Don’t access Unity projects via network shares

January 20, 2013 by

I must admit that I feel stupid for not having realized this earlier but I was updating / dual using Unity 3.5 and 4.0 as well when this happened, so I was a little unsure what was causing it, but here goes:

If you access your Unity project on a network share (like: \\server\project\game) then it will run quite well except a small error that pops up in the logs:

UriFormatException: Absolute URI is too short

This is part of the interface that is supposed to link Unity and MonoDevelop together and it is trying to tell you that it can’t generate the solution files (.sln) that MonoDevelop needs to properly integrate into Unity. It’s failure is mainly noticable because MonoDevelop’s intellisense or code complete completely stops working, degrading Mono to a simple text editor and making it very much frustrating to work with it.

If you are unsure if you are having this problem then simply try to use the > Assets > Sync MonoDevelop Project menu. That should instantly generate the error in the logs.

The easiest solution (besides having your project files on your local harddrive) is to map the network share to a network drive and everything will be ok.

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3 Comments

  • Thank you so much for this information. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to find out why Autocomplete doesn’t work on our school system – and getting no help from the forums. I was concentrating on the main symptom/problem and ignoring the little URI message. It was indeed the network shares that were responsible and changing to a mapped drive fixed it completely.

  • Scott Hather says:

    Ah! Finally, I access my project from multiple computers, so simply made a network share (without mapping the drive). Mapping the drive fixed it.

    No more bashing the keyboard because the intelisense isn’t working…Thank you so much!

  • Anthony says:

    This information should be on the front page of the Unity website. I was going crazy looking for the reason of this issue. Did what you suggested and all is fine now. thank you so much!!

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