New episode for advanced tips for Unity developers. As always, these tips and assets are all freely accessible (something that’s truly great about the Unity ecosystem!)
This week, the asset is called ParrelSync: it is free and open source, and the Unity package can be found here
ParrelSync allows you to create multiple copies - called clones - of your Unity project, so that you are able to run multiple editor simultaneously. The trick is that, once created, you never need to maintain these clones - ParrelSync will do that for you. So if you make a code change in the source project, ParrelSync will automatically replicate the change across the other cloned projects!
This means that, as you test your multiplayer game, you no longer have to build a standalone version of your game, as you probably currently do - and as is done in the multiplayer course - but instead, just press play in Unity on the multiple editors.
This will save you a TON of development time! No more having to build and run the whole game just to check a single code change! Especially in larger projects, where the build process could even take tens of minutes - or hours in very large games - just imagine the time you would otherwise waste to check that one value change…
Also, because your game tests run within the Unity editor, you benefit from all the features you are accustomed to (Debug.Log, Inspector, Profiler, etc), something you don’t have access to when running the otherwise standalone built version of your game.
Personally I couldn’t understand its omission - or that of similar assets - from the otherwise excellent multiplayer course, and I would even go as far as to say that I would refuse to join any multiplayer Unity projects that do not have something like ParrelSync installed.