5.2.1p2 breaks VR and a bunch of other problems

Unity Engine
1

I just upgraded from 5.2.0f3 to 5.2.1p2 which has completely broken the VR side. I’m running the Oculus 0.6 runtimes, could that be the problem? I’m even more nervous about upgrading the Oculus runtimes than I am about upgrading Unity every time there’s a patch. Aside from VR problems listed below, I’m not even able to open scripts in Visual Studio 2012 now. It crashes and Unity just hangs, requiring shutting it down in the task manager. It might work if I open VS first (haven’t tried it yet), but regardless, Unity doesn’t seem able to open Visual Studio on its own anymore.

Other problems:

  1. VR: My app now attempts to run in VR mode regardless of whether the Oculus Rift is turned on or off.

  2. When my game is running in preview mode, the mouse cursor is no longer visible unless the Unity editor has focus. But to bring the Unity editor into focus you have to click on a valid position of the editor window (it can’t be the game preview window for example), which isn’t easy when the mouse cursor is not even there.

  3. The Oculus Rift doesn’t work at all in preview mode. Maybe this is because I’m not using the 0.7 runtime yet?

This is just a short list for now. I’ve received so few responses to my posts lately that I’m not going to spend a lot of time listing everything that went wrong in the first three minutes of using the new Unity version. Does anyone have any ideas or should I just go back to the earlier version? I don’t want to upgrade to 0.7 if that’s going to just have more problems on top of the rest and it’s not certain to fix anything.

2

I just upgraded to 0.7 Oculus runtime and now VR works again. The frame rate is horrible though, not usable at all for my project. It’s stuttering like crazy.

Also, when stopping the program with the play button in preview mode, Unity just freezes. The last rendered image is still visible in the Rift, the blue light on the head tracker cam is still on, and everything just hangs. I have to shut down Unity in the task manager.

What else could I be doing wrong or forgetting here?

3

I upgraded to the latest NVidia drivers recommended for VR development. During a build the frame rate is a lot better than it is in the preview window, but it still stutters unacceptably with head rotation and Unity trees just line up with the camera forward direction instead of along a vector from the trees to the camera like billboards should. So when you turn your head the tree billboards all rotate. That’s been a problem all along.

Then there’s this:

2321780--156571--huh.jpg
2321780--156571--huh.jpg1920×1118 150 KB

I have no idea what all that ghost text on the panel is, but there you go.

Anyway, I’ve mucked around with 0.7 runtime and this new patch long enough. Time to go back to 5.2.0f3. Better luck next time, I guess.

4

The problems have just gotten a lot worse.

Earlier, I reverted back to 0.6 and 5.2.0f3 and everything was fine, just like it was before embarking on tonight’s adventure. I then realized I hadn’t installed the NVidia driver, so started over. Back to 5.2.1p2 and 0.7. That didn’t change anything, so I reverted back to 5.2.0f3 and 0.6.

Now I can’t even run the Rift in that version either. Here’s the error I get:

VR Error:
  OVRTime: 129.216918
  Time: 2015-10-02 04:08:39 [719:408:900]
  Code: -1006 -- ovrError_ServiceError
  Description: Blocking call not handled

As soon as the program starts, the Windows notification “Service Disconnected” pops up and it just won’t run in the Rift. Normally I have to just make sure my displays are set up to extend the desktop, but that doesn’t work anymore. I also tried it with a built version and it does the same thing.

The Rift no longer works at all now even with the identical setup I was using before making the mistake of upgrading to this new version of Unity. What now? Do I revert my graphics driver?

This is why I hate updating Unity to new patches, especially if a new Oculus runtime is involved. It’s too often just a nightmare, and if it doesn’t work, half the time you can’t even get things running on the previous version. I’ve been at this now for several hours and now wish I’d never even attempted to upgrade.

5

Alright, things are working again on the old version now. Here’s what happened next:

I uninstalled all of the Oculus software one at a time. Each time it wanted a reboot. Then I reinstalled the 0.6 runtime. Somewhere in the middle of this something got corrupted and my internet only partially worked. I could access Facebook, YouTube, and Google, and that was about it. So it wasn’t even possible to come back in here and post again.

Eventually after trying to unsuccessfully get the Rift running in 5.2.0f3 several more times, I just did a system restore to a point from a few days ago which appeared to do nothing good. I had two monitors plugged in which promptly turned themselves off just after the windows starting screen came up, so I wasn’t even able to use the computer anymore. I powered off/on a couple more times and it was the same thing. Finally I unplugged one monitor and thankfully everything came back up and it verified the system restore had worked.

So far so good, but still no internet other than Google, etc… I ran MalwareBytes and SpyHunter 4 scans which found nothing but a couple of tracking cookies. While those were running, I opened CMD and pinged a couple of sites. Presto, my internet started working normally again. Coincidence? Who knows?

The internet thing was a complete mystery and might have just been an unbelievable coincidence, although I’ve been using computers for more than 30 years and have never seen that happen. Granted, that’s predating the internet by quite a bit. :wink:

On the VR problem, the only thing related that occurs to me is perhaps that graphics driver update I did for Oculus 0.7 runtime capability might have screwed something up? I don’t know if the system restore also restored my graphics driver or not and at this point I’m so fed up with all this that I don’t even care to bother checking in order to report it. If it did restore the graphics driver, then maybe that’s what fixed the VR in 5.2.0f3? I just don’t know.

I have always had that OVR Error, but there was another warning that occurred when it shut down the Rift that I don’t see anymore now that things are back to normal with 5.2.0f3. Unfortunately I should have posted that instead of the OVR Error so it’d at least give some clue. I’m not about to try to reproduce the nightmare of the last several hours just to report that warning though.

Needless to say, I won’t even attempt to run Oculus 0.7 runtime again with any versions of Unity that support it until a lot of people here and at the Oculus forums are reporting that things are working well. This has been a frustrating experience, so if I may be forgiven for saying so in the midst of it: I’d expect this kind of thing for a beta release, but not a patch.

If anyone knows or has any idea what I might have done wrong, I’d appreciate some feedback so I am not part of the problem next time. Maybe I missed some instructions posted somewhere. I don’t know, but I don’t look forward to repeating tonight’s experience on the next patch update.

6

Since then, this happened:

This error would come up once per second, each second only one frame would render (1 fps).

OVR Error:
  OVRTime: 4997.624356
  Time: 2015-10-02 06:25:24 [89:514:800]
  Code: -1003 -- ovrError_Timeout
  Description: Semaphore WaitForMultipleObjects

Restarting Unity fixed this one.

7

Sorry I don’t have any additional information to provide for the OVR 0.7 issues, but this issue you’re seeing with the text is something I’ve seen a lot in the recent releases of Unity. It seems their UI.Image’s source image has been getting a little funky and will display whatever the last UI element’s source image was if you don’t provide a source image to the one currently rendering. So 2 things I’ve been doing to avoid this situation:

  1. If it literally doesn’t render anything, remove the UI.Image script and even the UI.CanvasRenderer if there’s nothing else that needs to be rendered on that GameObject; it’s apparently completely copacetic to have a GameObject that just has a RectTransform since it’s children will still have the modified transforms accordingly and still render as long as they themselves have UI.CanvasRenderers.
  2. The second case I was running into was wanting a “Panel” to just be a solid color, so I was using UI.Image without a source image and just a color, but like I said without the source image things were getting weird, so I just made a solid white jpeg sprite of an arbitrary power of 2 size, assign that, and set the ImageType to Simple, and it works out just fine being any color I want.
8

Thanks, Kevin. I’m just doing a solid panel per your #2 example. I’ve since given up on the patch and reverted to the earlier version that worked properly, but if it comes up again I’ll remember what you said.

9

I also experience a framerate drop from 75fps on Unity 5.1.3f1 to 65fps on Unity 5.2.0 and later…