Serious glitch with all unity games

Unity Engine
1

Hey all!

You are now my last glimmering hope. Below is pasted the email i sent to Unity support team where the problem is explained in detail.

"Hey!

I’m having some serious trouble with all of my games that are using the Unity engine.

Problem is that while running the games they constantly switch between “not responding” and working normally states. Making the game windows “flash”.

I have a video posted of the problem on vimeo and the password is “tis-100” :

https://vimeo.com/162407096

I had an lengthy conversation with tis-100 support about the problem but nothing was resolved.

Same problem occurs in every game made with unity I have in my steam library as mentioned above. Including but not limited to:
Darkest Dungeon
Magicite
Rogue Lands
TIS-100
etc…"

All games are on steam and working fine on my laptop. Im out of ideas!

-Antti

2

Does this only happen when you run in windowed mode? Are you running some software that could interfere such as screen capture? Can you post the log file?

3

It would happen if the CPU usage is too high. Windows will report the program is not responding.
What is the hardware you are using?
I am going to jump to conclusions and guess you are running on an AMD A-series processor.

4

Happens no matter what. Fullscreen, windowed, steam overlay on and off. No capture software running.

i have no log file to post about the problem.

5

CPU load is not a problem as I am running an Intel i7-4770k. There is a spike in CPU load when the glitch happens but it is insignificant.

6

Just for kicks run your games with anti virus running in silent mode. This sounds like a virus detector running and searching thru incoming code.

7

I have no anti-virus of any kind running.

*edit Or even installed for that matter…

8

Eeeek!

All games should have a log file. Find the exe and the log file should be close. See my signature.

9

Okay, found it… :slight_smile:
Here is the logfile for TIS-100

10

Hey, I’ve no idea what is causing this, but it should be pretty easy to figure out if you can record a performance trace.
First, you’ll need Windows Performance Toolkit:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn927310(v=vs.85).aspx
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=526740

After it’s installed, open up Windows Performance recorder, tick “CPU Usage” and “Disk I/O Activity” checkboxes, select “General” performance scenario, set “Detail level” to “Verbose” and “Logging mode” to “Memory”. Hit start. It will then start recording - you should now reproduce the performance glitch in any of the games you have trouble. Once you do, hit save. It will ask you the path where it should store the trace file. Hit “Save” again. It will take a while to save, and once it’s done, it will produce a file at the path you specified. Upload that file somewhere and PM me the link.

Try to keep the recording between 30 and 60 seconds long, as the files tend to grow really fast if you take longer.

1 Like
11

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx896TR4dQkfZlFTeU95cTBrRVU/view?usp=sharing

Here is the WPR file!

12

I can see several things from the trace.

First of all, one of your CPU cores is getting pegged by windows update worker. Are you installing updates right now?

Secondly, there seems to be a process called “MbbService.exe” which causes a spike every second in the trace. Do you happen to know what that is? Could you try killing and see whether it makes any difference?

To investigate further, I’ll need another trace, with 3 things checked: “First level triage”, “CPU Usage” and “GPU Activity”.

13

I have an idea what and why Mbbservice is there but no idea why it is running. I disabled it through msconfig.

Windows update has updates pending but its not installing anything… This glitching has been happening a long time and the updates have been pending a long time too :smile:…

*Edit Killed the mbb as mentioned above. Set up windows update and windows modules from services.msc to manual.

No change in behavior. Uploading the new WPR file now…
*Edit2 - Link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx896TR4dQkfbThibElBU2JZTjQ/view?usp=sharing

14

Well I’m confused now. The game itself isn’t hanging - the framerate is steady. However, windows for some reason thinks it does:

2651735--186847--upload_2016-5-27_12-23-41.png
2651735--186847--upload_2016-5-27_12-23-41.png1300×741 33.2 KB

The hangs are actually super short: less than half a frame in length.

I was also able to dig this thing out:

2651735--186848--upload_2016-5-27_12-24-26.png
2651735--186848--upload_2016-5-27_12-24-26.png1296×846 34.8 KB

Any idea what those two processes (ActualMultipleMonitorsShellCenter64.exe and ActualMultipleMonitorsCenter.exe) are? They seem to be doing something just before and during every hang, while being idle in between the hangs. Now, it might be that they’re just observing the hang and doing telemetry on it. However, it’s also possible that they’re doing something and windows starts thinking that the process hangs because of it. I was also able to see that those processes actually inject their own DLL into tis100.exe - so it might be a coincidence, or it might not be. Could you try disabling those processes and see whether that makes the hangs go away?

1 Like
15

ActualMultipleMonitorsShellCenter64.exe you say?
Sounds like a process from this tool

That’s sound plausible that this tool causes the problems.
I had performance issues and other hangs on similar software before.

Might be worth a try to uninstall / deactivate that software and see if the problem still occurs.

Thanks Tautvydas Zilys the Windows Performance Toolkit sounds like a good tool to figure out what going on.

1 Like
16

First, awesome support effort @Tautvydas-Zilys .

Next, and sorry this is a little off topic but slightly relevent, I think this goes to show exactly why Unity wants repro projects before seriously looking into bug reports. In many cases, especially performance issues, they most likely come down to things like this - some misbehaved software someone has installed.

1 Like
17

Hey!

Yeah the actualmultiplemonitors is a great tool I run to setup my multi-monitor view and I have actually tried disabling the software before. Now I even uninstalled it completely to see if it changes anything and unfortunately games still keep glitching the same as before.

18

Can you record yet another trace with that software disabled? Same settings as last time: “First level triage”, “CPU usage” and “GPU activity”.

19

Here is the new file!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx896TR4dQkfWVNWbE9sYjJFT3M/view?usp=sharing

Thanks a million for your awesome effort!
-A

20

Was this issue resolved? I am having the same problem…
One thing I noticed with mine is that I am continuously getting console warnings/errors, even when the game is not in play mode. I can’t remember off the top of my head if this happens with previous versions or not. But I get the same message nearly every second. (The warning is because I have “OnLevelWasLoaded” in a script and it’s becoming obsolete.)