Standard Assets and the need to address how a newbie should get these into the project

[mysticjim]

Hello

I know there is at least one topic on this from August;

Can't find the utility scripts..what should i have to do?

I updated Unity and reinstalled it but nothing changed, i’m stucked[unity%20problema]

But I’m just reaching this lecture now and also hit a bit of confusion with regards to the standard asset pack, how to get it and how to access it once imported.

I’ve noted a few things;

1. The lecture advises to download Unity again. This is no good for anyone on Unity 2018, as we’ve seen in the previous post. They’re no longer included in the initial options, so the lecture gives a bit of a bum steer to newbies

2. I think you can include the standard assets when creating a brand new project, but obviously I’m well into the project by now, so that’s not really a desirable option. I will test this out with a blank project to see how and where they end up in terms of the Unity environment, I’ll explain exactly what I mean by that in point 3!

3. When you import the Unity Standards assets part way through a project they do not populate in the convenient list - as they apparently used to and as Ben demonstrates, they appear to get dumped wholesale into the assets folder of the current project. I tried to be clever when following a tutorial this morning and only imported the elements I thought I needed, and found that as soon as I tried to use this particular asset (for reference it was the car) - I found that I was missing a couple of vital scripts, and the only way I could fathom it was to delete the standard assets and import the whole lot. Having the whole lot of the standard assets in my project was pretty confusing, and I found I couldn’t really put them anywhere else and just reference them when I needed them, and was obviously slightly worried about accidentally knackering up some functionality to them by trying to delete the bits I didn’t need. I find myself wishing they could just be seamlessly and unobtrusively integrated into the environment as per the lecture, or at least have a bit of a crash course in how best to manage them in a project optimally.

I’m sure over time, working with masses of assets gets easier - or rather you just learn what you should/shouldn’t do, but it seems a bit like a minefield at the moment.

[Rob]

Hi,

It can be frustrating when significant changes are made to software and you have to have a dig around to find out where things are again, I feel your pain.

Regarding point 1 below - this is likely to always be the case, students will always be downloading version of Unity which exceeds the version that the course was written in - you can, of course, use the Unity Download Archive and download the specific version that the lectures are produced in, by doing so you should hopefully get a closer experience to that demonstrated in the lectures. This doesn’t mean you have to, but if you choose to go ferral then you have to expect to do that bit of digging. Often other students will have experienced the same issues and have either asked questions on Udemy in the Q&A, or posted here, or maybe asked in Discord.

Certainly in order versions of Unity you used to select the components you wanted to included in a new project and standard assets were listed, I do not believe this is the case with the new versions of Unity as Unity themselves have moved away from the Standard Assets being something which is shipped with their product, over making the Standard Assets available as a download/import via the Asset Store - thus bringing the process in line with other assets you may import from the store.

A lot of the Standard Assets are interlinked, e.g. some scripts rely on others, so grabbing only certain parts can be more challenging until you become more familiar with what you need and what relates to what. I think the size of the Standard Assets can be a bit daunting, they do contain a lot of things and when you only need one or two scripts it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to have the whole package in your project.

What you could consider is to create a simple project which only has the standard assets in it. You wouldn’t necessarily need to download/import these each time then, you would already have them on disc in another project. You would need to manage any changes that are made to these periodically but that probably isn’t a factor at the moment anyway.

Copy the lot in, delete the parts you definitely know you don’t need, then be more cautious removing things which may be interlinked to the things you do need. If you spot Unity producing error messages after you have deleted a file, undo undo undo!

As time goes by you will become familiar enough with the scripts that you’ll be able to look at one, see that it references another and think “Ah, yes I’ll need this one too” and then you’ll copy them both across.

What I would say is that right now, with the Argon Assault, I wouldn’t worry too much about having all of the Standard Assets in your project, when you come to making something on your own then consider more carefully what you put into it.

[mysticjim]

Sound advice as always, Rob

Pretty much sussed it as you suggested, and thankfully - once you get past the fact there is all this extra stuff in your project and you’ve no idea what it does, once you focus on the relevant bits and stop worrying about the other stuff, it does get a bit easier.

I think my experience is tempered by using other applications where content management was a bit of a nightmare, and one false move on how you import assets and your whole asset management was screwed. I reckon Daz3D is probably historically the one that caused me the most problems - for such a powerful and professional tool, it’s always been shocking. Thankfully, although it’s not particularly elegant in the way it does it, Unity’s method at least works!

Jim

[Rob]

You’re very welcome.

I guess there are pros and cons to the Standard Asset pack, normally, with any other assets you’d get just the specific thing you were searching for. You’d probably get a readme file you don’t want which you delete, and a sample scene showcasing all the prefabs and so on, which you’d delete, but it would be really easy to see what’s left.

With Unity’s Standard Assets because they cover so many different things and are all in the one pack it is quite big. Not everything is inter-dependent, but there are a few. The alternative I guess would be that Unity broke this down into many asset packs, but then they’d have to stipulate with each one which other one may be necessary in order to support this one. You’d end up downloading multiple files. Each of these would have versioning, one may break another. Gah! Sounds quite painful.

I’m glad you’ve found a way to move forward using them which works for you, long term these will probably become not much more than reference material anyway.

[Anthony_Juarez]

In Unity 4 and Unity 5, the Standard Assets often needed the “Utility” folder, so I always grabbed that with whatever I needed. Assets also tend to sometimes need “Camera”.

As long as you have Utility (and sometimes Camera), you are usually fine.