We were waiting for Unity 3.5 to make a decision about licenses and using the Asset Server. Until now we were using Subversion and versioned the library/metadata folder, which worked reasonably well with some glitches but there are only two of us so we got by with a lot of communication on each update.
However we would now like to switch to a better way of doing things which I had hoped would be either the use of meta files or an asset server. I assumed that at least one of the two would help with the problem of conflicts in binary files or at lease would provide an improvement.
Unless I’m mistaken, the only change with the move to meta files is that moving/renaming a file will now preserve the guid, and import settings of assets are now saved in text form. However, prefabs and scene files with all the information in them are still binary and un-mergable using Svn.
So I thought “fair enough, that’s what the asset server is for” and looked into that. However (again - assuming I’m not mistaken - I would love to be!), it appears that the asset server does not support merging of prefabs or scene files. In other words as far as I can tell all the asset server is, is a built-in GUI inside the editor for a very simple version control system. Other than GUI it does not provide any advantages over Subversion with meta files.
So I guess my questions are:
- Is this correct or did I miss something? Or is it perhaps that the online documentation is not up to date yet with the changes to the asset server / collaboration features in 3.5? What are the differences between using the asset server vs. Subversion + meta files?
- Are there any other ways to merge changes in scenes and prefabs? Actually I can even live with scenes not being mergable as long as prefabs are. Is there something on the Unity roadmap? A 3rd party tool that will work with 3.5?
We know about not working on the same file at the same time, we’ve done that until now - my question is if there is a way to improve on that yet or not?