files. I went from 30GB down to about 22GB (using Asset hunter), and noticed an increase in reliability and shorter CFC and sync times. This obviously depends on the project, but reducing project size by reducing/optimising texture details etc. is an important step. Reusing assets as much as possible (eg. same mesh, different texture) is just generally good practice, even in AAA.

• Push very often. Push at least once per day for everyone on the project, to reduce the risk of catastrophic conflicts.

• Separate out your scenes. Instead of having one monolithic scene, separate out your scenes and load them in additively.

I used to be a Unity Collaborate 'hater', recommending Git instead, but with the improved functionality even on the LTS versions, I'll stay with it for future projects. The ability to revert changes inside the Editor is very useful and having one less interface and 'thing' to manage relieves the brain.

However, the major problem is still the inability to fork your builld, which is necessary for beta/console support.

So if you have made some back-end changes to support 2017.4 in the past few months, Collaborate team, thanks!

 

Took 10 days off from the project (worked on other stuff) and our programmer kept working on features and then pushed a big update. Once more having massive problems getting scripts to compile, cannot show a list of changed files since the website link is down for both of us.

So Collaborate works fine in hyper-optimal settings of pushing and pulling every couple of days for small changes.

Good feedback revoked....

 

I revert all of these comments and am currently moving my very small team (2 people) to Plastic SCM.