Selecting/deselecting many directories with Gluon

[Wolfram]

Hiho.

We're trying to use a workflow where users should start off with a workspace containing only parts of the repository, but can update to a full copy if they wish.

I'm guessing Gluon is exactly the tool for such a scenario?

However, we have some usability concerns for our scenario, which is as follows:
In our scenario we have a Unity project with many (>=100) 3D models, which usually consist of the model itself (an .fbx file), and several/many texture files for each one. The problem with the textures is, it can take VERY long for Unity to import them after an Update. So the idea is to have a workspace that only shows/contains the .fbx files, to be able to get a quick overview, but if the user wants to he can download the associated textures from the repository into his workspace.

However, in Gluon it seems I can "only" load/unload specific directories, not wildcards and/or filetypes or similar.
As in our scenario we usually store each model in a separate directory, which has its own subdirectory "tex", containing the associated textures, the user would have to first DESELECT >=100 directories named "tex", located in each model directory. And once he decides he now needs the whole repository, he would again go through the whole hierarchy and SELECT >=100 directories named "tex" (although it seems this step could be simplified by selecting the parent, which hopefully will recursively select all files/directories which are currently unloaded?).

This is of course not feasible - and would probably take even longer than just letting Plastic download all textures in the first place, and letting Unity import them...

Are we missing something, is there another way/workaround/trick? For example, to use wildcards or relative paths or something like that?

EDIT:

Hm, we don't really use the Unity-Plastic plugin (although we always connect our projects via the plugin), as the client is so much more powerful than the plugin.

But maybe when using Gluon one can use the filter/search field in Unity's "Project" tab to quickly select all "tex" directories for example, and maybe then can Gluon-load/unload these all at once?

 

EDIT2: I just realized, this thread probably belongs in the "Gluon" section...

Thanks a lot!
Cheers,
Wolfram

[Mikael Kalms]

Hi Wolfram,

just to give you some ideas on how you could work:

 

We are also working on a Unity3d project. 12 devs (6x art, 3x code, 3x design)

We keep source-format assets on Google drive, and only game-ready content (fbx tga and so on) + game source code in Plastic. The latest working copy is ~5GB in size for us.

Everyone on our team uses the full Plastic GUI client (not Gluon). We chose the full client because it allows working with branches. Most people started out working directly on main, then I trained them to work on personal branches, then I trained them to work on task-based branches. Today 70% use task based branches, and 30% use personal branches. The Branch Explorer is a good enough graphical view for all disciplines to understand this way of working.

We do not use exclusive checkout. We do not use the Unity/Plastic integration. We force meta files visible and force text format for all assets. We pay lots of attention to making our data files small and mergeable (including extensive use of prefabs just to move stuff out of scene files). We avoid situations where we need to merge scene files through communication & coordination.

This works very well for us so far. In the future, if Plastic's roadmap allows for quicker check-ins of large datafiles & "nodata replica" workflows improve, we may consider moving our Google Drive content to Plastic (either into the main game repo, or into a parallel repo).

 

 

 

[Wolfram]

Hi Mikael!

Thanks for your great response!

It contains many vital concepts how a team can work efficiently on Unity projects using Plastic, and in fact we already do almost everything exactly as you describe, from using the full client (even for our artists) to branches and task-branches (depending on the project, and the phase of the project), and to asset sizes.

The only difference seems to be that we do have the Unity/Plastic integration enabled (although we don't use it, we only use the client), to have the benefit of Unity automatically adding stuff to the repository, marking files as checked out, and so on. And for our source assets we use an in-house file server, which avoids having to constantly up- and download GBs of data, and which also helps with customers with privacy concerns/NDAs.

 

But I guess I didn't make myself very clear in my original post: For regular Unity projects, this approach is great. However, we're thinking about creating some kind of model library, which is a Unity project that just contains tons of models (and textures), and nothing else, except maybe a small tool to better browse/review these models.

So we have hundreds of models, each with textures and materials, and if somebody is looking for a specific model, he can download the repo and browse the data. Here, for a quick interactive preview, it's fully sufficient to just have the .fbx's available, so we're looking for a good, usable, maintainable method to NOT unnecessarily download x GB of textures from the repo, which then have to be imported by Unity, which takes "ages" even with a configured Cache server.

Instead, the artist should be able to download the textures for specific models on demand.

Gluon sounds like the right tool for this situation, but as the textures must be located in a subdirectory next to each model (and IMHO no other simple approach makes sense), we have as many texture directories as models, and AFAIK Gluon cannot multi-select these automatically, for example to prevent the initial download from the repo.

We also looked into using cloaked.conf instead (see 

 ), but this approach has many other problems and shortcomings, so it's not really usable for this, either.

[psantosl]

Hi Wolfram and Mikael,

Wolfram, I was talking to the team to try to find out the best solution.

I think we are close to have exactly what you want: basically you want to be able to select what to load in Gluon based on a given pattern.

So, it would be great if you go to Configure, select something (like *.jpg), and then have a button or something saying "select to load", so when you click it, you go to "configure back" and you can apply the configuration.

 

Sounds good enough?

 

pablo

 

[Wolfram]

On 4/20/2018 at 8:47 PM, psantosl said:

So, it would be great if you go to Configure, select something (like *.jpg), and then have a button or something saying "select to load", so when you click it, you go to "configure back" and you can apply the configuration.

 

Sounds good enough?

Yes, that's exactly it! A wildcard or search patten for files/directories.That's great to hear, thanks a lot! :o)

[calbzam]

Hi,

We have released the following task:

[New] 7.0.16.2407
Gluon (Windows, Linux, OS X): New feature to load/unload files using patters (e.g *.png).

Now it is possible to load/unload files using patterns (e.g *.jpg) using the search dialog in the Configuration view!

Just click the "search files" button (or CTRL-F) when your Workspace Explorer is in Configuration Mode. Then type patterns (*.jpg, *.psd, ...) in the search text box and then toggle (load/unload) all the search results.

Pro tip: Use Ctrl+A/Cmd+A to select all the nodes in the tree, and then use the space bar to toggle the load/unload status.

NOTE: we detected on Gluon for Windows that changing the load state of tons of files (more than 5000) severely harms the operation performance. The performance looking for Unity3D .meta files isn't great, either. We'll fix these issues ASAP.

Best regards,

Carlos