Maximizing game window in editor messes everything

Hello,

I’m creating my own game and developed about 80 actions for my characters, and everything works as expected.

I always did my dev/testing up until now on a non-maximized game window.

I wanted to see what it looked like once maximized and now a ton of things no longer work.

Any clue why anyone ?

Examples:

  • Taking a bumper that should send up no longer works but only on a specific character.
  • Some timer based events happen instantly as if the timer was already > the timeout.

And more.

I have absolutely no idea what’s going on. I never would have thought maximizing the game window could have any effect on stuff like raycasting, setting velocity etc.

Possibly order-of-execution dependencies that you created without realizing it.

Good news: it’s just like any other bug: you have to debug to figure out what is going on. See bottom of this post.

If it is your UI not anchoring properly in different-sized / different-shaped screens then check these steps out:

Here are some notes on UI Anchoring, Scaling, CanvasScaler, etc:

Usually you need to choose a suitable ScaleMode and MatchMode in the Canvas Scaler and stick with it 100%. Generally if you change those settings you will often need to redo your UI entirely.

I also use this CanvasScalerOrientationDriver utility to make sharing UI for Landscape / Portrait easier. Read what it does carefully.

Time to start debugging!

By debugging you can find out exactly what your program is doing so you can fix it.

Here is how you can begin your exciting new debugging adventures:

You must find a way to get the information you need in order to reason about what the problem is.

Once you understand what the problem is, you may begin to reason about a solution to the problem.

What is often happening in these cases is one of the following:

  • the code you think is executing is not actually executing at all
  • the code is executing far EARLIER or LATER than you think
  • the code is executing far LESS OFTEN than you think
  • the code is executing far MORE OFTEN than you think
  • the code is executing on another GameObject than you think it is
  • you’re getting an error or warning and you haven’t noticed it in the console window

To help gain more insight into your problem, I recommend liberally sprinkling Debug.Log() statements through your code to display information in realtime.

Doing this should help you answer these types of questions:

  • is this code even running? which parts are running? how often does it run? what order does it run in?
  • what are the names of the GameObjects or Components involved?
  • what are the values of the variables involved? Are they initialized? Are the values reasonable?
  • are you meeting ALL the requirements to receive callbacks such as triggers / colliders (review the documentation)

Knowing this information will help you reason about the behavior you are seeing.

You can also supply a second argument to Debug.Log() and when you click the message, it will highlight the object in scene, such as Debug.Log("Problem!",this);

If your problem would benefit from in-scene or in-game visualization, Debug.DrawRay() or Debug.DrawLine() can help you visualize things like rays (used in raycasting) or distances.

You can also call Debug.Break() to pause the Editor when certain interesting pieces of code run, and then study the scene manually, looking for all the parts, where they are, what scripts are on them, etc.

You can also call GameObject.CreatePrimitive() to emplace debug-marker-ish objects in the scene at runtime.

You could also just display various important quantities in UI Text elements to watch them change as you play the game.

Visit Google for how to see console output from builds. If you are running a mobile device you can also view the console output. Google for how on your particular mobile target, such as this answer for iOS: How To - Capturing Device Logs on iOS or this answer for Android: How To - Capturing Device Logs on Android

If you are working in VR, it might be useful to make your on onscreen log output, or integrate one from the asset store, so you can see what is happening as you operate your software.

Another useful approach is to temporarily strip out everything besides what is necessary to prove your issue. This can simplify and isolate compounding effects of other items in your scene or prefab.

If your problem is with OnCollision-type functions, print the name of what is passed in!

Here’s an example of putting in a laser-focused Debug.Log() and how that can save you a TON of time wallowing around speculating what might be going wrong:

If you are looking for how to attach an actual debugger to Unity: Unity - Manual: Debugging C# code in Unity

“When in doubt, print it out!™” - Kurt Dekker (and many others)

Note: the print() function is an alias for Debug.Log() provided by the MonoBehaviour class.

Well no I didn’t implement UI yet. It’s more stuff like timings and velocity assignments that are broken :confused:

Perhaps you are not multiplying by Time.deltaTime when you move stuff?

If physics moves it, just set the velocity.

If you move it, whatever you contemplate moving it by, express that in units / second and every frame multiply it by Time.deltaTime.

I did add a Layer to the Time class. I call its deltaTimes instead, which calls Time.deltaTime with a factor.

I always multiply by those deltaTimes where need be.

Ok so I built the game and it works as it should.

I also checked at which commit does the issue start to appear, and it’s after I implemented that new Time layer static class :

using UnityEngine;

internal static class TimeX {

  internal static float timeScale = 1f;

  internal static float deltaTime { get { return Time.deltaTime * timeScale; } }
  internal static float fixedDeltaTime { get { return Time.fixedDeltaTime * timeScale; } }

}

Basically I use it for “time slow down” powers. So instead of multiplying stuff by Time.fixedDeltaTime or Time.DeltaTime, I use these TimeX.fixedDeltaTime and TimeX.DeltaTime.

Would anyone know why that could cause any issue only on “Maximized tab” ?