No errors reported in editor, build completes without errors but on launch the build displays the white screen of unity (no logo) and immediately crashes to desktop.
While the game is pretty huge, it is stripped down to a single scene with only a simple UI image and no complex code or other potential causes of a crash. I’ve already shared this in the #unity3d IRC and sadly no one there can understand the cause either.
From what I can tell it is crashing during a Create:Material, but I can’t find any more information or tips as to what is causing this issue.
As it’s often the first question posted to these kind of requests I can confirm that an Empty/Clean project compiles and runs without any errors/crashes. Any and all help would be most appreciated.
Well it seems that no help or solution has been forth coming so I wanted to share what I did to get passed this problem.
In short I created a completely empty project and moved sections of my product over to it, doing a build each time to find a point when it would fail. Consider my repo is over 50gb this was no small project to be moving. The end result is now I have a more stable development environment that does build correctly so I can continue working on the project. It took me about 12 hours to do migrate all the content.
At one stage when I copied over a large number of assets the build failed, crashing to desktop as before. I marked all the textures for these assets to be included in an asset bundle and even though there is no asset bundle as yet, it for some reason resolved the crash/error, so I think in most cases I just had to much stuff trying to get squeezed into the shared assets. So I will do more of this and actually get them into their own bundles.
Another bonus to doing this (What I am now calling my migration from R&D to full production) is that my editor environment (and game builds) now run very fast and I no longer have 5-8min wait times between the scenes. It’s worth noting that nothing has changed in the scenes, all assets are included but it now runs considerably faster. I had a Materials folder where I was simply putting prototypes and other odds and ends during development that measured 2.6gb and now after cleaning up and moving everything it is under 60mb.
So if anyone else out there runs into some similar problems I can not help you with Stack Trace, but I can recommend that rebuilding your entire project is worth doing even when it is a huge project like mine, and even if you’re not getting crashes, after all the performance increase was worth doing it for anyway.