Assorted Dashboard Strangeness

Unity Engine
1

Hello everyone!

I have been experiencing some strange issues with a Unity Dashboard widget I have been developing. I have already reported some obscure bugs I ran into, but the below items seem so obvious that it feels like I must be doing something wrong - or many other people would have experienced what I am seeing long before me.

You can find my widget at:

If noone else has already experienced these issues and knows offhand to work around them, I will take the time to reduce each to individual test cases and officially bug report them. If anyone has experienced them before however, hopefully this thread will help future users on their way!

-Aubrey

  1. Widget occasionally emits extremely annoying chime noises when keyboard keys are pressed or held down.

  2. (Seemingly related to #1, but I haven’t been able to pinpoint it yet.) In fullscreen mode, half of the time none of my input elements work. They focus correctly when clicked - and the flashing text entry bar appears, but text does not get entered into them when keys on the keyboard are pressed. The issue can nearly always be resolved by entering and exiting the widget’s fullscreen mode several times.

  3. Mars Explorer uses a custom mouse cursor, which it accomplishes by calling some Unity commands to hide the standard cursor and then draw a guitexture where the cursor should be. This works perfectly, except that it can occasionally hide the os X cursor when the dashboard isn’t even being shown. About 10% of the time, my cursor will start disappearing in any os X application when placed in any area of the screen that would be covered by the Mars Explorer widget if the Dashboard were open. Opening and closing the dashboard generally temporarily fixes the problem.

  4. (Experienced in Web Player and Dashboard). Around 3% of the time I launch Mars Explorer, it takes far longer to initialize than normal. When it finally does initialize, none of my custom fonts are displayed and they are replaced with the default fonts. Everything else appears to be normal, and I haven’t been able to establish a pattern or triggering mechanism for this.

I have also been suffering from a lot of random game crashes, but I will research them a bit more before reporting on them in length. Quick question: Is it generally my fault or Unity’s fault when a Unity application I have written crashes? Should I submit every crash as a bug report to Unity, or do I just need to spend some time splitting my application into different parts until I figure out what causes the crash and tweak it until it doesn’t crash anymore?

2

Yes, that’s a focus issue. I found that a reliable way of getting proper focus (and doing away with the annoying system beep) is to click in the widget, and then switch to fullscreen some other way rather than clicking on the fullscreen icon, such as making it so you can switch by pressing “F” or something.

It’s very rarely Unity’s fault in my experience, and when it is, it’s not random. Check the console to see what errors are generated. Often it’s null reference exceptions, which you want to fix in your code.

–Eric

3

@Eric:

Thanks for your suggestions!

I collected all the console messages associated with a particular crash (which did indeed seem to be an unhandled null exception), and posted them to: http://aubreyfalconer.com/view-276

Unless anyone has any idea what is causing the crash, I will keep disabling parts of my application until I can isolate it.

Is there any way to reliably retain focus to a widget when it enters fullscreen mode triggered by a button clicked by a user? If not, this seems like a Unity bug to me. I already have a custom fullscreen button in my application, but relegating the functionality to a keypress just doesn’t seem too intuitive for users.

-Aubrey

4

Just solved the crash problem…

Having any more than 9 or 10 directional lights illuminating a terrain object (EVEN IF IT IS LIGHTMAPPED AND THEY ARE NOT EFFECTING IT) causes unity to instantly crash on my machine. Since my game had a “headlight” attached to each player’s vehicle, when too many players would join my game would crash. It took me a long time to isolate because I was sure the problem was in my code somewhere, so I guess the moral is that sometimes Unity can indeed be at fault :slight_smile:

I reported the bug to Unity, and hopefully it will be fixed in version 2.1 - which I read on the blog will have better terrain lighting support.

So - has anyone else experienced issue #3, where dashboard widgets can hide the cursor in any application?