Asset importers, including any scripted importers that you write, should produce consistent, or deterministic results. A deterministic importer always produces the same output from the same input and set of dependencies.
To verify if an importer is deterministic, the Asset Database has the following ways that you can check the consistency of the import results of the assets currently in your project:
-consistencyCheck command line argument to open the Editor.Manually reimporting an asset causes Unity to check whether a new import result matches the previous cached import results.
To start a manual reimport, select an asset and perform one of the following actions:
Unity then checks the resulting import for consistency. If it detects inconsistent results, Unity prints a warning in the Console windowA Unity Editor window that shows errors, warnings and other messages generated by Unity, or your own scripts. More info
See in Glossary with details about which importer caused the issue, such as:
Importer(<name of importer>) generated inconsistent result for asset(guid:<guid of the asset>) "<name of asset>"
When you reimport a root asset, Unity also reimports and performs the consistency check on its child assets.
If you open Unity with the command-line, you can use the -consistencyCheck command line argument to perform a check on all assets and importers in the project. Unity then logs any inconsistencies found during startup to the Console, and the Editor log file.
You can also use the -consistencyCheckSourceMode argument to check against a different source, or a Unity Accelerator cache server. For more information, refer to Unity Editor command line arguments.
The consistency checker only checks asset imports that can be cached. For example, if you disable caching for a ScriptedImporter instance, then the consistency check for that import is also disabled. For more information, refer to AssetImporters.ScriptedImporterAttribute for details on how to disable caching for a scripted importer.
When Unity detects importer inconsistencies, you can find more information about the issue in the Editor log. This includes information such as:
The following is an example of an Editor log that shows importer inconsistencies:
ConsistencyChecker - guid: a1945cd7aab67441ba89015f97494624, dependenciesHash.value: fb8cfb407bba82d4daded6031688ba9b, artifactid: 07078a054d3f597b4c2cc47e8e4c0bde, producedFiles[0].extension: , producedFiles[0].contentHash: 8490a5ed35a4361d679e6055a386969e
ConsistencyChecker - guid: a1945cd7aab67441ba89015f97494624, dependenciesHash.value: fb8cfb407bba82d4daded6031688ba9b, artifactid: 07078a054d3f597b4c2cc47e8e4c0bde, producedFiles[1].extension: .info, producedFiles[1].contentHash: 4bd9140e19d2e44782f1131172e514ba
ConsistencyChecker - guid: a1945cd7aab67441ba89015f97494624, dependenciesHash.value: fb8cfb407bba82d4daded6031688ba9b, artifactid: 646d6432767729ea7d288c636183de97, producedFiles[0].extension: , producedFiles[0].contentHash: 5ca760170f85012ce16aa8c22e8d9ea1
ConsistencyChecker - guid: a1945cd7aab67441ba89015f97494624, dependenciesHash.value: fb8cfb407bba82d4daded6031688ba9b, artifactid: 646d6432767729ea7d288c636183de97, producedFiles[1].extension: .info, producedFiles[1].contentHash: 4bd9140e19d2e44782f1131172e514ba
Importer(ScriptedImporter:Assembly-CSharp::RandomImporter) generated inconsistent result for asset(guid:a1945cd7aab67441ba89015f97494624) "Assets/first.rand"
If Unity Accelerator isn’t available, the consistency checker prints out warnings in the Editor log. Additionally, if you haven’t set up Unity AcceleratorThe Unity Accelerator is an external tool that provides an asset cache that keeps copies of a team’s imported assets. The goal of the Accelerator is to speed up teamwork and reduce iteration time by coordinating asset sharing so that you don’t need to reimport portions of your project. More info
See in Glossary, Unity outputs the following message:
ConsistencyChecker - Cacheserver is not enabled
If Unity can’t connect to the cache server, it outputs the following message:
ConsistencyChecker - Not connected to accelerator/cacheserver
You can use the binary2text tool to examine the contents of the Library folder to find out exactly what the importer generated. The binary2text tool is located in the Data/Tools folder in your Unity Editor installation. For example:
./Data/Tools/binary2text ./myProject/Library/Artifacts/84/8490a5ed35a4361d679e6055a386969e output_file
The hash value is the asset’s content hash. To find the reported inconsistency and what content was generated during the check, refer to the Editor log.