Unity 5.3.1 problems++ Unity UI and Trail Renderer flickering

Unity Engine
1

hi everyone,

I’m just adding to the feedback with some Unity 5.3.1 problems we’re seeing testing a project upgrade to compare performance and stability. In general, the framerates on OS X (editor and player) seem to have been more stable for us than a lot of other posts (mostly about 5.3.0) but there definitely seems to be a performance drop for us compared to 5.1.x/5.2.x with less smoothness and more framerate stuttering.

While we haven’t had a chance to isolate the problems and submit any formal bug reports yet, the camera space overlay Unity UI seems to flicker quite a lot, rendering unrelated textures/sprites in place of the proper textures (maybe just a binding or batching problem for a frame or two now and again, then fine again for a few seconds). Also, good old trail renderers seem to flicker as well, appearing for a while, then flickering out for a few frames, then returning. We haven’t trapped these yet (yes, it’s unproven and you can’t fix it until repro!) but if and when we do we’ll submit a bug report and post a case number. We’ve also hit the same console spam as everyone else with AABB blah blah errors that appear to be related to particle systems.

Update: Trail Renderer Bug Report + repo: Case #774093 Trail Renderer flickering in all Unity 5.3.x releases. The issue appears with trails sharing a material where one trail moves quite a small amount and other trails move a lot.

So, generally speaking, we’re like most other posters at the moment and are unable to consider upgrading to Unity 5.3.x. As an aside, we’re not using many of the newer features either - GI, lightmapping, newer shaders, etc. - just forward rendering 3d with simple shaders and shadows.

Update 2: Unity 5.3.4f1 and 5.3.5f1 have fixed the trail rendering flickering and missing segment problems and now 5.3.x finally works fine for us… just in time for Unity 5.4 :slight_smile: As a bonus, trail renderers are also batched when materials are shared.

cheers,

// greg

1 Like
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Getting same issues as greg: aabb spam from particle systems and disappearing trail renderers.

Particle system bug is the most critical thing. It’s easy to reproduce though:

  • Create empty scene.
  • Right click in Hierarchy View to bring context menu up.
  • Click Particle System to create game object with default particle system attached to it.
  • Change Simulation Space to World in Inspector.
  • Hit Play.
  • Get 18 errors in console. Messages: “Invalid AABB result”, “aabb.IsFinite()”, “IsFinite(d)” and so on. Everything seems related to bounding boxes.

In other scenarios there are much more than 18 messages. Sometimes you get infinite stream of these errors slowing down you pc significantly.

3

We’re seeing the same issue with in-game UI flickering and losing their texture for one frame:

This is in a 2D game that doesn’t use GI or any fancy lighting - the problem seems to be caused purely by exercising the UI and adding/removing UI components at runtime. FWIW the canvas is also set to screen space overlay.

4

I’m getting similar bugs. I have a particle system attached to my rocket. When it blasts off (Off screen) at a very fast speed the particles start to flicker.

I’ve tried the fixes such as “enable sub emitters” and increasing the “scale size” to something like (13.1,13,13) … and still the flickering happens.

I’ve read on the forum it has to do with the movement speed of the rigidbody the particle system is attached to? … but just speculation from others.

We might need some Unity Devs to support on this one