Unity Development Blog 2 – Assets Server
by Ryan Zec on Jun.12, 2009, under Game Programming, Unity, Unity Developement Blog
So much for every week, I’ll shoot for at least once a month which is a little more realistic.
I have been working with the assets server for a little while and it seems to work ok, however I still don’t see how they can charge $500 for it. My biggest issues so far is that it does seem to be a little unstable. At least 3 times (in the past month) I was able to connect to the server but when I tried to update, I would get a timeout error. I try again a little later and magically it would work after doing nothing to the server. Other than that issue, the assets server does what it needs even tho it does not have all the features of SVN (while have a much higher price tag).
I still have 30 days to continue to try the server and while I am going to try to figure out a way to work without this server and wait till they integrate SVN I am probably going to have to buy it. While it is an optional package to purchase, it is almost impossible to work with Unity with multiple developers without it.
My next post is probably going to touch on the GUI system that Unity provides for you to build your interfaces (Maybe even a video 
).
June 12th, 2009 on 8:30 pm
I don’t get any of this. Buut.. cool post.
June 12th, 2009 on 8:44 pm
So the game development world has always been kind of a mystery to me. Does the asset server only manage binary files? Is there any way to establish a system where modellers and UI designers use the asset server for development and push out periodic “nightly builds” to the developers? It seems like that might allow at least the devs to stick to a mainstream/opensource versioning system, but maybe there’s something somewhere in the setup that would keep this from working.
June 15th, 2009 on 3:46 am
Joe B: Well Unity’s assets server does help with some of the binary files that Unity uses that something like SVN would not be able to handle easily however the way that Unity is built, it would be impossible to effectively use SVN for scripting and other text-based files. The reason is that Unity keeps track of all assets (include images, models, scripts, audio clips, etc…) in its metadata files. So if you added a script, Unity in the background would update its metadata and that right now requires the Unity assets server to properly work with.
Now while I assume it is possible to work with SVN and Unity’s files (since they are working on integrating SVN/Perforce to work with Unity) it probably requires a better understanding of Unity’s files (like the metadata, prefabs, etc…).