2018.2.21f1 freeze at Building Player Packaging assets - sharedassets0.assets

[robbskyy]

I have been building a Unity Personal project in 2018.2.21f1 for sometime without problems.

About two weeks ago my project would no longer build for PC Windows.

I discovered if I delete the terrain it will build.

I tried building projects in familiar favorites builds of 2017 and 2019 with the same result, builds without terrain, does not build with terrain.

All attempts to build freeze at Building Player Packaging assets - sharedassets0.assets

All lighting bakes are off: realtime, baked global, auto generate all off.

Most recent attempts are a new Unity 3d project with analytics off, I then add only a 3d object terrain, build… no other changes

All Unity installs are stock with no added features

I have 14gb free ram, and 700gb free hd

Not using cloud build

A hundred builds previous worked without a single issue.

Tried:

Reimaging windows 8.1pro to an old reliable build as I do every few months for the past decade.

Reinstalling Unity Personal

[robbskyy]

Workaround 1: In a new project, I first build with no terrain, and that build works without errors. Then a add a terrain and build, and wait a very long time, and this time it built. with 104 errors see screenshot. Mostly it was…

Shader Compiler Socket Exception: Terminating shader compiler process, 0 retries left

Shader compiler: internal error compiling shader snippet type=1 platform=4: Failed writing data to socket

Shader error in ‘Hidden/TerrainEngine/Splatmap/Standard-AddPass’: Internal error communicating with the shader compiler process

Same as in 2017 and 2019 with empty projects…

So what suddenly causes shader compiler errors in the 2021 version of all my unity’s?