How do I open an existing project in Unity?

I have downloaded an existing project and unzipped it to my hard disk.

I now have a folder containing two folders called "Assets" and "Library".

How do I open this project without causing problems to the project setup or the way Unity manages the project structure?

All you have to do, is go into the Assets folder, and try and find a file with the extension “.unity”.

What this is, is a unity scene file. Scenes are what makes up your game. Double click the scene file, and then that project will open up in Unity.

The assets folder is where you store all of your project files, like models, scripts, scenes and other prefabs.

You will usually find a folder at C:\users%userprofile%\documents\Unity Projects

This is where I would reccomend storing all of your unity projects.

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

-Grady

You should only open project from Unity's "Open project..."-menu item.

If you drag the entire project to Unity, the existing Library folder's content will clash with that of the project you are trying to import. In some cases leading to crashes.

A Unity project consists of two folders (and a temporary folder while the editor is running).

  1. Assets: This is where all your art and code assets are stored. You can import assets to this folder from OSX's Finder or Windows Explorer. However it is highly recommended to use Unity's interface for this task.
  2. Library: Unless you are 110% sure of what you are doing, you should not attempt to add, remove, or modify the content of this folder as it may have severe consequences to your project. As mentioned, importing a Library folder to you project (putting it in the assets folder or similar), may crash Unity.

I came here looking for the answer to this question as well as the open project process is a little misleading (for newbies).

Unity isn’t looking to open a project file (.unity) but instead a root folder that contains the /Assets and /Library directories.

So if your game name is let’s say Angry Birds, you may have a file path that looks something like: AngryBirds_Project/Assets/Scenes. Click on the AngryBirds_Project folder and open that in Unity’s Open Project prompt.

Select Open Project… from the File menu. Once you’ve done that, if the project you wish to open is not listed, click the “Open Other” button. From here you must navigate the the desired project’s base folder, this will contain the Assets and Library directories and (likely) others as well. If you are in a folder that is not an acceptable Unity project, a message saying “Selected folder is not a Unity project” will be down at the bottom of the file browser (atleast in Windows 7 and 8).

search .unity in your hard disk where you unzipped project and open with installed unity version

Just add .unity to the folder that your assets and library lies in, and then you can use unity’s “Open project…” to open the folder as a project.

Unless you 100% know what you are doing, make sure you have the same version of unity as was used to create the project in the first place.