Has anyone else seen this? Using Unity 3 beta 3, I sometimes - no rhyme or rhythm - suddenly have the entire screen, not just the Unity window - flickering (black). The machine becomes unresponsive at that point, no mouse or keyboard input possible anymore. Hard reset is the only thing that stops it.
On the one hand, I am not 100% certain this is a Unity bug and not, say, a hardware issue, as it seems very extreme and, especially on OS X, unlikely that you can easily crash the entire machine, not just your own application. However, I have never seen this before or in any other application or game.
Bug report has been filed, but I’d very much want to know if I’m the only one with this problem. If so, I may have to have my hardware checked.
For obvious reasons, no screenshots possible. Next time it happens, I’ll try to record a video with my camera.
I’ve not had it so far, but it was erratic. Well, it’s not as if it’s something I could miss if it happens.
If it’s gone now, I’ll be worried, because that means it really was a Unity bug. Which means OS X is far more susceptible to bad apps crashing the system than I thought.
You are not alone, has happened to me twice after using b4 for two days on a mid 2007 MBP. Graphics card is GeForce 8600M GT 128 Mb, probably related to it. I too filed a bug report.
Well it doesn’t seem to be a very common problem (if it’s a beta bug at all). Were you using the same laptop type? Could be very hardware specific issue.
I have this exact same problem. it started when I installed U3b1. U3 seems to have somehow corrupted my drivers, because it will occasionally happen now when running 2.6.1, including old web-players I published last year. It happens more often when U3 is running, or has been run.
I wonder if Unity is pulling some DLLs from the default install location /Applications/Unity even though I moved U2.6.1 to it’s own directory, before installing U3? I say this because, initially I installed U3 to it own unique directory /Applications/Unity3.0.b2. when I tried to run it couldn’t find the base script classes and nothing would compile. Renaming the app to /Applications/Unity fixed this problem, but then the next time I ran U2.6.1 it couldn’t read the editor config file, gave a cionsole error, and opened up in a tiny default window with default layouts.
So I am suspicious that Installing the way I did may have prevented some DLL from being updated, or updated something that shouldn’t be if you still plan to run U2.6.1.
I am currently running U3b4 and see the problem more and more often. I have a Macbook Pro, 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM, Snow Leopard OSX 10.6.4, with an nVidia GeForce 9600M GT.
I deleted U3.0b4 and U2.6.1, and then reinstalled them, U2.6.1 first. No changes. it still crashes my Macbook Pro.
It is becoming reproducible with the scene I am working on now. I just baked some high res light maps onto a high ploy architecture scene, using deferred lighting. As you know Unity seems to start with it’s camera in a random location each time, which is frustrating. But in this case it is always starting far away from the building, looking away from it. If I take the editor camera and rotate over to the building too quickly it crashes the second it tries to upload the lighmaps, textures, and geom to the graphics card. If I rotate the camera slowly so that only a small portion of the building comes into view at a time it is able to upload the data and keep going.
I took my Macbook Pro to the Apple store yesterday. They ran a four hour diagnostic and found no hardware problems.
Having eliminated hardware issues, we suspected that drivers could be corrupted. So we wiped the system and reinstalled Snow Leopard. Not wanting to run the risk of any corruption in my Time Machine backups, I did not do a full restore, instead copying only my data files back on, and doing a fresh reinstall of 2.6.1 and 3.0b5.
Unfortunately Unity 3.0b5 still locks up my system.
I am baffled. Apple says there is no hardware problem, I have a clean OS, yet Unity 3 is crashing my system.
That is likely (not certain, though) what is happening to me, too.
The crashes always seem to happen when a lot of new geometry, materials, etc. come into view. When rotating quickly, or in the editor using the F hotkey to move across the map.
That is exactly when it crashes. It is like the graphics card hiccups when you throw too much data at it too quickly.
What I don’t understand is why only three of us out of the hundreds testing U3 on our Macs are seeing this issue. If it was a bug in Unity you would think a lot of people would have this issue.
If it was a driver or hardware bug, you’d think it would also show up in other places. It’s not like Unity would be the only graphics-intensive program I use.