This happens about 2-4 times per hour and requires task manager kill of the process and restarting Unity.
Why is Unity such a dumpsterfire?
20.30.3.41f1
It doesn’t happen in a new project, right?
Meaning it’s almost guaranteed to be something within your project, not Unity itself. And in most cases, it’s self-inflicted. By self-inflicted I don’t necessarily mean that you wrote a failing script, but you may have imported an asset with such a script. By that I mean an editor script that may trigger an infinite loop.
First step is always to analyze, not to blame Unity. Editor.log may contain some hints. Attaching the debugger and when that infinite loop happens, pause execution. Or set breakpoints in suspected scripts, typically those handling editor events like assembly reload, asset processing. You can also temporarily disable some editor scripts the project isn’t relying on to narrow down where this might be coming from.
Apart from that, if you kill the Unity editor process this may corrupt the cached data in the Library folder, so it would be a good idea to delete the Library to see if it just keeps getting hung up on one broken cached datafile.
I’m with OP, when new projects have compile errors before you do a single thing other than create a new project…dumpster fire. Then you try to open an old project and get “Load Scripting Assemblies” that hangs Unity indefinately and zero in the logs as to what’s gone wrong. Unity is constantly self destructing and corrupting projects. You spend more time reinstalling, trying stupid suggestions online and redoing things than moving forward with an idea as Unity constantly has some problem.
You want us to “analyze?” Great then how about Unity kick out some actual errors or logs. Unity Hub can’t even sensibly tell you if there is a registered handler for ://api or ://unity much less give you something to debug when things really go south. I don’t know how many times I’ve been locked out of projects due to corruption, random “compile errors” (and again yes on fresh installs and a brand new project), random hangs or simply because Hub won’t log you in due to missing environment variables or external third party software is assumes you have and is an unspoken requirement but is never checked or explained.
Between working on something for hours and out of the blue now it somehow has “Compiler errors” when all you’ve been doing is placing assets and the message of what that is be completely blank to this “Load Scripting Assemblies” non-sense I don’t know why I am still trying to use this dumpster fire. Unity is absolutely the most fragile, unstable and unreliable piece of software I’ve ever used. Frankly “dumpster fire” is almsot too kind a term. When your creativity or lively hood is locked up behind something this unreliable the path from calm to incomprehensible rage and yelling of obscenities is a short one.
How about those writing the engine do some “analyzing” as to why it’s like the software equivilent of tissue paper in a rain storm.
I have not had one instance where Unity “self-destructs” happen to me or colleagues I worked with over ten years.
The few instances reported here can largely be attributed to a user or system error, be it incorrectly copying project content (eg via explorer) or “cleaning” a project respectively running system-wide “cleaning” tools, sharing a project on a “cloud drive” (known to cause corruption), 3rd party antivirus interfering, incorrect file/folder permissions, running Unity as admin, broken editor scripts overwriting assets, you name it.
So when that happens you KNOW this is something unusual that should not happen, and you also know that it does not normally happen otherwise Discussions would be every other post complaining about that particular issue.
This makes the problem one that’s 99% guaranteed to be an issue on the user’s system. Thus you need to perform analysis on that very system.
I can almost guarantee you, if you wipe your system and install Windows to a blank drive with default options and then install Unity Hub with default options and then the latest LTS editor and then create a new project, you will almost certainly not have any issues.
If you’re up for it, give that a try.
I hate to break it to you but there are plenty of posts here and on other discussion forums about all the things I mention. Bully for you never having this happen but the forums show I’m not alone. I don’t run “system cleaners”, nothing is on networked or external storage and my projects are not copied or moved. They’ve resided in the same folder for years.
As for my system, tell me how I can save and close a project that is working, go eat lunch, come back and load it for compile errors to appear, terrain textures are in the folder but somehow no longer attributed to the layer, materials be missing or “Load Scripting Assemblies” and it doesn’t load at all. Nothing in the logs, nothing changed in the previous hour.
I don’t run Windows so I’ll pass on that trash. Also yeah, let me wipe and redo my whole machine because ONE piece of software is broken. Again if I was the only one complaining -maybe- but I’m not the OP and this isn’t the only post here or on places like reddit or stack exchange outlining the exact same issues. Everyone spitballing as to how to fix it with zero real fixes. I’ve been coding in one form or another for almost 40 years and I’ve never dealt with anything as flakey as Unity. More so this install is only a few months old as I just built this machine.
As for the “latest LTS editor” that’s not going to happen unless the project lead ports everything off the version we’re stuck on.
Absolutely you are not alone on this!
But it’s almost always something with their system, or their workflow, but rarely a problem of Unity (they do exist obviously but when they do, it’s often easy to identify them and point to a patch release with a fix).
Permission issues are widespread since users keep tampering with their systems or run everything as administrator just because.
Just as widespread are broken editor scripts modifying assets when they shouldn’t or in ways they shouldn’t, including directly editing YAML. Any 3rd party code you add to a project runs the risk of carrying one of these, as will any programmer copy-pasting a code snippet off the Internet.
I can’t. But there could be plenty of causes. Antivirus, editor script, memory or disk failure, and so on.
If you work with source control, I’m sure you are aware of the “meta out of sync” issue? If you pull changes, and afterwards references go missing, textures not assigned, materials pink, then what may have happened is that you pulled someone else’s GUID of that asset which differs from yours. The problem doesn’t even have to come from either you or the person who made the commit.
Check if under source control you notice .meta file changes where the GUID changed. This should not normally happen as the GUID of each asset is supposed to be stable once created. If you find one of these, chances are this explains most of the issues you mentioned.