Bug Kinematica: Demo - Null Exceptions when clicking character and hovering inspector

Hi, just wanted to notify this bug, which also triggers when enabling/disabling an ability (related post last month). Something with the ledge object?

It happens when clicking the character on the hierarchy, and then continuously when hovering the inspector with the character selected. Attaching image.

Thanks, Aitor

 

I noticed this issue as well, and did some digging to see what the cause was. It looks like the problem comes from

SnapshotProviderEditor

trying to calculate the snapshot size of

ClimbingAbility.ledgeGeometry

when not in play mode. Internally, the

LedgeGeometry

struct contains

NativeArray

field tracking the vertices of the ledge, but it is only initialized at runtime. So in the editor we get an error logged because trying to read the uninitialized

NativeArray

trips a safety check.

As far as I can tell this isn't strictly a bug in Kinematica itself. For the demo, you can fix this updating

LedgeGeometry.WriteToStream()

(

ClimbingAbility.Ledge.cs

line 238) and adding a check against

NativeArray.IsCreated

so that it won't try to read the vertices array if it's not initialized:

Code (CSharp):

1. if (vertices.IsCreated)
2. {
3.     buffer.WriteNativeArray(vertices, Allocator.Persistent);
4. }

For any projects trying to use Kinematica, you'll only run into this error if you are doing something similar where you have a

NativeArray

inside of a type that you want to track via the snapshot inspector, and you can avoid the error with a similar approach.

That said, I do wonder if the

WriteExtensions.WriteNativeArray()

that's being used in that function shouldn't be updated to check

array.IsCreated

in order to better handle this sort of case. I don't know know if the expectation is that

WriteNativeArray()

should only be called with an initialized array, and therefore it's on the caller to check

IsCreated

, but if not this could possibly be a place where Kinematica could be updated.

@grahamsaulnier I can submit an official bug report if it still makes sense to do so, though given that Kinematica's development has been put on hold for the duration of 2021 I imagine it doesn't matter much at this point. If nothing else, I figure posting this information might save a Kinematica dev an hour of debugging when they do eventually return to it