Derp Derp - Share your stories

Just sharing something a little lighter:

I've spent the last hour randomly changing shader, quality and graphics settings then building to device trying to figure out why my post processing effects weren't being applied...

...I forgot that I created a new scene to try some potentially breaking changes and that the scene I was working on wasn't in the build settings. Add correct scene, build, and of course, all is fine.

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Please share your own stories

 

Meh, I just spent 12 hours trying to integrate a browser-based rewarded video with Unity.

Their dumb rewarded ad plugin/script just gets messed up when you try to show it in a modal over your Unity game and the documentation is sorely lacking.

 

At least you get to blame someone else

 

LOL, well in a way I blame myself, because if I had just ended up using an IFRAME in the modal from the beginning, I would have saved 10 hours of my time

 

I received an angry three-page email from a lady claiming that I had Nazi symbols in my game...

Naturally, I don't have any such thing in any game and I reviewed all of the glyphs I had present in my puzzle game to make sure nothing remotely resembled any Nazi symbols.

... It was only then that I discovered to my horror there was one such symbol that when flipped did indeed resemble a swastika.

... Up on the closer inspection of my glyphs, I realized that during my Photoshop actions I flipped every single Sprite before it was saved. FML.

 

I spent half an hour with some manager code wondering why certain states were firing when they weren't coded to. A little bit after I started using stack traces it suddenly dawned on me. I was naming the methods that started the state machines "Start". Unity was simply calling them as it was supposed to.

 

Golden!

 

I didn't like Unity's built in navmesh agent because I wanted physics-based movement in my project. The characters should be able to get knocked around while trying to get where they're going, so I went to write my own movement/ navigation script. I wrote an AI script that still used the built in navmesh agent to calculate a path, then I'd access the resulting waypoints array and use my own code for the actual movement.

After a few hours of debugging and testing, I realized my new script was killing my frame rate with only three agents. I tried several things to increase the performance, including playing with the frequency of when the path was recalculated- instead of once per frame, do it once a second, once every five seconds- it seemed like nothing made any difference. my frames where always 20-30 ms no matter how much I optimized.

After another hour it finally occurred to me to use the profiler. I discovered that my actual AI script was negligable. Pretty much All of the frame time was taken-up by Debug.Log statements that I added when I was debugging. I just deleted them all and my game was back to running super-fast like it was before. My AI scripts had NO noticeable impact on performance.

Ever since then I always recommend to use the profiler when optimizing. The problem could be something entirely different than you might think it is!

 

I've browsed these forums since 2013 and have nothing to show for it. As for a unity gaffe, I rejoined the forums recently and my first post back was to beat the dark-theme-isn't-free dead horse and shortly after dark theme is finally available for unity personal.

I guess that's what I have to show for my time here. I am good at complaining

 

I once wondered why state was shared between instances of scriptable objects, it took me a while to realise I had forget to use Object.Instantiate

 

I think everyone on these forums can concur with this one. How often do you sit there coding a Monobehaviour class, just to finally test, and you KNOW the object is in the scene...but nothing happens. So you mess around a few minutes more...and finally realize....you didn't attach the monobehaviour to the thing.

 

I remember a derp moment where I'm running Debug.Log on some value on a component and wondering why the readings are all over the place, only to realize after a lot of head-scratching that there's more than one of these components in the scene.

 

A few years ago, I was working on a stealth-based game which required the AI to hear the player's footsteps or shots hitting the scenery. While trying to optimise it, I settled on using a CoRoutine instead of an OnTriggerStay method. The problem was, I forgot to actually make it run more than once, so they would listen once and then ignore everything that should have alerted them.

That rendered the AI completely deaf, which defeated the entire point of what I was trying to do. And because I wasn't using source control, I couldn't figure out when or where it happened for over a month.

 

Last month, shortly after discussing source control and back ups on the forums, I hit the red X button on my Visual SVN server thinking I was stopping it to restart it. It turns out it was for deleting the repository. While the progress bar was going, there was no Cancel button, nor was there a confirmation box before the operation starts, for dummies like me.

I checked my backups, and saw I had one back in June (if it even worked, you never know), but then I had to go off to make money at the day job. When I got home, I realized the backup was for June 2019 . Fortunately, I found a more recent backup at Feb 2020.

Luckily, I wasn't that active in this repository (I use SVN for art and git for code), I only had about 23 changes in that time span. However, those changes included art pipeline script changes, initial passes at upgrading Blender scripts to 2.8x, and some minor version upgrades to my project's data files, along with some FL Studio music revisions (I'm still a rookie with music production).

My laptop had the most recent client copy, so I had the most up-to-date changes, but I had no way to restore the SVN history between February and August.

I re-committed my most recent changes, grouping them by area of work. After that, it totaled 23 changes. Lol. So I ended up back at the same revision number that I would have had I continued without the derp move.

The following weekend, I finally got to automating my backup of both SVN and git repos, to run on a weekly basis.

 

Recently spent two hours trying to figure out why a line renderer wasn't rendering in-game (2D). Sprite default shader? Check! Actually using that shader in the component rather than a very similarly named stadard diffuse shader? Doh!

 

I don't see the derp moment here. Just sounds like one major rant.

 

Left my laptop in my car parked in a private parking garage in San Francisco while I was working my day job. Laptop had about a week of uncommitted changes, and was out of sight under a car seat. Well it was stolen anyways. At least the second time you write the same code it goes a bit faster than the first time.

 

And the moral is, don't park in San Francisco.