Getting Terrible Frame-Freezes... but game is still being Update()'d

VoxelMatt · August 25, 2016, 6:41am

Hey Unity Devs, I’m hoping that someone can help me shed some light on a crazy bug that some of our Android players are reporting.

TL;DR: Bad 1sec+ frame freezes, but game keeps updating. Is this a Unity Rendering Bug???

The long version:

We get 1+ second frame freezes whenever coins are added to the players total. BUT the game keeps updating in the background. Here’s a video a user sent us showing the HUGE lag spikes:

- YouTube (After the lag spike - the trains have continued moving, making the game unplayable)

After spending several days trying everythign I can to fix the problem (I can’t actually reproduce it on any device we have access to). I wrote some code that would make the problem WORSE… so here’s what it looks like when we actually have bad code that sticks on a frame.

- YouTube (Notice that the trains don’t continue moving behind the lag.)

This is currently happening to maybe 1% of our players, and I can’t (yet) see any common ground on device type, or OS version.

What can cause rendering to stop while we still get calls to ‘Update()’ ???

VoxelMatt · September 1, 2016, 7:40am

More Information from one of our players. I’ve highlighted the important bits.

“I tried the Open GL and the first two
plays Mons and Bruges were perfect. I
had two perfect balloon rounds which I
think is a first. One in Mons and then
one in Bruges before the (video)
freezing returned on my third balloon
round when I played Amsterdam.”

"The
game continues I can hear it and even
control the trains. Only the video is
frozen for a short, random amount of
time. "

We sent them 2 builds, one that disabled multi-threaded rendering. No change. And one that used OpenGLES3.0 (previously we just used gles2.0). In the OpenGLES3 build the problem seemed to go away for a little while. But then came back.