EDIT: FIXED! I am not sure why, but after deleting everything associated with Unity in appdata (local, locallow and roaming) reinstalling Unity again and this time running it as administrator, there are no longer errors. I am unsure why this fixed it or why Unity couldn’t just give a warning saying running as admin is required, but if anyone has a similar issue, I would recommend trying that.
Using Unity 2021.1.11f1, when I create a new HDRP project, immediately after opening the project there are 215 compilation errors such as:
Asset Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition-config/Runtime/Unity.RenderPipelines.HighDefinition.Config.Runtime.asmdef has no meta file, but it’s in an immutable folder. The asset will be ignored.
Asset Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition/Editor/AssetProcessors/FBXArnoldSurfaceMaterialDescriptionPreprocessor.cs has no meta file, but it’s in an immutable folder. The asset will be ignored.
Asset Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition/Editor/Lighting/Reflection/Volume/ReflectionProxyVolumeComponentEditor.cs has no meta file, but it’s in an immutable folder. The asset will be ignored.
Etc…
After a huge number of these missing .meta file errors, there are also a few at the bottom about missing namespaces and shaders not being supported, but I am imagine these are probably due to the missing .meta files leading to tons of essential files being ignored.
Looking into the package folder in file explorer and checking the given files in the error list, indeed the .meta files do appear to be missing. I cannot see any rhyme or reason behind which .meta files are not there though, it seems completely random.
If I create a standard 3d project, everything works fine; however if I then install HDRP from the package manager the errors return (although there are 206 errors then).
I cannot open the HDRP wizard and use that to fix the errors as that menu option (the "Render Pipeline submenu under the “Window Tab”) is not present. I imagine this is because the package is not installed properly due to all of the errors.
I tried to Google this problem and have tested reinstalling Unity and deleting the packages in AppData/Local/Unity but neither fixed the issue.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Would it be possible to manually create these .meta files? Could I have installed the package incorrectly somehow? What does the folder being immutable even mean? If there is some sort of debug file I could upload that would be helpful please tell me!