uTomate - The automation solution for Unity3D!

@fizzd - out of the box we have no action for code generation right now. You could write a custom action (http://www.ancientlightstudios.com/utomate/tutorials/creating_your_own_utomate_actions.html) which generates the code files according to your needs. uTomate's API has a lot of ground covered when it comes to finding files (e.g. all scenes in your project), so the amount of custom code would probably not too much.

You could grab the demo version (http://www.ancientlightstudios.com/utomate/demo/) and give it a spin. In the mean time we'll have a look at some options for code generation, which seems to be a recurring theme these days.

 

Hi one quick question abiut utomate powers. I want to speed up allocation of the textures in the material slots. I have many objects using the same custom made shaders(shader forge). Using some sort of naming convention of the object and the texture to match them, would it be possible to speed up this process? Something like obj_001, _002, _003 etc. will have textures texture_diffuse_001, _002, _003, texture_normal_001, texture_height_001, _002, _003. And one more thing: I`m not a coder, so no scripting skills here.
Thanks in advance for your answer.

 

@kork - thanks for the quick reply! I've gone through the tutorial and API (they are well explained, thank you), and I think I can do the scripting in C# to take a string (i.e. the entire cs file) and add some code to it using Regex.

But the part I'm still not 100% clear is how to take the file and get the string from it, before modifying it. I've looked at UTFileUtils but those methods are about file paths. At the end of the tutorial it teaches you how to get a list of paths and says "Now you can do something with the list of files.".. but how do I go from that to getting the file contents?

Any chance you might have an example script that does something to files, and saves it? Thanks!

 

@Mark_T, I'm not a 100% sure what your use case is. You have a bunch of materials in your project and you also have a bunch of textures and you want to assign these textures to the materials according to a naming convention, like this:



Is that correct? Or did you mean to do something else?

 

Hi @kork,

Glad to see utomate is still ongoing. great bit of software.

just a quick copy of my questions I asked but I think you missed them.

Hi @kork

Just getting back into needing uTomate. Still think it's great. I have been testing out the 'Build Unity Player' action. 3 Quick questions though.

1. There is a header stating unity pro is needed for this feature but it does appear to work for me in unity 5.3.1p1. Is this mainly aimed at unity 4 users?

2. Can see redundant windows 8 target platform option but cannot see 8.1 - does it exist anywhere or is it part of another option in the drop down?

3. Any plans to add windows 10 universal to the action?

Thanks again.

doc

 

@fizzd I hacked together an example action, you can find a .unitypackage attached to this post. The example action reads all scenes from a project and then generates code in the /Generated folder of your project. For each scene a new class will be generated from a template. Finally a "Levels" class will be generated which contains the enum and the static function to access instances of the levels classes for an enum value. Hope this helps getting you started.

 

@docsavage sorry I seem to have overlooked your questions. Let's quickly go through them:

1. If you're using Unity 4 you will still need a pro license to use the "Build Player" action. With Unity 5 this restriction has been lifted. Our documentation actually reflects this (see http://www.ancientlightstudios.com/utomate/documentation/actiondocs/4.6/build_unity_player.html vs http://www.ancientlightstudios.com/utomate/documentation/actiondocs/5.4/build_unity_player.html). We have documented each action for each Unity version (also because some actions only exist for specific Unity versions).
2. +3. It's a bit confusing as we have to go with the underlying Unity API so our action actually shows something more than you'll see in the Unity UI. I think you can access both Windows Phone 8.1 SDK and the Universal 10 SDK by selecting "WSA Player" as target platform and then the respective SDK from the SDK selection:
   

We should probably rename those enum values in our inspectors so this is more clear.

 

Thanks for the reply Kork and still supporting this asset

doc

 

Yes, I have a bunch of objects and I have to assign different custom made shaders (Shader Forge) and place/link the appropriate normal, diffuse, specular, occlusion maps in the appropriate normal, diffuse, specular, occlusion slots of the shader/material.
A huge time saver feature. If it`s possible to utomate/automate such a workflow. At least for non coders like me.

 

@kork oh goodness I cannot thank you enough, you are a kind soul! I just went ahead and bought uTomate, imported your script, and it was easy from then to tweak things to match my use case. Thank you for taking the time to write that up, really appreciate it, it would have taken me at least a few days i think had i tried to do it myself. Left you a review, thank you so much again.

If anyone stumbles across this and needs a really simple script to copy a file or to do code generation, this is the tweaked simpler version of kork's script that i used, attached. It takes a dummy file, lets the user write the name of a new class to copy it to, duplicates the dummy, and overwrites the class name and initialisation to match the new duplicate's file name.

Then it adds a reference to that new class in a mother class called "LevelSelector" by replacing "//ADD-ENUM" with the level name, followed by "//ADD-ENUM", so it can forever be repeated haha. If you've tried to do duplication manually you'll know how annoying it is - trying to refactor the duplicate will affect the original if you use Monodevelop, you can't duplicate the file directly from Unity, etc.

 

Thanks for sharing this.

 

@docsavage no problem! it should be noted that after a while i realised that none of this code REALLY needs uTomate - in this case uTomate is just a wrapper to make it easier to change a variable via inspector, run the script, but you could easily have just done a workaround by making a custom editor. (unless @kork can correct me if I'm wrong)

still very happy to have paid for it of course, given the help plus that i'm pretty sure the presets are going to save me lots of time in the future for building up different versions of the game!

 

@Mark_T That would require some custom action (== coding). I gave it a quick shot I and created an action that can auto-assign textures to shader properties of any material. You give it a material and a folder with textures. Then it walks over the texture properties of the shader used by the material and looks for textures named MaterialName_TexturePropertyName.png in the textures folder (you can change the name building rule to some extent). If it finds a match, the texture will be assigned to the material. If not the action either fails or silently continues with the next texture (depending on how you set it up).

In an automation plan you can now combine this action with the built-in "Find Assets" action. The "Find Assets" action will find all materials in your project (or a set of folders). Then using the "For Each" node, you can run the new "Auto-assign materials" action for each material that has been found by the "Find Assets" action. I have attached an example project here.

During my tests I found a bug in the "Find Assets" action, so there is another unitypackage attached which fixes this bug. Please import it and overwrite the FindAssetsAction.cs file with it's contents. Hope that helps.

 

wow, really exciting.
I`ll give it a try and I`ll let you know.
And Sir, you have to know that I`m really grateful for your help and effort. A big Thank You!

 

Got an error at line no 6 (The type or namespace name `Examples` could not be found) in UTAutoAssigntexturesToMaterialsAction.cs. deleted the line, upgraded to 1.7 and everything worked like a charm. I`m not sure I`ve done the right thing but it worked.
Thanks a bunch!
If I have textures common to more than one material, like detail textures, how do I do it? My detail textures don`t have any prefix. just Steel01, Steel02, or WoodA.
Again, many thanks, a real time saver!

 

@Mark_T you can tweak how the textures are looked up in the action. There is a property in the inspector which allows you to set up a format for texture names. So you can remove the part that looks for the material name. However you need some rule of matching textures to shader properties so the shader property should be named Steel01/02 etc. You can only auto-assign stuff if it follows a consistent rule, so if you have no such rule, you're probably back to manual assignment.

 

Is it me or is the $project:assets variable not working in the for each file on windows? It seems to work fine on osx, but on Windows I'm receiving a null ref exception.

 

@silentneedle I just checked and it seems to work here. Can you tell me which Unity/uTomate version you're using and maybe also add a screenshot of how you set up that "For Each File" node?

 

My bad, it seems the problem was related to one of my custom actions.However, there seems to be still a problem between my mac osx and windows machines with for each file.

I'm using Unity 5.3 with the most recent uTomate version (from the store).

Selection mode is "Folders" and I'm including the following path (f(x) enabled):

Code (CSharp):

1. "Prefabs" + $os:pathSeparatorChar + "Client" + $os:pathSeparatorChar + "AssetBundles" + $os:pathSeparatorChar + "*"

Which results in the following exception:

But the exception is only thrown on the windows machine, it works fine on mac osx (el capitan).

 

This is both inconvenient and the source of your problem In fact uTomate will take care of converting slashes to backslashes on Windows so you can (and should) always use forward slashes in actions. So untick the "f(x)" in the "Includes" section and just enter "Prefabs/Client/AssetBundles/*" (without the quotes). This works both on Windows and Mac and is a lot less headache to type in. I'll update the documentation on wildcards about this (actually it's mentioned in one of the tutorials [http://ancientlightstudios.com/utom...mation_plans.html#_don_t_hardcode_path_names] , but this might not be the best spot). I'll also update the action so it prints a warning when it sees backslashes.

 

Thanks, it fixed all my problems.

 

Hi,
First, I've been using uTomate for a long time, it's invaluable! Thanks

Is there any way to run a UTomate plan from a c# script? This is the one thing which is missing from my current workflow, and scrolling through 100s of plans in the Plan window is making me sad.

 

I know this question has been asked on the first page of this thread, but there may have been an update that has added this so I'll ask it again anyway:
Is it possible to automate the XCode/IPA exporting process as a whole?

The website says the following:

You can build Visual Studio or XCode projects directly from Unity. Want to upload your finished build to testing services like TestFairy or HockeyApp? There are actions for this as well!​

Which makes it sound, but does not state directly, that you can, but can you? Reading the documentation I don't get the impression IPA exporting is supported?

I would like to be able to rename the project, edit XCode build settings, create/edit schemes, archive, set the IPA exporting settings and finally perform the exporting itself.
I started working on a custom solution to automate this process, but if uTomate can do this already for me then I could save me some time!

 

uTomate contains a 'Build xcode project' action, which can be used to export an IPA file ( https://ancientlightstudios.com/utomate/documentation/actiondocs/5.4/build_xcode_project.html ). We used it in one of our projects to upload new builds for iOS to Testfairy without leaving Unity.

This action uses the 'xcodebuild' command to build the IPA.

It first executes

Code (CSharp):

1. xcodebuild -scheme $BuildScheme$ clean archive -archivePath build/BuildArchive $AdditionalBuildOptions$

to create the archive and then

Code (CSharp):

1. xcodebuild -exportArchive -exportFormat ipa -archivePath build/BuildArchive.xcarchive -exportPath $OutputFile$ -exportProvisioningProfile $ProvisioningProfile$ $AdditionalExportOptions$

to export the IPA file.

As long as the xcodebuild command supports all your build and export settings, this action should work for you.

Unfortunately our to-do list still contains an item to check if this action is compatible with the new XCode 8 (especially the new automatic singing feature). So i can't guarantee that it will work with this version.

 

Is it possible to completely automate the creation of assetbundles using this? Lets say on a huge project, could I use this to automatically work out what is in use in a scene and generate the asset bundles also automatically for me? Without having to go through each one and click on it then add it to an asset bundle etc, this would be an incredibly slow process without automation.

 

This is possible, but not out-of-the-box. I created a small test with a few scenes and prefabs. My automation plan creates a new asset bundle for every scene and adds all prefabs to the bundle if there is an instance of this prefab in the scene.
I don't know how you want to distribute your assets across the assetbundles, but the steps are probably quite similar.

uTomate already contains actions to iterate over files (e.g. scenes) load a scene, find objects in a scene and assign asset bundles to assets. The only thing that is missing is to get the prefab of a game object (there is only an action to instantiate prefabs). This is probably a good feature for one of the next releases. But you can write your own actions, so it's not really a problem.

Code (CSharp):

1. //
2. using AncientLightStudios.uTomate.API;
3. using System;
4. using System.Collections;
5. using UnityEditor;
6. using UnityEngine;
7.  
8. [UTDoc(title = "FindPrefab")]
9. [UTActionInfo(actionCategory = "Custom")]
10. public class FindPrefabAction : UTAction
11. {
12. [UTInspectorHint(required = true, order = 0)]
13. public UTGameObject gameObject;
14.  
15. [UTInspectorHint(required = true, order = 1)]
16. public UTString outputProperty;
17.  
18. public override IEnumerator Execute(UTContext context)
19. {
20.  
21. var theGameObject = gameObject.EvaluateIn(context);
22. var theOutputProperty = outputProperty.EvaluateIn(context);
23.  
24. var result = PrefabUtility.GetPrefabParent(theGameObject);
25. if (result != null) {
26. context[theOutputProperty] = AssetDatabase.GetAssetPath(result);
27. } else {
28. context[theOutputProperty] = null;
29. }
30. yield return "";
31. }
32.  
33. [MenuItem("Assets/Create/uTomate/Custom/FindPrefab", false, 360)]
34. public static void AddAction()
35. {
36. Create<FindPrefabAction>();
37. }
38. }
39.  

This action checks if a game object is an instance of an prefab and writes the path to the prefab into a property. This is just a quick draft, so the code is not perfect.

If you want, i can upload a demo project (or screenshots) with the automation plan to show more details.

 

Does this work with Unity 5.5?
I'm getting an error in UTSetPlayerSettingsAndroidAction.cs trying to run this line

wrapper.SetEnum("m_MobileRenderingPath", renderingPath.EvaluateIn(context));

 

uTomate 1.8.1 is not fully compatible with Unity 5.5. We are currently waiting for the new version (1.9.0) to show up in the asset store. If you need the new version now, just send us a support ticket with your invoice number (see https://ancientlightstudios.com/utomate/support/support.html ).

Sorry for the inconvenience.

 

Running Unity 5.5.0f3 with uTomate 1.9, using an older Mac as a buildserver with jenkins.

So the Pipeline is. Buildslave is pulling the project from git, opens the projects and triggers the uTomate Buildplan. the plan only contains the a playerbuild.
The weird thing is that from time to time i get successful builds without changing something, but most of the time the build fails at this point:

Spoiler: Error Stack

*** Cancelled 'Build.Player.MacStandaloneSupport' in 22 seconds (21580 ms)

Building the player failed. 'Reflection Probes' job failed with error code: 2 ('Failed to bake the skybox probe.').
UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:Internal_Log(LogType, String, Object)
UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:LogFormat(LogType, Object, String, Object[])
UnityEngine.Logger:Log(LogType, Object, Object)
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object, Object)
AncientLightStudios.uTomate.UTFailBuildException:LogToConsole() (at Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTFailBuildException.cs:27)
AncientLightStudios.uTomate.UTomateRunner:ContinueRunning() (at Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTomateRunner.cs:191)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallUpdateFunctions() (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorApplicationBindings.gen.cs:197)

(Filename: Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTFailBuildException.cs Line: 27)

Fail: Execution of plan BuildMac_plan failed.
UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:Internal_Log(LogType, String, Object)
UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:LogFormat(LogType, Object, String, Object[])
UnityEngine.Logger:Log(LogType, Object)
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
AncientLightStudios.uTomate.UTomateRunner:ContinueRunning() (at Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTomateRunner.cs:193)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallUpdateFunctions() (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorApplicationBindings.gen.cs:197)

(Filename: Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTomateRunner.cs Line: 193)

Automation finished in 22 seconds.
UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:Internal_Log(LogType, String, Object)
UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:LogFormat(LogType, Object, String, Object[])
UnityEngine.Logger:Log(LogType, Object)
UnityEngine.Debug:Log(Object)
AncientLightStudios.uTomate.UTomateRunner:CleanUp() (at Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTomateRunner.cs:225)
AncientLightStudios.uTomate.UTomateRunner:ContinueRunning() (at Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTomateRunner.cs:194)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallUpdateFunctions() (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorApplicationBindings.gen.cs:197)

(Filename: Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTomateRunner.cs Line: 225)

Run failed with error.
UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:Internal_Log(LogType, String, Object)
UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:LogFormat(LogType, Object, String, Object[])
UnityEngine.Logger:Log(LogType, Object)
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
AncientLightStudios.uTomate.UTomateRunner:CleanUp() (at Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTomateRunner.cs:232)
AncientLightStudios.uTomate.UTomateRunner:ContinueRunning() (at Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTomateRunner.cs:194)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication:Internal_CallUpdateFunctions() (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorApplicationBindings.gen.cs:197)

(Filename: Assets/AssetsStore/uTomate/Editor/UTomateRunner.cs Line: 232)

Refresh: detecting if any assets need to be imported or removed ... Refresh: elapses 0.020485 seconds (Nothing changed)
Updating ProjectSettings/ProjectSettings.asset - GUID: 00000000000000004000000000000000...
done. [Time: 6.176437 ms]
Refreshing native plugins compatible for Editor in 8.94 ms, found 2 plugins.
Preloading 1 native plugins for Editor in 0.51 ms.

----- Total AssetImport time: 0.172609s, AssetImport time: 0.063096s, Asset hashing: 0.000000s [0 B, 0.000000 mb/s]

Refresh: detecting if any assets need to be imported or removed ... Refresh: elapses 0.021095 seconds (Nothing changed)
Cleanup mono
debugger-agent: Unable to listen on 6
[usbmuxd] Stop listen thread
[usbmuxd] Error:
[usbmuxd] Listen thread exiting
Checking for leaked weakptr:
Found no leaked weakptrs.
##unity-automation:{"messageType":"MemoryLeaks","allocatedMemory":32571,"memoryLabels":[{"Default":96},{"Permanent":15808},{"Thread":304},{"Manager":312},{"Physics":8},{"String":102},{"DynamicArray":20},{"Curl":376},{"ScriptManager":2104},{"VR":6332},{"EditorUtility":536},{"AssetImporter":472},{"RestService":56},{"License":573},{"UnityConnect":5344},{"Collab":128}]}
FATAL: Unity3d command line execution failed with status 1
Build step 'Invoke Unity3d Editor' marked build as failure
Archiving artifacts
Finished: FAILURE

Whenever the build fails i still get a functional player on the buildserver, but jenkins treats it as a fail.

I´m not sure if this is related to uTomate after all, but at least i´m sure that in here are a few people with experience using CI, uTomate and Jenkins. Maybe somebody can help

 

wow sorry for the super late reply. Notification about your post must be somewhere in the junk folder or i never received one.

You said the plan only contains the playerbuild. Does this mean it only consists of one action, or does it use other actions too?

The error messages says, the process failed, because there was a problem while backing maps. I searched for this particular error message and found only one unanswered post about it. But i found others with similar issues (a few for Unity 5.5.0) and one way to solve them was to clear the GI Cache (by hitting the 'Clean Cache' button in the Unity preferences dialog as hard as possible ).

Does this also happen, when you launch Unity on the build server and start the plan by hand? If yes, can you try to do the same on your local machine with the same Unity version? Maybe it's a bug in Unity and can be solved by upgrading to another version.

Sorry that i can't give you a better answer right now. Please let us know if you have more information.

 

Hi,

Can I ask why this ; github.com/derkork/uTomate-UnityCloudBuildSample
has not been updated nor included in uTomate (paid version) ? Is there still hiccups with Unity Cloud ?

Thanks !

 

@RDeluxe, Unity cloud build isn't really a fully-featured CI system. Basically the only thing it can do is build players. I created this sample to test the feasibility of using uTomate within Unity cloud build, but it is experimental at best - mainly because Unity cloud build doesn't provide any means of having a customized workflow. All you can do is run some code before and after Cloud build is exporting the project to a player. When I created the repo i was hoping that Unity Cloud Build would offer some more flexibility in down the road (e.g. run arbitrary scripts as part of a build), but this never happened. Since using uTomate in that kind of environment does provide little added value, I didn't update the project or added this "integration" to the full uTomate distribution. If you like to use uTomate with a CI system, you may want to have a look at an article I wrote: https://effectiveunity.com/articles/how-to-create-your-own-unity-cloud-build.html (this is a 3 part series). When using such a setup you can leverage the full set of capabilities of uTomate (including things like uploading your builds to TestFairy or HockeyApp). Of course you will have to use your own hardware for this.

 

Ha, damn, that means that the limitations you pointed out - especially the one about opening scenes - are still valid today ?

That's nowhere in the Unity Cloud documentation and I'm getting crazy trying to make this work

 

I have created a uTomate subReddit, as this thread really has become huge and totally unmaintainable. If you have a question or suggestion about uTomate and/or Unity automation, come over to the Reddit and let us know.

 

Hi, awesome asset but...

There is no way that I can set a property for newly added component via Add Component To GameObject action therefore when I add multiple components of the same type (for example capsule colliders) I cannot set component properties for these. I can only set properties for the first component of any given type. How to solve this issue?

EDIT: I solved it by creating a custom action that takes also en index.

 

Hi,

i'm glad you already found a solution for this. Adding an index was one of our possible solutions too.

 

@kork
Does it support ipa generation with new Xcode etc?

 

@JohnGate do you mean xcode 9? It's still a beta version, so we haven't tried it yet. uTomate uses the xcodebuild tool to build projects. There were quite some changes in this tool between xcode 7 and xcode 8 which caused some trouble. But i can't find anything similar in the change log for xcode 9. So i think it should still work.

 

Hey @zloty,

uTomate shows to me as deprecated on the asset store. This must be an error, right?

Best regards,
Patrick

 

Yes its gone

 

@zloty
Any plans to open source it? I could learn one or few things from XCode IPA generation.

 

Yes it is gone . I wrote up a small post where I outlined the reasons for this.

@JohnGate There are currently no plans to open-source it.

 

Sorry to hear this. Great tool with even better support. Understand why you have decided this way though. A lot of asset store devs are now charging upgrade fees to newer versions. In fact it seems to becoming standard. Some of them arguably too soon in the product life cycle. This is not the case with uTomate though and a new version with an upgrade cost would be the first in years of the product development.

Either way thanks for supporting it so well all this time.

doc

 

Sorry to see it deprecated, but I definitely understand the challenges of the Asset Store. Thanks for providing a great product all these years. I use it literally every day to manage builds and dependencies across over 40 projects.

 

Hi,

This is such a bummer!!! the Whole PlayMaker Ecosystem workflow relies on utomate, I am really sorry this did not work out for you, you deserved a lot more for uTomate.

Indeed, I think Unity fails big time on not creating a subscription based model for sustainable income for publishers like you. you are one among too many publishers that is having a hard time because of this. I mentioned that to them at Unite many years ago, and did not even seemed to acknowledge the miss...

I would have NO problem with paying for uTomate 2 just because it's for 2017, even if it had even only minor changes, just to create sustainable income for you.

Good luck with Everything I have had a glimpse at your amazing skills not only for Unity c# but also for your website stuff, I whish I knew just 10% of what you know...

Bye,

Jean

 

Wow, that's bad, our whole building process is using uTomate. I agree with Jean, why you don't charge for version upgrades like other developers do?

 

I agree, we all knows its not easy to make money with certain assets, but charging upgrades every so often is fair and most will be fine with it..So that way you make money and people get updates. but I guess it don't matter now since its gone. Thanks for the years of hard work.. sad to see it go. I used it with most projects as well.

 

Same here, we would pay for an upgrade.

In the meantime we will fix as well as we can.

 

I'm trying to use above command but with no help, it doesnt even work if i simply hit Terminal and paste following command, can you lpease guide me?

Code (CSharp):

1. xcodebuild -project /Volumes/Projects/MyBuild/Unity-iPhone.xcodeproj -scheme iOS archive -archivePath  /Volumes/Projects/MyBuild.xcarchive

Any help is appreciated.


UPDATE:
I used following but still error

Code (CSharp):

1. xcodebuild -project MyBuild/Unity-iPhone.xcodeproj -scheme Unity-iPhone clean archive -archivePath MyBuild MyBuild/Info.plist

 

I'd also pay for an upgrade if uTomate appears on the Asset Store again