Trying out Visual Scripting and hitting what looks like a bug (can't change variable type)

Unity Engine
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1

Versions:
Unity: 2021.3.15f
Visual Scripting: 1.7.8
OS: Linux Mint 20.3
Kernel: 5.4.0-135-generic
Graphics Driver: NVidia 510.108.03

I’m following the intro to Visual Scripting tutorial, and at the step where it has you create a variable on your visual script graph, I can add it, but the dropdown to change the variable type won’t show up consistently. On Vulkan, it flickers in and immediately disappears, while on GLCore it usually doesn’t show up at all, but out of ten clicks probably flickers in once.

I’ve tried clicking directly on the down arrow vs clicking the whole dropdown and seem to get the same effect. I also tried getting into it with keyboard inputs (clicking the dropdown then pressing the down arrow, clicking the label then pressing the down arrow, or clicking the previous item and then pressing tab, down, tab, down, tab, down to see if it ever gets focus/opens), and it never seems to respond.

I made a screen recording of clicking the button every second or so until it flickered in (at about the 45s mark) where it looks like this for exactly one frame and then disappears:

8632791--1160673--upload_2022-12-3_12-56-27.jpg
8632791--1160673--upload_2022-12-3_12-56-27.jpg979×1023 75.8 KB

It’s not the most interesting video, but I can see about sharing it if it’ll help (the forum said mp4 isn’t an allowed extension.)

Is this maybe an OS/driver thing? The behavior does seem to vary slightly between graphics APIs. I haven’t tried it on Windows yet- I plan to to see if it makes a difference, but that’s not a viable workaround for me. I also wonder about trying different versions- if maybe there’s a newer or older version of Visual Scripting that would work. As it is, with the only variable type being Null (effectively), it’s pretty limiting.

2

It’s most likely an OS thing. Bolt historically has had a lot of issues with Linux client. And Visual Scripting has inherited some of those problems since it’s still effectively Bolt 1.

So your best course of action would be to report a bug, but I wouldn’t expect a bug fix anytime soon. It’s been more than 8 months since the last release and there are a lot of serious bugs going unaddressed for long periods of time. That’s on top of Linux not being a priority for Unity.

3

Thanks so much for the response- it’s kind of a shame, but it is what it is, and it’s probably worth reporting. How would I do that?

Interesting follow-up, though! I installed 2022.1 and opened the project in it, and the dropdown works just fine! So, whatever it was did get fixed, just not in the LTS.

4

That’s good to hear, maybe they can backport what ever they fixed.