2 minute load time between splash image and first scene on Xbox One

During this 2 minute load time where it's compiling shaders, the screen is just black. I've tried having a simple scene up front to let it just load something, but no, it compiles all the shaders first.

Meanwhile, during this load time my customers think the game is broken and it's just a bad experience overall.

So, I've tried to learn about this C++ XAML nonsense but I can't wrap my head around how to open a loading window overtop of the Direct3D canvas but I just can't seem to get a grip on it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

@Tautvydas-Zilys thanks for responding. The shader precompilation spams the Visual Studio output when the debugger is attached.

As far as scripts go, my first scene simply waits for the personal edition splash screen to complete and then load the next scene.

Oh, and also, the first scene also has UI displaying a loading spiral and background, which does not show up ever. This is the correct behavior based on the code below, but not ideal since it's just black for 2 minutes before the Unity splash shows.

Another thing. When removing the first scene that waits for splash to finish, the same issue occurs.

Code (CSharp):

1. using System.Collections;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4. using UnityEngine.Rendering;
5. using UnityEngine.SceneManagement;
6.  
7. public class Init : MonoBehaviour
8. {
9.     public string mainMenuScene;
10.  
11.     private IEnumerator Start()
12.     {
13.         while(!SplashScreen.isFinished)
14.             yield return null;
15.  
16.         Debug.Log($"Init.Start '{mainMenuScene}'");
17.         SceneManager.LoadScene(mainMenuScene);
18.     }
19. }
20.  

Thanks again!

 

This is with Master. And this game is already in the store this way. MasterWithLTCG also did not improve it.

It is marked as Game and this is happening on retail devices.

There is nothing in the Always included shaders.

And no, there is no script running at this time. The only one is the script mentioned above and it does not start running until the Unity splash screen starts. In fact, the wait for debugger popup isn't even opened until after this time as well. You can see from the log output that it's compiling HUNDREDS of shaders and it even states how much time it takes. In this case it is 52 seconds, but I have customers saying that it can be much longer, like after a hard boot when there's no cache warmed up.

 

No I don't use any of those. Just your PostProcessing stack and TextMeshPro which I'm told generates a lot of shader variants. But, this is a very old project, with hundreds of assets all using legacy shaders mixed the standard shaders, and so there are probably a lot of shaders to compile.

Either way, I feel like it's a bug that I'm not able to put something up during this, or that Unity isn't displaying my splash screen by default.

Also, @Tautvydas-Zilys it is virtually instant on PC. I didn't know about the XAML method so I'm going to test performance on that right now, but I am certainly not hopeful. And also, that second option is the one I mentioned in my first post that I tried and failed because I can't make sense of the C++ code.

@Charles_Sanglimsuwan I was thinking of switching to LWRP for performance and I'd have to reattach all the shaders anyway. Is that something you recommend if I'm going to audit all materials anyway?

 

So, Xbox Live didn't work in XAML mode so I couldn't test it (also mouse cursor exists but I assume that's easy to remove). I'm building a test project now to submit as a bug report.

 

OK, so it turns out that I had a shader variant collection preloading, and since it was in a different place than "Always Included Shaders" and collapsed, I missed it. This is a misunderstanding I had with shader variant collections, which seems to me need some sort of better explanation somewhere. Anyway, what I've done is follow Charles' advice and remove that and add it to my first scene where I'm manually warming them up with a static loading screen after the UI graphic has a chance to load. So the only "blackness" between splash screens is to compile the shaders necessary for the UI.

This is an acceptable solution but there are 3 issues here:

1. (Case 1124823) Blackness between system/app splash screen and Unity splash screen in D3D mode. This does not happen in XAML mode, which "correctly" (sort of, see below) shows the extended splash screen. I've submitted this bug.

2. (Case 1124827) In XAML mode, the extended splash screen stretches my splash screen to full screen. It should not do this and should emulate the behavior of the OS by centering it based on the scale of the device's screen and DPI.

3. (Not really a bug, but) Warming up the shaders is blocking, so I can't have an animated loading screen, which is kind of a bummer, but better than a black screen.

Anyway, thank you SO much for all your help!

 

This post also helped me, was experiencing super long screen load on XBOX build but didnt' realize it was the shader variants.

In my case I am using amplify shader so using the scriptable render pipeline is not an option but I think I have cleaned it up by reducing the pre-loaded variants.

Thanks for the input!