First experiences with Timeline: Crash, crash, crash, crash, crash...

Is this normal?...

Just added Timeline and Cinemachine to a project to animate what seemed like some fairly simple intro/outro cameras while triggering character anims. The tools seem great in theory...

But in practice I'm getting *far* more editor crashes than normal. At one point simply trying to move a Cinemachine camera with the timeline in record mode would crash the editor as soon as I tried dragging the move gizmo.

After deleting \library and re-importing, I was able to edit/record again, but now I'm getting frequent crashes when the editor loses focus in play mode.

Possibly related are the numerous Assertion failed: Assertion failed on expression: 'm_CachedAnimator == NULL' errors that I get when exiting play mode... (Internal Unity asserts with no call stack, I think these may go away so long as I don't attempt to play any anims from the timeline?)

(Currently using Unity 2017.2.1p2)

 

As usual, the problems are happening in a fairly large project, and I haven't yet found an obvious repeatable case (I do have 13 crash.dmp files just from today in my AppData\Local\Temp folder, though)

But there's been 2 separate issues that I've seen - the crashes during editing may have gone away after re-importing the project (haven't seen one since, but only done minimal editing since). But I've been having editor crashes in play mode since then, seemingly when the editor loses focus (when I'm switching to Visual Studio) - which is strange. But it's not happening very repeatably

Definitely been seeing the "Assertion failed on expression: 'm_CachedAnimator == NULL' " message quite a lot when leaving Play mode, though.

(Would 'Optimize Game Objects' on the skinned mesh being animated be expected to cause any problems? Or putting the whole timeline setup on a prefab and playing it back on an instance of that prefab?)

 

Ok, maybe things aren't as bad as it first seemed...

After some further investigation, it looks like our "Assertion failed on expression: 'm_CachedAnimator == NULL'" messages are unrelated, and are occuring on a branch of our project without Timeline/Cinemachine (no idea of the cause, though). I hadn't seen/noticed them until starting integrating those features, and they'd looked related to the new features.

The play mode editor crashes are still an unknown/worry, haven't seen them outside of our Timeline/Cinemachine branch yet, but there's no solid evidence that these features are the cause

The remaining crash problem was the edit-time issue that happened repeatably in record mode - but appeared to be resolved by a re-import of the project. Will have to see how further editing goes...

 

It looks like one of the crashes we've been seeing isn't limited to the editor. Trying a build of this branch on iOS resulted in crashes deep within Unity's animation systems. Not 100% repeatable, but they don't seem uncommon either... Could well be the same thing that's crashing the editor?

Call stack attached. Unfortunately, googling the functions at the top of the stack doesn't reveal anybody else with similar problems...

Haven't managed to recreate this in an isolated test project though - had a quick try and it all seemed fine - but in the real problem there's more complexity with runtime animation override controllers, AssetBundleManager (in simulation mode when we've seen the editor crashes), and more...

 

After looking at this a bit more, I can confirm from editor.log that the editor crashes with the same callstack as we see on device.

Our workaround for now is not to use timeline to play anims on our characters - as using it just to move Cinemachine cameras around seems stable. But I've not yet been able to narrow it down beyond that. (The characters already had a Mecanim state machine running on them, with a runtime override controller, and some had 'optimise game objects' enabled - so not the simplest setup)

Still getting some editor crashes while working with timelines - that's a separate problem and appears to be related to the undo system - crash log below was from 2017.2.2p2 while editing a simple Cinemachine timeline with one camera track and one animation track (to move the virtual camera). And I wasn't trying to undo, I've been actively avoiding doing that...