Importing Small Assets when saving project

Greetings folks.

We have had a major issue on our project for a couple weeks now and have been having a hard time sorting it. This occurred after updating our Unity to 5.4, then updating the needed assets as well for 5.4 such as Alloy, Uber, RTP and a couple others. We also updated our main voxel terrain framework which is a good amount of code. We initially deleted the folder in windows, replaced the folder then started up Unity. Because of all the issues we have been having, we also tried to delete the folder with Unity opened and re-imported the code base via a Unity package. Being that most of our shaders and some scripts had to be updated via Unity 5.4 changes, it seems logical there may be a corrupt asset. Still have the issues and our Log has no errors or anything that tells us whats wrong. Here are the symptoms:

1. After loading through a couple scenes, load into main play scene and play for any amount of time, after hitting stop on the Unity Editor, Unity locks up for a couple minutes and makes the workstation unresponsive to a degree.

2. When hitting Save (ctrl+S) Unity keeps giving me the "Importing Small Assets" dialogue, which goes fairly quickly but I cannot tell what it is importing. Because of this I cannot find the corrupt asset.

3. Unity hangs for a long time when going between scenes in both Play and Editor mode.

One of the issues we have is our game is live and we have around 10-12 gigs of assets in the project. This, combined with the complex setup of our systems makes it very difficult to simply rebuild the project, we really need a way to dig through Unity and find the corrupt asset or have some kind of debug. Anywho, just looking to get some advice or see if anyone else has encountered a similar issue. I have found a number of posts that have the same issue but they never have a working solution. It seems having an asset become corrupt is kind of rare, but has been a consistent problem since probably 3 and up. Maybe we can get a tool or something to help devs sort Unity out when this happens(or maybe there is something I am unaware of, which would be great to find). Thanks in advance for reading and any input you may have.

 

You can try deleting you library folder which will do a reimport of your assets (may take a while). This may fix a corruption if there is one. Another thing to check is if you have a lot of assets in a resources folder, that will cause slow start/play times.

 

Thanks for the suggestions, sadly, these are things I have tried and they didn't help. I have the project in REPO and downloaded on another machine, compiled and had the same issue. :/ Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer the post!

 

I have the same issue.

 

Hello everybody

Any news about this issue since the last November ?

Thx

 

No news here. Have upgraded Unity multiple times, tried removed assets I'm not using. Tried a few Project cleaner/Error checking Assets as well, they don't work and just crash. The problem still persists. It is only on this one project, other projects using some of the same assets do not have this issue. :/

 

This problem has plagued me since around the same time, around Fall of 2016. It's crazy frustrating to have to watch the 'Importing Small Assets' box arbitrarily show up and slow down my workflow every few minutes, and the hangs between scenes are even worse.

I've removed a ton of assets and rebuilt the library; which only succeeded in lowering the time it bar stays on screen, and not the frequency in which it appears.

Is the only option to start in a fresh project, or something?

@Tethys Was your team able to find a solution?

 

We have not found a solution and this is an issue on a project that is a live game on Steam right now lol. I pretty much hate working on the project and avoid it when I can. I've worked it down to its a GUI Asset ID issue on the backend with Unity. For some reason they have this thing where changing assets, renaming them, moving them doesn't change the gui, then you bring in new fresh assets that had the same name as the old renamed items and there seem to be conflicts. It's all we've been able to figure out, but not how to fix it. Our project took 2 years to build and has a TON of custom stuff in it, again, in a live game. Rebuilding is not an option. We have it in repo and on 4 other dev machines, problem seems to persist across all of them. I also cannot get any sort of project cleaner to work - when it tries to run through the assets they always bug out and crash. Some kind of corrupted asset that Unity has just jacked up and cannot seem to get over, nor can it tell me which one it is.

 

Bleh; that really sucks.

I think I know exactly the problem you're talking about though; I think one time I updated my Unity + updated some core assets and the GUIDs got totally screwed. I couldn't import the packages, I would have to rewrite them directly using explorer. It seemed to work fine for a time until this issue started popping up.

Guess I really have no choice but to rebuild entirely, unless Unity has a solution. :S

 

Still have this issue.
At least we need a way to know which plugin is screwing this

 

I agree - its seems kind of wild Unity continues to make all these great new features, but for years this has been an issue. They need a way to clean corrupted (or least identify) assets so we can do something about it. Seems insane to be stuck working on a bugged project for 3 years (and if this is any indication, the project will be born, live and die in 10 years and still have this bug lol).

 

Agreed...

I rebuilt my project and imported several of my most needed assets from the old project; and I was horrified to see the problem popping up again after importing a folder containing around 500 user-created small .asset files for a third-party framework I'm using.

I really want to know why this is happening and how I can fix it, because a rebuild certainly didn't.

There has to be a way for us to tell what 'small assets' are being constantly re-imported.

There are several other developers also having issues, but it hasn't been acknowledged by Unity devs, as far as can tell...

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1247922/importing-small-assets-when-saving-scene-unusual-w.html

 

I can confirm that we updated to Unity 5.5.3 2 days ago, updated the project, still seeing the dialogue when we hit save or make edits occasionally. Just deleted the Library due to getting a new File MemoryStream error some files, maybe that will sort the import issue (doubt it though, have deleted and rebuilt the library before).

 

And same with 5.6; the obnoxious behavior continues.

Even doing something as simple as pressing CTRL+D to duplicate an asset in the project hierarchy can trigger the Importing Small Assets window.

@karl_jones
Sorry to tag you; but is there any kind of debug method to figure out what, exactly, is being re-imported all of the time? This issue is a major time-killer.

 

Any bug tracker that we can send this behavior to the dev team? I'm starting to see it too since my project got bigger. Wasn't there on earlier game that I've develop.

 

We have the same issue on a fresh new project. We have imported various assets from the Asset Store such as UI Styles, now with every click on the Style Editor this pops up. I gather that its updating the config which is stored in the assets folder and this is triggering the dialog and we had seen it in other projects as well but my god has it got anoying and you can forget about using keyboard shortcuts its a modial dialog so it grabs focus.

We have submited a bug to Unity on the subject but reading over this thread I am thinking we will be waiting awhile.

 

Any update on this? Here is a solution someone made.

 

Problem still exists...

 

Bump on this. I keep getting it on minor code changes or any asset change (like deleting a file).
It's really cutting into my time now.

 

Hi everyone, i fund a miracle solution about this bug i espect this will work for you as for me, and that will help unity to correct the problem...

when this happens, - open photoshop - open explorer - drag an image to photoshop - go back to unity and it should focus again to it.

 

In my case, the problem was caused by the Cache Server, it was stopped and the "import small assets" message appeared every time I saved a scene.

 

Any fix ?

 

BUMP!
Seriously? no fix? it started happening to us 2 weeks ago and it's taking a lot of our time.
Anybody tried this?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unity-fix-importing-small-assets-forever-chan-calvin/

 

Experiencing the same issue now. Would love to hear from Unity on this.

 

bump. This started after I began creating my own .asset files, they keep getting reimported on save.

I used AssetDatabase.CreateAsset() to create meshes and AssetDatabase.AddObjectToAsset () to add meshes to that mesh and finally AssetDatabase.SaveAssets().