Why is unity3d soo unstable?

It’s epic, however it crashes on me all the time. When I adjust a color value = crash. When I’m doing nothing = crash. I’ve lost many changes to my project like 2-3 times these last few days and constantly have to WinRar the entire thing to at least make some progress since - like now, when I try to load my project it crashes on startup. Is there an older, more stable version than 3.0?

No there is no older version.
Also they are all the same in relation to this and no problem with stability here.

perhaps you are running out of memory or alike?

I have win Xp X64 with 4bg of ram, my entire project folder is ~150mb.

There’s 2.6.1 which in my experience is much more stable. That’s the version I’m sticking with for the foreseeable future. Not sure if it’s still available or not. Also, Unity 3.x shaders, projects and packages are not backwards compatible so you’d need to re-create your projects from scratch.

Out of my experience both are equally stable / instable, they crash in the same situations and commonly with the same reason, thread context fuckups.
Difference is just that not all operations in U3 are locking which means I waste less time waiting.

Unity 2.6.1 and Unity 3.0/3.1 are the same here as far as stability goes. Maybe it’s different on Windows, but on OS X I have no major complaints; it’s quite stable. It’s a little flakier than 2.1 was, but back then the UI was OS-native…I do miss that a bit, but the increased flexibility makes up for the occasional weirdness.

–Eric

For what it is worth mine is stable. Windows Vista 4gb ram. Indie. I cannot think offhand of a crash.

The only reason I say this is perhaps it is something else? Bad ram, etc? Or maybe running something else simultaneously that does not share well. That sounds abstract but make sure you eliminate all possibilities first.

@Dreamora - Are you using Windows or a Mac? Perhaps some of the instability I’m seeing in U3 is related to the fact that I’ve also switched to a PC as a development platform at the same time. I will agree with Eric that 2.6.1, under OS X 10.4 was nearly as rock solid stable as 2.1. I’ve only been using 2.6.1 on a PC (Windows 7) for a couple months now and so far (knock on wood) I haven’t had any issues.

One change that i had to make was to tell myy antivirus to ignore unity. Unity moves and arranges files at times and that is not fully appreciated by AVG. After that change my unity is working superb!

Running on Vista 64x and same stability as 2.6.1 basicly. The odd crash now and then but i gotten used to it.

With Vista make certain you do NOT install it in Program Files. Windows Vista moves that folder around so its not always in the same spot. Just a lot of problems.

That fixes some of the crashes.

@Wolf Dreamer - Is the same true for Windows 7? I’ve got Unity (3.1 and 2.6.1) installed in “Program Files (x86)” which was the default folder for the installer.

Try disabling your antivirus (especially if it’s Bitdefender-> put it into game mode), this solved almost all my stability issues…

Used Unity 3 on both Windows and Mac, in my personal opinion Unity 3 is vastly more unstable than Unity 2. I actually never experienced a crash on Unity 2, but get some as frequent as every 5 minutes on Unity 3!

On mac, it even locks up my machine forcing me to hard-shutdown the machine (can’t get to force quit, it literally saps all my machines resources).

Unity 3.4 is really stable for me on OS X (10.6.8 here). I can’t remember the last time it crashed.

–Eric

same… no problems at all since a LONG time ago ( im also on OSX)

I had some issues with the earlier 3.x versions but 3.4.1 (I’ve not tried 3.4.2/3.4.3) has been very stable for me. I’ve had maybe 1 crash a week. Granted, like yourself I don’t recall ever having a crash with 2.6.1 but I don’t think 1 crash/week is that bad.

I’m working on a pretty simple scene at the moment with the lightmapper / point lights. While doing general editing tasks after a while unity decides to lock up my entire machine forcing me to hard-reboot it. I’m at a point I’m pressing CMD+S after every click… When doing programming tasks I rarely crash, but using the editor recently has just been the bane of my life.

This scene isn’t complicated either and the editor isn’t lagging (i.e. it’s not a big scene). It never crashes if I leave it for a large period of time, only when I do some action (such as move an object in the scene, or type a value - last time it crashed when I decreased the Scale in Lightmap property from 1 to 0.1).

Such an issue would be nearly impossible for others to re-create I would imagine since it is so random and probably some mismatch with software/hardware.

Unity Pro Version 3.4.2f2.
Mac Pro 2x2.8Ghz Quad Core Intel Xeon
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Mac Os X 10.5.4 (Leopard)

You may want to consider boot camp + windows 7 to see if it improves the situation for you. I can’t offhand suggest anything that might mac the typically stable mac version blow up other than huge polygon/vert counts or custom materials.

I had a few crashes on the earlier versions of Unity 3, but nothing since 3.4. Saying that is probably the kiss of death and it will start crashing now.