I love Unity software. I think it rules, but this scriptable build pipeline has no documentation and doesn’t work intuitively. I’m okay with this on your experimental features, but literally every UNITY user must use this new experimental feature or they can’t make standalones. There are many of us who no longer can build standalones (to release our game on Steam) because of this, I am one of them. Can you help me right now? I’ll explain how to help them for future updates.
Can you help me? I think my main things in my build needed are:
a) I use DOTS/ECS.
b) I use Assemblies.
What scriptable build options do I use to make a standalone?
Helping others:
Instead of having users pick arcane & undocumented components in the build pipeline, automate it.
Run a “precompile” scan of script files. See if DOTS/ECS is used. Then automatically add the DOTS/ECS components.
Run a “precompile” scan to see if assemblies are being used and include the resource folder/component needed.
I spent 7000 hours on the game I want to launch. I finished Friday, posted an announcement on Steam that I’m launching Friday… But it’s now Monday and I have no clue, absolutely no clue how to build a standalone. I am googling this, and apparently most every other unity user is in the same boat. I’m quite fine with experimental packages n stuff, they make Unity shine. The problem is that you took away core functionality that every Unity user needs and replaced it with an undocumented experimental feature, that is poor product management. The executive/manager who made that call should get a talking to.
To Reiterate: Can someone help me compile my game to standalone?
a) I use DOTS/ECS.
b) I use Assemblies.
What scriptable build options(components) do I use to make a standalone?
So depending on the target platform, get a proper package (dependency Windows I guess if its Steam);
Add Standalone component to your Build Configuration.
Run a build. And that’s about it.
If you have C++ redist for Burst, it should build as by former build pipeline and include subscenes.
If build still crashes after that - investigate your crash log.
Log may be located either in your build folder, or in %appdata%/LocalLow/your_company/game_name/.
Offtop tip
Note that if you’re not using subscenes or conversion flow, you can hack out subscenes via custom bootstrap and package modification. This way you won’t need Platforms package.
But at release stage… I’d say stick with Platforms package.
I‘m surprised that you called it „finished“ and announced a release, if I understood correctly, on the very same day and that‘s when you find out you can‘t build (a standalone, ie an executable version of your game). I mean, haven‘t you been testing the game in builds? You sure you want to release it without extensive (at a minimum one week) tests using builds?
Point being: You’ll risk a lot of bad rep for bugs or simply design issues (due to different screen size, input devices, etc.) that never appeared in playmode. Those bugs are usually the most time consuming to debug, too. All the while aggravated users are waiting for the fix, and while you are „taking so long“ they‘ve got nothing better to do than posting negative reviews.
If you do a IL2CPP build make sure you have “Windows build Support (IL2CPP)” installed ( in Unity Hub ->Installs → settings [gearwheel] → Add modules)
Also note that Steam will review your build which might take a few days (if they don’t encounter issues).
I ran into Dots Animations not working when running in a build, where it worked in editor… So I would advice you to test the build at least a little bit before pushing it onto end users.
The game runs in editor. I’m surprised Unity can’t make a standalone to match. No IDE in my history of a programmer since 3 years old in 1981 could not make a standalone to match your editor compiler. You’re calling it a ME problem, when it is a U nity problem. I tried to be as polite as possible to not tarnish Unity’s name. I even didn’t post “That UI GUY” of me panning how bad this is. I love Unity, but it is ridiculous how hard it is to make a standalone now… Tons of other people have this frustrating issue of not being able to make a standalone, look on forums. I searched for help, found none, but found lots of people with the same problems.
System.Exception: Invalid path in TextDataProvider : ‘D:/starfighter/starfighter_Data/StreamingAssets/aa/settings.json’.
My Addressables build:
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Can someone watch this short 3 minute video of how I do addressables in case you know what is wrong?
I have a new error: BuildPath for group ‘Default Local Group’ is set to the dynamic-lookup version of StreamingAssets, but LoadPath is not.
Looks like the answer is here, but I don’t understand his tech talk:
I think what I have to do is manually find where UNITY builds settings.json because it isn’t configured to launch with standalone for whatever strange reason. Then I need to manually copy/pasta that directory into my standalone.
