Immediate crash following Scaleform/Unity getting started

[Michael.Heydon]

I've installed a trial of Unity Pro 4.5 and downloaded an evaluation of the Scaleform 4.2 Unity plugin. After following the steps listed in the getting started guide, when I push play Unity crashes. Notiftying "Unity Editor has stopped working". I'm on Windows 7 (x64) with the DirectX runtime installed. 

[Michael.Heydon]

I've confirmed this is not just my computer, as two others within the office experience the same issue. 

[Michael.Heydon]

Does anyone have any ideas? 

[Anonymous]

i just wanted to try scaleform with unity and same happened to me. perhaps we should try to use an older version of unity.

[Anonymous]

Exact same problem. Unity Pro 4.5, Windows 7 (x64), Scaleform 4.2. It seems having the My Camera script running in the scene compltely crashes Unity. In all my time with Unity I've never seen it crash from an error/plugin, but this does it every time.

[Anonymous]

I had the same problem. Latest Unity (4.5), wants to use DirectX by default, and this turns out to be what is causing the problem.

To turn off DirectX:

Edit > Project Settings > Player > Other Settings > Use Direct3D 11 = unchecked

C

[Anonymous]

Oh wow that worked. All this time and the solution was that simple. Really wish someone said something earlier.

[Anonymous]

Yes, I discovered it quite fortutiously.

I was using ScaleForm 4.2 in an earlier version of Unity (where it worked fine) and then upgraded Unity to 4.5, and ScaleForm was still working fine, but only if I opened the project that I had originally authored in 3.x. When creating a new project from scratch (in Unity 4.5), ScaleForm was always crashing.

Looking for the difference between the two projects, I saw that the later project had <DX11> in the title bar whereas the former did not. After some research found out how to turn off DirectX 11. And that solved the problem.

Although the switch is in the Player settings the Editor is also affected, presumably so that you can double check for any side effects of DX11 within the Editor (such as flipped textures or whatever). Or as in this case: ScaleForm crashing.

Currently I don't have any dependencies on DX 11, but it will be painful if and when I ever do need it as ScaleForm is such a cool solution for the creation of complex GUIs.

Carl

[Michael.Heydon]

Yes, that worked thanks. Good find!

Still hoping we hear something from Autodesk as to any future fixes though! 

[RichMC]

We ship with multiple DLLs on Windows to work with OpenGL, D3D9 and D3D11. When there’s a mismatch of Unity’s renderer and the DLL, a crash will result.

After importing the unitypackage, you can find additional DLLs in: Scaleform/Integrations/Unity/Bin/Win32

Depending on which renderer you want to use, copy the associated DLL to Assets/Plugins and start Unity. It should no longer crash when you try to Play.

[Anonymous]

In the Scaleform/Integrations/Unity/Bin/Win32 folder there are three folders: Debug, Release and Shipping.

I understand the difference between Debug and Release, but what will be the difference between Release and Shipping? Which should I use and under what conditions?

C

[RichMC]

From Unity Development:

There’s some useful information under section 2.2.1 in our documentation:

http://gameware.autodesk.com/documents/sf_4.2_getting_started_with_scaleform.pdf

Release still has AMP enabled for profiling and logging statements.

Shipping disables AMP and logging completely.

Debug: during development and to track down bugs. There are logging, asserts, and debug symbols available.

Release: This version can still be used with AMP for additional profiling.

Shipping: when you plan to ship a product. – Submit it to an app store, or submit this to your distribution service. This is a minimal binary, optimized for size and speed.