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Unity 3.4 Editor less stable?
Has anyone else noticed that Unity 3.4 is much less stable, at least on Windows? I've had previous versions run for literally weeks without a single problem, but in the last two days I've had 1 lockup, 1 crash with dialog, and 2 crashes without dialog (except to ask if I wanted to launch MS Dev 2008 to debug it).
Had two crashes the day 3.4 was released, and I rarely have crashes.
Could you (and people responding here) please describe in a short sentence, when exactly Unity crashes (i.e., what did you do to make it crash/freeze, is it reproducible, etc.). Cheers!
Yay had my 8th crash today only. Can anyone beat me? :)
OrangeLightning: have you disabled vsync? http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/99344-3.4-FPS-Limiting
@OrangeLightning: It is actually quite a useful feature and generally has one major purpose, and one good (for some) side-effect: The first is, it allows front-framebuffer changes only during "vertical retrace", and not while the image on the monitor is in the process of being refreshed. This prevents image $$anonymous$$ring (a rather annoying artefact) from happening, and explains the usually 60Hz one gets (or a sudden drop to 30Hz if your normal framerate goes below 60fps).
The other point is, it prevents your GPU from running at 100% 100% of the time, wasting heat and power, and forcing your GPU-fans to scream at thunderstorm speeds all the time. The human eye has a very hard time to distinguish anything happening above 60Hz, so rendering at 500fps is usually just a waste for ressources. Of course there are special circumstances where you do want rendering to be as fast as possible; especially if your input processing is also locked at 60Hz, lag will sometimes be noticeable. But for many applications, there is simply no reason to always run at the limit. For example, we have several transition- and idle scenes in our applications, while waiting for user input (which can easily be an hour or more, as an exhibition stand application), and without lots of movement within the scene. So ins$$anonymous$$d of rendering a static background texture plus GUI at a ridiculous 2500fps, we use V-Sync to enforce a 60Hz limit, which lets GPU temperature easily drop by 20 degrees, reduces noise, etc.
Beats me, though, why it now hsould be set to "on" by default, without mentioning in the changelog. But it seems it is not enabled by default for all people.
Answer by Waz · Jul 29, 2011 at 09:02 AM
Lucky you. 3.3 and 3.4 crash all the time on Windows7 64-bit, for me and others.
Same here. Unity consistently freezes every time if I was still in Play mode while editing a script and switching back, so Unity would start recompiling.
Ah yes, that "feature". It's great with textures, models, and shaders, but doing it with scripts is just pointless. At least this one you have some hope of avoiding.
$$anonymous$$y case it just freezes when I change an asset in Edit mode, about every hour, sometimes much sooner.
I never had issues with 3.3 on Win7-64. Although that skipping bug was irritating. 3.4 is having issues though.
is pretty random if you ask me. I've seen people who never even managed to make it run once, some whose Unity crashed the instance their scripts crashed, and then there's my own, which has crashed maybe twice since the day it was installed over two months ago.
Yeah, play mode takes way longer, and a lot of crashes all together on win64 here to :(
Answer by Meltdown · Jul 29, 2011 at 12:30 PM
I've found a simple way to make Unity not crash (well at least limit the crashing). As others have said, I agree it definately has something to do with making changes in the editor when switching back from Visual Studio or MonoDevelop, and then changing something in the Inspector or elsewhere.
Right now I've gotten into the habit of clicking on the window title bar of unity each time I go back into it. This small delay is usually enough to let your scripts compile. Then I go and make any changes in the editor.
Stupid sounding idea I know, but I used Unity for about 12 hours yesterday and it only crashed twice.
So when switching back, single click the Unity window title bar, and then go and do your edits. Works for me :)
Answer by BerggreenDK · Aug 26, 2011 at 10:23 AM
My experience with Unity 3.4 on Windows 7 (64-bit) is that the upgrade to 3.4 has made my projects crash the editor MUCH more often.
As far as I can recall, all my crashes has been somehow related to me updating/renaming/previewing c# scripts.
I think its the MonoDeveloper background compiler that crashes Unity editor, because if I stick to prefabs and hierachy editing, nothing crashes. Editing textures in a shader hasnt made mine crash yet either.
But as soon as I run a project and get eg. "NullExceptions" because I've forgotten to load some ressources and this happens 60/second. Eventhough I instantly pause/break my program when Console shows me the errors, sometimes it takes a few minutes and then Unity starts to go slow or become unresponsive and suddently we have the almight "hangman"...
I dont know if its related to having the player running in the Editor while I go to MonoDeveloper and start to fix the script for minor tweaks, but I often forget to pause/stop the Editor/player before I go back to MonoDeveloper and edit.
This COULD PERHAPS have something to do with ressources not getting properly destroyed/garbage collected by the Mono compiler. I really dont know and I seriously hope that the Unity developers themselfs are onto why this happens, because we have been looking at investing in the PRO licenses for our games very soon, but if Unity keeps getting worse, we might have to look for another platform.
I have this same problem without any NullRef exceptions, and I also never recompile scripts while the scene is playing, but I still crash all the time. Doesn't matter if I use $$anonymous$$onoDevelop or Visual Studio. It definitely seems like the act of compiling in 3.4 is often fatal in many circumstances.
The easiest way to reproduce this seems to be just making $$anonymous$$or changes to a code file then clicking on Unity to regain focus, then repeating over and over (i.e. use the editor like a normal developer...) Sometimes hitting the play button also causes the crash if you hit it immediately after compiling, but it doesn't seem like a necessary step.
The only common factors I'm aware of are having 64-bit Windows and recompiling scripts.
Alright I take that back... most of my crashes today (6 and counting...) are after hitting the play button after recompiling.
This is re$$anonymous$$ding me of the bug from the 3.0 beta where the scene would try to start playing immediately if you hit the play button while recompiling, rather than waiting for the compile to finish (like 2.6 does), which caused a crash.
Even if I wait a few seconds after compiling finishes I get the crash when hitting the play button (once every 15-20 times maybe, I should start logging...), but it could still be related; maybe the editor is not properly reporting when the compile is really done and this is actually the same bug from the beta?
Alright forget everything. Unity 3.4 just crashes all the time apparently. I thought you had to at least recompile scripts, but now I'm getting crashes when I've done nothing but stop and start the scene a few times.
Answer by tdeweyer · Jul 29, 2011 at 08:59 AM
I'm having the same problem in one day 3 lockups(needed power button of the computer). And very slow respons.
In my case it seems to be because i'm using a dll plugin.
Answer by darky · Aug 14, 2011 at 12:22 AM
I started noticing the crashing today when I started scripting in 3.4 and make alot of changes within a short time. It most of the time happens whenver I wrote a line and hit that play button to check it out quickly. I also noticed that not always things update in the Inspector. I think it's probably some sort of Refreshing issue of the Inspector so when you move too fast for Unity before it's finished refreshing, it just outright crashes. Not that I'm the expert on this , just saying what it looks like to me since I observed it in that chain of events :)
I assume with "crash" you mean "freeze"? This is probably the most annoying problem of all - if you press "Play" before the script compilation finishes, Unity freezes 100% of the time. It was like this before 3.4, even with 2.6, but not on every installation - and somewhere between 3.0 and 3.2 I did NOT have that problem. It was really great to stay in your quick workflow - scripting, testing, playing, testing - without having to kill and restart Unity every other time :-(
No, I ment what I wrote: Crash. I did not encounter the freeze bug, though I think I read it somewhere else, too, when I looked about my 3.4 crashes. So you're not alone, but in my case it's really complete crashes.
Yes, @Wolfram, that freeze is the worst. It's the fail I see mostly. However, for me it results in both freezes and crashes with about equal proportion, with the other "Too many root sets" failure in a lesser proportion (but with 3.0 that was the highest).
I can't imaging they're all different problems, but rather the same problems, killing Unity at a different point.
Yes, all since 2.6. It's pathetic that Unity haven't fixed this, while adding more and more half-baked features (Lightmapping that fails with normalmaps, Substance that requires $$$ to be useful, Occlusion Culling that they had to rewrite to make it work, great Deferred Rendering but at the expense of Forward losing most shadows for a whole release and still only half getting them back).
$$anonymous$$arketing departments only ever seem to care about New Stuff they can rave about. They should worry more about the bad PR results of instability. It's hard to put positive spin on "Unity 4.0 - Now With Less Bugs!!!".
I guess Unity starts to become more and more like EA Games? Tell a lot about new products, but dont fix the errors in existing products as they have already been sold. Gaining new customers seems to be more important than keeping those they have. :-( I've been playing DICE's Battlefield series for years now. Always the same. New game, with bugs that are never fixed and then a new game again.
@Warwick Allison, "Unity 4.0 - Now With Less Bugs!!!" makes me smile. :) It would be an odd headline for a product, but quite welcome. O_O I think, as a developer, I think I might actually appreciate such a release enough to forgive it not involving novel content. ;)
As for the crashes, it happens to me a lot more after 3.4 too. I find the problems associated with frequent script updates, just like @Genjin described in his answer. I can't tell you exactly what to do to reproduce it reliably, but my got feeling ties it to problems with hitting play while it's trying to sync and compile changed scripts.