Multiple simultaneous instances of Unity standalone player and PlayerPrefs, on Windows

Unity Engine
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1

I have an unusual situation in which I’m running multiple instances (several) of our Unity standalone player. These are being launched by a bash script, run for a while, and then exit (via Application.Quit). I’m seeing intermittent crashes, and my log files tell me the crashes are happening sometime during the quit/shutdown process. My theory is that two or more instances happen to be quitting around the same time…and both are trying to write PlayerPrefs (which I believe on Windows, goes to the Windows registry) at the same time.

Is there a way in Unity to suppress the writing of PlayerPrefs on Application.Quit? In my case, I don’t need to, and in fact if my theory is correct that would solve my crash problem. Secondarily, is there anything else that Unity might be doing that’s not good to do at Quit time with multiple instances of a standalone player? (Note: I do pass in a unique, alternate log file name, so there’s no conflict in Unity’s log file writing.)

Using Unity 5.0.1f1, and running/developing on Windows 10. Thanks.

2

If it is indeed a race condition with player prefs and it’s only at shutdown time, you could try a manual PlayerPrefs.Save() before the quit process begins. Of course, this assumes that if there are no “dirty” values to be saved, it won’t save the prefs at shutdown.