I’ll share the 2 most common issues that we constantly encounter when using Unity’s collab tool; as well as our solutions that we use to overcome them. Now, don’t get us wrong, collab is a great tool that enables us to work remotely in the same project without too many issues. It really is great for those of us too scared to venture into the land of Git/Svn, but there’s no real value in us talking about that. I’m going to focus on the feedback that we have shared with Unity in the hope that it will help other developers who are encountering the same problems.

F*** collab issue #1: Renaming files

TLDR; Don’t rename files

When we rename a file as part of a push, we normally encounter problems when this update is later pulled by the team. The renamed file gets correctly updated with its new name, but it does not get the new contents.

The most common occurrence of this problem is when we are renaming some of the poorly named classes in our project. In particular, we had a moment where scripts stopped being named XXController, and started being named XXManager. Renaming all the old scripts to match the new naming system I would go into the script and, using Visual Studio’s global renaming tool, rename the class and all references to it. I would then rename the file in the Unity’s Project view.

Signing off at the end of the day with a message of “Peace out guys, I’ve made that sexy as hell push we’ve been talking about all day, I’m outta here!”, usually starts a torrent of messages consisting of ‘don’t leave!’, and reports of a bad push containing the error “The type or namespace name ‘blah’ could not be found...”.