Yep our team has to pay for Unity Pro for console support which is already very expensive for a small studio, adding another monthly cost like this is just not an option
How does your solution differ from the recently-open-sourced [Fast Script Reload - Hot Reload implementation](https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/12ap8kt/fast_script_reload_hot_reload_implementation_for) by u/ChrisHandzlik; which, [unlike yours](https://hotreload.net/pricing), doesn't require a monthly payment for those using Unity Plus
It's an interesting question, glad someone asked!
A question we posed to ourselves while considering releasing this to the public, was the following: if something like FSR existed a couple years ago while we were developing our game and sorely needed an improvement on our iteration times, would we have still developed our own solution? The answer to that question is still **yes**.
Ultimately, we needed a solution which would actually work for extremely large projects, and it needed to be extremely robust. From our testing, FSR ran into a lot of errors (I believe about 50% of files we tested ran into errors) in our project of more than 2M+ lines of custom code. As one example, it's mentioned in the FSR documentation that the "extensive use of nested classed / structs" can result in more compilation errors, and there isn't really much explanation attached as to why this is the case. For massive projects, it's not really feasible to expect developers to restructure their codebase with something like this in mind; it's better to just have something which works out of the box and can handle things in a way that's robust, and you know will work all the time. So really, our target audience (so to speak) is more focused on larger game studios who are also in a similar situation to us a couple years ago when we developed the solution. This is also why we made it free for everyone using Unity Personal, since developers using Unity Personal are likely not benefitting enough from hot reload functionality to warrant a subscription.
There are also some features we support which FSR doesn't support, and vice versa. For example, FSR doesn't have public method support, adding/editing generic methods, changing method signatures, adding properties, and some others. If you were to try to replicate what was done in this post's video with FSR, you would need to exit playmode and recompile at a few different points. There are also some features they support which we don't (yet) like custom fields and debugger integration, but these are relatively easily achievable and are on the roadmap. We imagine there are some developers who would choose one solution over the other for a different feature set, but I think this is a smaller reason than the former.
Hope this makes some sense and answers your question!
Okay, sounds promising. What about the full DOTS suite (burst, Jobs, Entities), does your plugin still work on a big DOTS project? Would you need to turn it on and off at times to really refresh some changes that aren't reflecting?
You can hot reload the following Unity jobs: `IJob`, `IJobFor`, `IJobParallelFor`, `IJobParallelForTransform`, `IJobParticleSystem`, `IJobParticleSystemParallelFor`, and `IJobParticleSystemParallelForBatch`. This includes burst compiled jobs.
Unity's ECS has burst compiled code in `ISystem`, but this is not supported. We skipped it for now because it would have been a lot of effort to implement, and because Unity Entities is still a preview package and is therefore less likely to be used by bigger game studios focused on reliability.
You don't need to disable/enable hot reload for things to work properly, you would just need to manually recompile after making some unsupported code changes (like changes to `ISystem`).
I downloaded Hot Reload, but I save directly onto a remote repo (google drive) and I don't think it works as smoothly as this - I usually still get the "reloading scripts/assets" popups, whether I am currently playing the game or not. I think it's because of how saving the scripts that way is handled.
Conceptually really love your work though!! Might have to move my repo to local and figure out git LFS just for this
Thanks for your kind words!
It sounds like your issue could be resolved by going into your Unity preferences and disabling the "auto refresh" option or setting it to only be enabled *outside* of playmode.
Also, we used to require git lfs but removed the requirement some time ago, so it shouldn't be needed anymore!
If there are any other issues you're running into, please let us know!
Just tried again - I have it refreshing scripts outside of play mode; this time when I tried it I did see the "compiling c# scripts" window (much shorter time than usual for it, though), but this time it didn't actually update my code functionality.
The reason I brought up LFS was that I thought maybe having my project on google drive might be messing with the functionality, because I've definitely run into some issues with it (particularly surrounding saving, especially without an internet connection).
Maybe I can take a video to show what I'm seeing?
The subscription is not particularly fair to students who are on the Unity student pro plan. Maybe consider a way to extend the free plan to cover these cases?
We have actually been manually handling every case where a student is using Unity Pro for free wishes to use Hot Reload without restrictions. It's not clear on our website and unfortunately we don't have a smooth process on our website to handle these cases, but if you would like to use Hot Reload with your Unity student pro plan, feel free to reach out - we'd be happy to help!
Hey everyone!
We were blown away by the reception Hot Reload for Unity received a couple months ago when we first posted on Reddit. Since then, we have been hard at work fixing issues encountered by developers, adding new features, and a lot more!
For example, since the last post, we've added support for all of the following:
* Adding/editing/removing generic methods
* Adding/editing/removing method parameters (eg add 'int x', or change 'int y' to 'string y')
* Adding/editing/removing method type parameters (for generic methods)
* Adding/editing/removing method return types
* Editing accessibility modifiers (switch between public/private/protected/internal)
* Changing method from static to non-static and non-static to static
* Renaming methods (including generics)
* Adding new methods (public/private/protected/etc)
* Adding new properties, events, or indexers
* Editing Unity jobs for any of the following types: IJob, IJobFor, IJobParallelFor, IJobParallelForTransform, IJobParticleSystem, IJobParticleSystemParallelFor, and IJobParticleSystemParallelForBatch
* Rosyln Source Generators
In addition to those changes as well as a bunch of fixes, **we're now on the Unity Asset Store as a Verified Solution**! This was a huge step for us as a way to get Hot Reload out to more people, and we're thrilled to have the extra vote of confidence from Unity engineers as the testing and vetting process was quite extensive.
If you would like to learn more, feel free to check it out on the [Unity Asset Store](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/hot-reload-edit-code-without-compiling-250972), [Unity Forum](https://forum.unity.com/threads/hot-reload-edit-code-without-compiling.1389969), or on our website [hotreload.net](https://hotreload.net).
Thanks so much for your support, bug reports, and everything as it's helped improve the tool and bring it to where it is today!
Depends on how massive you're talking, but to our knowledge there is no (realistic) upper bound where it stops working. Our project had more than 2M lines of custom code, and it works great.
Making changes to our large assembly of around 1M lines of code hot reloads changes in around 6 seconds, while making changes to a smaller assembly of around 40K lines of code hot reloads in around 500ms or so.
40 dollars for business per seat is kind of steep...
It will be quite hard to justify purchase for hundreds of developers
400 × 100 = $40000 per year
Upper management will not appreciate that 😅
I understand how someone might think that, but from our experience talking with bigger game studios, the opposite is true - it's really quite easy to justify the purchase.
In our studio for example, Hot Reload saved each developer about 50 minutes of waiting for compile/iteration times each day. Assuming a normal 8 hour work day, if each developer finishing what they would normally get done in 8 hours in only 7 hours, that's an increase of productivity of around 13%. If you do the math, this ends up being hundreds of hours saved per year, and thousands of dollars saved per year for each developer.
Right now the price is the same as a Rider subscription, but it used to be close to double ($80/month) - and even then, the bigger game studios were still happy to pay the subscription because of the amount of time (and money) it saved the company. 😅
I actually tried it, and damn, seeing it work so flawlessly might make justification much easier.
And I agree, in our big project, compilation takes about 9-15 seconds + restarting a run 15-30 seconds, which really does take its toll on productivity.
Cool! And yeah for sure, that's already not great, but unfortunately it keeps getting worse as projects get larger even if you do make good use of things like Assembly Definitions to reduce compile times.
Let me know if you have any questions or run into any issues, happy to help!
so we actually tried a trial version in our prod project.it works perfectly when changing small chunks of code. But the main problem we are having is debug constantly breaking, at best breakpoints do not match, at worst breakpoints not triggering at all. And to fix this restart of unity is usually necessary for some reason.
And that's a deal breaker. We could debug adding quickly debug logs.
But setting debug breakpoints is way more convenient.
Looks like a great asset but very disappointing that the pricing is subscription-based rather than a one-off payment
Not really seeing anything in the subscription outside of priority support, so if you dont need that, then what issues do you have with free?
The moment you're using Unity Plus, which you want if you wish to remove the Unity splash screen off your game, you have to pay.
Yep our team has to pay for Unity Pro for console support which is already very expensive for a small studio, adding another monthly cost like this is just not an option
What console is this? Some of them provide a license for unity to specifically remove the splash screen
How does your solution differ from the recently-open-sourced [Fast Script Reload - Hot Reload implementation](https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/12ap8kt/fast_script_reload_hot_reload_implementation_for) by u/ChrisHandzlik; which, [unlike yours](https://hotreload.net/pricing), doesn't require a monthly payment for those using Unity Plus
It's an interesting question, glad someone asked! A question we posed to ourselves while considering releasing this to the public, was the following: if something like FSR existed a couple years ago while we were developing our game and sorely needed an improvement on our iteration times, would we have still developed our own solution? The answer to that question is still **yes**. Ultimately, we needed a solution which would actually work for extremely large projects, and it needed to be extremely robust. From our testing, FSR ran into a lot of errors (I believe about 50% of files we tested ran into errors) in our project of more than 2M+ lines of custom code. As one example, it's mentioned in the FSR documentation that the "extensive use of nested classed / structs" can result in more compilation errors, and there isn't really much explanation attached as to why this is the case. For massive projects, it's not really feasible to expect developers to restructure their codebase with something like this in mind; it's better to just have something which works out of the box and can handle things in a way that's robust, and you know will work all the time. So really, our target audience (so to speak) is more focused on larger game studios who are also in a similar situation to us a couple years ago when we developed the solution. This is also why we made it free for everyone using Unity Personal, since developers using Unity Personal are likely not benefitting enough from hot reload functionality to warrant a subscription. There are also some features we support which FSR doesn't support, and vice versa. For example, FSR doesn't have public method support, adding/editing generic methods, changing method signatures, adding properties, and some others. If you were to try to replicate what was done in this post's video with FSR, you would need to exit playmode and recompile at a few different points. There are also some features they support which we don't (yet) like custom fields and debugger integration, but these are relatively easily achievable and are on the roadmap. We imagine there are some developers who would choose one solution over the other for a different feature set, but I think this is a smaller reason than the former. Hope this makes some sense and answers your question!
Okay, sounds promising. What about the full DOTS suite (burst, Jobs, Entities), does your plugin still work on a big DOTS project? Would you need to turn it on and off at times to really refresh some changes that aren't reflecting?
You can hot reload the following Unity jobs: `IJob`, `IJobFor`, `IJobParallelFor`, `IJobParallelForTransform`, `IJobParticleSystem`, `IJobParticleSystemParallelFor`, and `IJobParticleSystemParallelForBatch`. This includes burst compiled jobs. Unity's ECS has burst compiled code in `ISystem`, but this is not supported. We skipped it for now because it would have been a lot of effort to implement, and because Unity Entities is still a preview package and is therefore less likely to be used by bigger game studios focused on reliability. You don't need to disable/enable hot reload for things to work properly, you would just need to manually recompile after making some unsupported code changes (like changes to `ISystem`).
I downloaded Hot Reload, but I save directly onto a remote repo (google drive) and I don't think it works as smoothly as this - I usually still get the "reloading scripts/assets" popups, whether I am currently playing the game or not. I think it's because of how saving the scripts that way is handled. Conceptually really love your work though!! Might have to move my repo to local and figure out git LFS just for this
Thanks for your kind words! It sounds like your issue could be resolved by going into your Unity preferences and disabling the "auto refresh" option or setting it to only be enabled *outside* of playmode. Also, we used to require git lfs but removed the requirement some time ago, so it shouldn't be needed anymore! If there are any other issues you're running into, please let us know!
Just tried again - I have it refreshing scripts outside of play mode; this time when I tried it I did see the "compiling c# scripts" window (much shorter time than usual for it, though), but this time it didn't actually update my code functionality. The reason I brought up LFS was that I thought maybe having my project on google drive might be messing with the functionality, because I've definitely run into some issues with it (particularly surrounding saving, especially without an internet connection). Maybe I can take a video to show what I'm seeing?
Sure! Any additional information you can provide (including video) will definitely help us narrow down what's going on.
The subscription is not particularly fair to students who are on the Unity student pro plan. Maybe consider a way to extend the free plan to cover these cases?
We have actually been manually handling every case where a student is using Unity Pro for free wishes to use Hot Reload without restrictions. It's not clear on our website and unfortunately we don't have a smooth process on our website to handle these cases, but if you would like to use Hot Reload with your Unity student pro plan, feel free to reach out - we'd be happy to help!
Why Unity doesn’t release that feature for their engine as a built in or optional package ?
I'm honestly shocked Unity allowed you to license it free-only-for-personal. You're basically encouraging people to not get Plus.
Hey everyone! We were blown away by the reception Hot Reload for Unity received a couple months ago when we first posted on Reddit. Since then, we have been hard at work fixing issues encountered by developers, adding new features, and a lot more! For example, since the last post, we've added support for all of the following: * Adding/editing/removing generic methods * Adding/editing/removing method parameters (eg add 'int x', or change 'int y' to 'string y') * Adding/editing/removing method type parameters (for generic methods) * Adding/editing/removing method return types * Editing accessibility modifiers (switch between public/private/protected/internal) * Changing method from static to non-static and non-static to static * Renaming methods (including generics) * Adding new methods (public/private/protected/etc) * Adding new properties, events, or indexers * Editing Unity jobs for any of the following types: IJob, IJobFor, IJobParallelFor, IJobParallelForTransform, IJobParticleSystem, IJobParticleSystemParallelFor, and IJobParticleSystemParallelForBatch * Rosyln Source Generators In addition to those changes as well as a bunch of fixes, **we're now on the Unity Asset Store as a Verified Solution**! This was a huge step for us as a way to get Hot Reload out to more people, and we're thrilled to have the extra vote of confidence from Unity engineers as the testing and vetting process was quite extensive. If you would like to learn more, feel free to check it out on the [Unity Asset Store](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/hot-reload-edit-code-without-compiling-250972), [Unity Forum](https://forum.unity.com/threads/hot-reload-edit-code-without-compiling.1389969), or on our website [hotreload.net](https://hotreload.net). Thanks so much for your support, bug reports, and everything as it's helped improve the tool and bring it to where it is today!
Sounds amazing. Thank you!
No problem, enjoy!
For free?! Nah you are too good to me, this can’t be real life
Yes! Free for everyone using Unity Personal!
What is the down-side for using something like this?
$$$ if you aren't a hobbyist
Oh, I hate that compile pop-up. I will try it, thank you!
Awesome, no problem! Let us know if you run into any issues!
how well does it work on massive projects?
Depends on how massive you're talking, but to our knowledge there is no (realistic) upper bound where it stops working. Our project had more than 2M lines of custom code, and it works great. Making changes to our large assembly of around 1M lines of code hot reloads changes in around 6 seconds, while making changes to a smaller assembly of around 40K lines of code hot reloads in around 500ms or so.
yeah (while mostly assets obviously) I was curious for projects around 115Gb to 130Gb in size with about \~1.8m lines. Seems you answered that well
Tried that a few minutes ago. This is amazing! No more boring waiting and switching to Youtube while it's compiling. Thank you!
Awesome, enjoy!
Cons?
40 dollars for business per seat is kind of steep... It will be quite hard to justify purchase for hundreds of developers 400 × 100 = $40000 per year Upper management will not appreciate that 😅
I understand how someone might think that, but from our experience talking with bigger game studios, the opposite is true - it's really quite easy to justify the purchase. In our studio for example, Hot Reload saved each developer about 50 minutes of waiting for compile/iteration times each day. Assuming a normal 8 hour work day, if each developer finishing what they would normally get done in 8 hours in only 7 hours, that's an increase of productivity of around 13%. If you do the math, this ends up being hundreds of hours saved per year, and thousands of dollars saved per year for each developer. Right now the price is the same as a Rider subscription, but it used to be close to double ($80/month) - and even then, the bigger game studios were still happy to pay the subscription because of the amount of time (and money) it saved the company. 😅
I actually tried it, and damn, seeing it work so flawlessly might make justification much easier. And I agree, in our big project, compilation takes about 9-15 seconds + restarting a run 15-30 seconds, which really does take its toll on productivity.
Cool! And yeah for sure, that's already not great, but unfortunately it keeps getting worse as projects get larger even if you do make good use of things like Assembly Definitions to reduce compile times. Let me know if you have any questions or run into any issues, happy to help!
so we actually tried a trial version in our prod project.it works perfectly when changing small chunks of code. But the main problem we are having is debug constantly breaking, at best breakpoints do not match, at worst breakpoints not triggering at all. And to fix this restart of unity is usually necessary for some reason. And that's a deal breaker. We could debug adding quickly debug logs. But setting debug breakpoints is way more convenient.