project.bytes and project.xml

Hi everyone.
Just wondering if project.bytes is obsolete? Is it still required?
It seems the .bytes file is automatically generated but not from the xml?!
If I just use my xml the generated bytes is more or less empty and if I use my bytes file then unity crashes
I use 2018.1 beta 10 as I want to switch over to 2018.1 and build with net 4.x and IL2CPP. Though, I currently struggle to get bolt running.

Basically I really don't like the bytes file. I'm working with bolt now since it came out in 2014?! And I never liked it. The xml is really nice though (version control and file merging!) but I'm currently unable to get my bolt assets only from the xml.
Am I doing something wrong on my end?

Btw: All fine on my working repo where I'm still on 5.6.x

Also the problem occurs if I import the bolt freshly from the assets store. (Interestingly there is no xml file there) but it crashes as soon as I select the bytes file.

Comments

  • Can you file an issue here with the steps you took to get the problem to happen after importing Bolt into a new project? https://github.com/BoltEngine/Bolt-Tracker/issues
  • Hi,

    Sure!

    Regarding the files and my issue above. Do you know if and how I can get my bolt assets loaded from the project.xml?
  • By importing Bolt into a new project, creating a Bolt asset, changing Bolt settings to serialize as text, and compiling, I get project.xml and no .bytes file.
  • Ok thx! That helped me! I figured out that during the update process the save-as-text checkbox changed to unchecked.
    - I then deleted the project.bytes in windows (as I can't select it in Unity) and restarted the editor.
    - Unfortunately just about half of the project.xml was loaded.
    - A file compare showed that different assets where using the same GUID before and after the update (e.g. asset B was using the GUID of asset A)
    - So I deleted bolt.user.dll bolt.user.dll.mdb, again restored the project.xml the the version prior the update and restarted the editor again.
    - Now it did load all assets from the xml.
    - Then I did a rebuild-prefabs-database
    - And compiled the assets via the bolt ui.

    Now it works.. but that was a ride.. Not sure if this is a bug or just undocumented behaviour?! At least now I'm aware of this.