Unity BuildPipeline

Thelangfordian

I did a talk on using Unity BuildPipeline and some other build stuff at the Joburg MGSA meetup.
As promised I am uploading the presentation here. I will add notes the slides, and update as things progress.

My goal with the talk was to show other game devs how they can use Unity's build tools to have some more control over building. I realised that the particular use case could be for jams, and new devs getting into Unity, and moved on to realising that perhaps a more out-of-the-box tool could be more useful for people who don't want to worry about the builds and how they work.

There is of course Unity Cloud, but I figured that having another tool (and something local) could always be useful.

I have created a Github, and once it is more mature will create a Unity Store package.
The goal is that other devs can contribute and improve the tools with their own experience and workflows.

I hope this is useful and look forward to any feedback that I can incorporate into the tool.

I will keep this thread up to date as the project moves forward.

Slide Link - PDF
Github Link

critic

I wanted to suggest something during the meetup, but Tuism kind of covered it. Concurrency is a huge thing for small teams, for instance having the artist being able to build and tweak without the coder needing to stop. You suggested using some sort of repository for this, like Github, but would it be possible to add some sort of primitive version control to this tool. Just a 'stage' button of some sort, that different members of the team would use to put aside a stable build so that it can be compiled by different members of the team without needing to constantly worry about concurrency?

Thelangfordian

@critic Tuism did bring up a very valid point when he asked about the version control. There are a few ways to solve this for non-devs, Unity has an interesting take on it with the Unity Cloud.

It is something that will need to be thought through and chatted about. if I can come up with something out-of-the-box for small teams to essentially get version control without needing to know the intricacies of version control, that would be great.

I also don't want to actually write my own uber build engine or version control system. So yeah, interesting problem to look at.

If you have suggestions or observations, drop them here :)

critic

Just copying the project and all its files to some other folder and overwriting when user selects "stage" should be good enough for this, the project would always build from the stage directory and staging would be done manually, full overwrite copy every time. Pop-up with a warning when stage is selected, would be good.