Whenever I make a build and right-click on the window on my taskbar, it says “Unity playback engine.” rather than the name of my game. Does anyone know why and how to fix it? I am on version 2021.3.9.
This is also happening on other versions and it wasn’t happening like a week ago. All of my old projects don’t have this issue. When I hover over the thing on the taskbar, it has the right name, but when I right-click, it says “Unity playback engine.”
Can you show a screenshot of that?
This might help https://discussions.unity.com/t/895020
Indeed, thank you. We started populating those file properties on purpose, but I didn’t expect any of it to show up in the task bar. I wanted to see the taskbar screenshot showing it so that we could fix it (or rather, so that I know exactly what needs fixing).
The problem is that Windows displays the description of the app on the taskbar rather than the name of the app, so when “Unity playback engine.” is set as the description of the app, that is what is shown on the taskbar. If you leave it empty, it stays as the name of the app. In the image below, my game is called “Test project”, but when right-clicking it on the taskbar while it is running, it says “Unity playback engine.”
Also just as a suggestion, I feel like the Unity stuff shouldn’t be included in the properties when you have Unity Plus/Pro, because at that point, you’re paying to have full authority over how your game is displayed (such as being able to remove the splash screen). It would be cool for Unity Plus/Pro users to be able to customize the properties in the editor instead so they can set their own copyright info. I’m mentioning this since I have a Pro license and I never expected games built with Pro to be forced to have Unity branding on them, as the splash screen isn’t required. This also provides more incentive for people to subscribe to Unity Plus or Pro.
I totally understand. None of this was supposed to be part of branding or anything like that. I didn’t expect it to show up as it is showing up there. It wasn’t supposed to affect the game executable!
Here’s a temporary workaround:
- Open build settings, check “Create Visual Studio solution” checkbox (you can do this in your Unity project or an empty Unity project);
- Create a build. This will create a Visual Studio project.
- Open the built project in Visual Studio. In there, there will be a file named “WindowsPlayerVersion.rc”, which contains all these listed properties.
- Edit the file to your liking and build the resulting project in “Master” configuration for your desired CPU architecture (either x86 or x64).
- Take the generated executable and save it somewhere.
- Now, when you do normal builds, replace the generated executable with the one you made manually.
I will undo the change and make sure to fix it as soon as I can.
This bug can be tracked via Unity Issue Tracker - Windows Player exe contains unwanted properties, causing text "Unity Playback Engine" to appear in task bar when mousing over it.
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In that case, I do still think that it would be cool to have the option to change the properties in the editor rather than having to do the Visual Studio build thing. Is this a feature that could be added?
It’s not on our roadmap at this time. I suspect that would involve patching an already compiled executable in place because when you don’t build a Visual Studio project, the .exe is simply copied from within Unity installation directory.
This is a severe regression and should be fixed ASAP. I’m having the same issue since 2021.3.9f1 as well (Windows x64)
That’s exactly how I’m treating it. You can use the workaround above in the meantime but rest assured I working of getting the fix in as quickly as I can.
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Has a fix appeared for this in 2021 LTS yet? I’m about to release my new game and would prefer it to not be called Unity Playback Engine in the taskbar etc.
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The fix will be in 2021.3.13f1.
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And 2021.3.13 will be avaible the … ?
2020.3.41f1 also has this problem.
Here’s the issue tracker link: Unity Issue Tracker - Windows Player exe contains unwanted properties, causing text "Unity Playback Engine" to appear in task bar when mousing over it. The fix landed to 2020.3.42f1.
Can confirm it’s fixed on 2021.3.13f2, thanks @Tautvydas-Zilys
Regression in 2021.3.16, here are UWP and EXE versions.
