The 2022 unite presentation has shown progress on unity's multiplayer abilities, including a built-in process that seems to mimic this approach but in an even better way! That would be rad. Upon its release, this repository may become redundant.
A tool to let the user quickly duplicate their unity project without copying all the assets, for multiplayer testing
One method of quickly debugging multiplayer code is to run multiple unity editors of the same project, and inspect each instance as it works its way through the server/client functions. This is disabled by design for a unity project because of file IO concerns, so this tool lets you get around that by cloning your unity project and creating a series of hard links/junctions in your new cloned folder. These links point back to the original, which can let you edit code and see the results fairly quickly in each cloned unity.
There's a couple ways you can add this to a unity project:
"com.hwaet.projectcloner": "file:../../../../[relative path from your manifest file to the package.json]"
"com.hwaet.projectcloner": "https://github.com/hwaet/UnityProjectCloner.git"
The new cloned project will be placed right next to the original. So your folder structure will look like:
To open the window which allows to create a clone and manage it, in Unity Editor go to "Tools/Project Cloner". After the clone is created, you can launch it from the same window ("Open clone project" button will appear there). No need to add the clone to Unity Hub or anywhere else.