So after a lot of… historically looking at problems with Reflection Probes, or difficulties, noticed that:
- Most bugs come from realtime probes.
- Most difficulties come from trying to use baked ones correctly.
Something I just ran into that I’ve had to test and sort out is… it’s not safe to put a Realtime Reflection Probe which calculates all faces on Awake inside a prefab and then try to load them. I just spent the better part of a week dealing with repeatedly corrupted scenes after upgrading to Unity 6, and I was getting crashes when dragging the far clipping distance where the Editor would freeze, then it started miswriting data I guess and thereafter your scene would hang on any GUI paint or repaint.
I’ve gone through and unpacked/repacked everything and am now avoiding any embedded reflection probes because their inclusion and serialization of cubemaps is partially dependent on the scene in which they’re appearing and the lighting environment of said scene. So, a prefab with a nested realtime or mixed probe will look for data that isn’t present, and it seems to corrupt scene data somewhere. I’ve been able to reproduce it over and over from a clean scene to a scene where I can no longer view any editor GUI and have to delete my library or specific files like the last loaded scene to even get the project to successfully load so I can work.
So, I guess, having thought about it, really a realtime reflection probe shouldn’t even bother calculating on awake if it’s not actually in the current scene and turned on. A mixed one should only load what’s baked in prefab view so it doesn’t reach out looking for a skybox that doesn’t exist. Baked ones seem not to have this issue. All the bug reports I’ve read over time describe odd behaviours and crashes when it’s a mixed or realtime probe.
Anyway that’s what I’ve got. Thanks.