Resolved Meta Quest Community Service Announcement: 2020.3.26f1 LTS builds the fastest by a long shot

If you are finding your builds are taking a long time for the Meta Quest, perhaps it is the version of Unity you are using. After updating to the latest 2021.3.3f1 LTS my build times jumped 6x over the previous LTS 2020.3.26f1 version. I tried a number of other non LTS and even Beta versions of Unity and none come close to 2020.3.26f1 in terms of build times no matter the fiddling. Here are two identical small builds with the faster being 2020.3.26f1 and the slower latest LTS 2021.3.3f1. This is a big deal as we all know optimizing for Quest requires a lot of test builds and that longer build time can really add up especially when I build my entire project and have to wait 45 mins versus 15 mins.

I will add that I am URP with VULKAN.

Love to hear if you have a different experience.

 

Are you building with standard Unity Build tool or OVR Build Tool and/or OVR Quick Scene Preview? The latter two can cut your build times down considerably.

 

Thanks for the tip and reminder about those OVR Builds as I have not tried in a while. The regular OVR Build takes the same time as a regular build and while the Quick OVR build is actually 10 seconds faster than the 1 min build in LTS 2020.3.26f1. It is not building right as it is not loading all the scenes and some shaders for some reason. No console errors, but lots of issues in the headset. I messed around for an hour as this would really speed things up. I am on the latest Oculus Integration and was in the latest LTS version. What versions are you on and are you allso URP and VULKAN? I would love to get this working right, although the quick is not that quick compared to 2020.3.26f1 which is barely slower.

 

I agree building is quite slow and seems to be even slower in 2021, unfortunately I didn't note my 2020 build times - I usually start a build and get up and take a micro-break. My build times are currently 5-8 minutes for a 350MB APK. I am using 2021.3 LTS with URP but no Vulkan because Vulkan is sketchy... the advice I got was "try it out and if it works, cool, if not, too bad". I have no idea if that could be related to your issue.

You might want to investigate why OVR Quick Build isn't working properly, it's probably a long-shot but it might be related to why your build times are so slow. Have you tried running OVRLint?

Otherwise submit a bug report to Unity, especially if you have a project you can upload to them to reproduce the error, where it builds fast in 2020 but slow in 2021 - Unity loves reproducible bug reports!

 

btw there's a nice tool from Unity called Build Report Inspector which shows where time was spent during the build process. It might help diagnose the problem. Unfortunately it hasn't been updated in years but I can confirm it works fine in 2021.3 LTS. I just really wish Unity would take it to v1.0 and include it in the standard Package Manager list, it feels like another half-baked experimental tool which could potentially save us all a lot of trouble.

Also relating to Vulkan, here is Oculus' official status of Vulkan support (experimental): https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/unity-vulkan/

 

Thank you so much for the reply!