Re:Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version
by weaksauce on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @02:32PM
(#9140030)
That's an excellent feature. the scenes in unity are binary and not merge-able. That feature alone left me considering other options when I was looking at game engines.
Re:Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version
by ephemeralgomi on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:36PM
(#9140935)
Jonathan Blow wrote an excellent article on the text-based entity file format he developed for The Witness, which was designed to be (more) mergeable:
http://the-witness.net/news/2011/12/engine-tech-concurrent-w...
Re:Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version
by keyle on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @05:18PM
(#9141179)
That was a great post!
Re:Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version
by Someone1234 on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @03:11PM
(#9140360)
I am legitimately surprised they're using a binary format for scenes. That is very anti-source control in general. The only binary blobs in the entire project should be assets (e.g. textures, sounds, etc). Everyone loves to whine about XMl, but I'd happily take XML for scene layout over a binary blob.
Re:Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version
by hnlauncher on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:19PM
(#9140834)
By default it is binary, but you can change it to a textual one: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/TextualSceneFormat.html
And they've also improved the merging story, see: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/02/17/production-workflow-impr...
Re:Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version
by shinymark on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:20PM
(#9140846)
Scenes and prefabs have been able to be saved in a text format for a while. That said, they were still effectively unable to be merged in all but the simplest of situations for reasons I don't fully understand.
Hopefully this was improved in Unity 5. One of the buried release notes mentions a new merge tool for scenes and prefabs in the engine.
The concept of version control is much more integrated into the UX of the Unreal tools, with things like visual diff/merge support for assets built in.
Additionally, one of Unreal's killer features for scaling collaboration up with larger teams is the idea of editing a map in multiple distinct layers which are composed at runtime. This means you can have someone working on audio in the audio layer, someone working on collisions in the collision layer, someone working on lights in the lighting layer... all in parallel. If you tried that in Unity, all you'd end up with is a binary blob with a merge conflict, and n-1 people having wasted their time.