I tracked down the reason I could not standalone: It truly is a UNITY Editor bug, devs watch this

50 hours of compiling hundreds of times 2 minutes per build, 30 hours of fret on top of that over 9 days, and I tracked the problem down... It is 100% a Unity Bug, confirmed, unarguably. Just watch the video, your actual editor glitches when viewing it:

When I add an "ItemDropBufferElement : IBufferElementData" to my Entities in the scene, the editor glitches.

It works in the Editor compile perfectly, but in standalone it crashes. I think my standalone has something to do with the UnityEditor glitchy UI render of the "ItemDropBufferElement : IBufferElementData". There's a good chance my standalone does not work for some unrelated error to the UI glitch and my "ItemDropBufferElement : IBufferElementData" is not properly formatted for standalone. There could be a chance the two events are unrelated, but there's a good chance they are... For none of my other custom made Entity components glitch the editor like this.

Unity Rules normally. I'd buy stock. I love using it. I love the experimental packages. But Unity sucked for me this past 9 days of over 50 hours of coding on top of 30 hours of fret. I been non stop compiling 2 minutes at a time for hundreds of times, looking up tech documents and stuff for things that should work out of the box. Issues here: 1) ItemDropBufferElement : IBufferElementData Two parts: -1a) is not rendering properly in the editor. -1a) in fact it will not work with a standalone build 2) Addressables give no feedback information that a build was unsuccessful, in fact it seems like it WAS successful.

Please in the future, do not shut my threads down about this. I'm not out to trash Unity. I'm here to make your IDE better. I say nothing but nice things about Unity, but when bugs like this come along, you need to know, everyone in the community needs to know. A bug in your code does not make your company a failure, only censorship for reasons of brand image does that(and I don't think Unity would do such a foul thing. You guys too cool for that).

When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." "Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophy."

 

I was told by
SchnozzleCat in discord: [GenerateAuthoringComponent] does not work with IBufferElementData

Now that you know the problem, please fix this bug. It should be trivial.

 

That stuff is working fine in 2020.3 and 0.50. It only seems to be a problem in 2021.3.4f1 and 0.51. And to that specific when Entity type is used as field. Personally my buffers are working but I don't use any Entities in them. The graphical glitch seems unrelated. No idea why that is happening for you though. Do you have any custom editors that could glitch out rendering?

Apart from that, this thread also has a good chance of being closed. Nobody watches a 19 minute video with no timestamp. (to be fair, it's in the beginning though) You don't provide enough information for us to help. Really, I'd like to help but I can just shrug it off. The rest is just some rant. I empathize with you being stuck but that really doesn't help on the forum.

edit: Something you could try. Get rid of the [GenerateAuthoringComponent] and write a MonoBehaviour with IConvertGameObjectToEntity. Pretty much impossible for these fields to glitch out. If they do, you have a problem totally unrelated to Entities.

 

I assure you, there is a bug. It cost me about 80 hours. Look at what it does to the interface, spews through components and doesn't work in game either.

This is Unity 2020.3.36f1 unity and ECS 0.51.

The visual bug does not occur in 2020.3.33f1, not sure about 34f1, but it occurs in 35f1.

The actual in game bug of IBufferElementData not working happens in all those editors.

I'm advised to go to 2021 and see if the Unity bug is not present there. [NOT SURE why the image doesn't show. You can manually link https://starfightergeneral.com/pix/Unitybug.png]

 

Ok, upgrading to 2021.3.5f1 fixed the visual bug. Now to fight for the code execution issue which may or may not be related to that bug.