The weirdest bug/issue in Unity you've ever encountered.

Anyone?

 

Anything to do with porting games to Window Store and Windows Phone 8 when those platforms were in the early days

 

When I'm fighting a bug that isn't even a bug, when some how got ticked on instead of off, (one of them why does it work when it shouldn't moments) lol.

 

I had one of these recently. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get a script to send email from networks outside my own. It was the weirdest thing: it sent fine when running in the Editor, and it sent fine when built to any standalone on my other machines, but it just didn't work for any of the game's users.

I was tearing my hair out trying to find out if there was some sort of spam protection (SPF?) on my SMTP server refusing to authenticate unrecognized IPs. And user logs were reporting that the HELO my game was sending was not a proper FQDN. I tried some really hacky reflection tricks I saw that would let me set the HELO manually, but it turns out that mono 2.0 implemented their SmtpClient class in a different way than vanilla .NET, in a way that made it impossible to do... without upgrading to mono.NET 4+. Doh. As you can see, I was deep down a rabbit hole.

So it turns out that I just had to switch my .NET equivalency from 2.0 subset to the full 2.0. One tick box. Why? Because apparently the security API that I was using to authenticate with the SMTP server was not in the subset API. Instead of throwing an error or even crashing, Unity just ignored the line where I set my mail credentials and I guess that's why the SMTP server was failing to authenticate.

I still don't know why those standalones worked on my network. Perhaps there was some sort of whitelist server side. Either way, it sure was a wild goose chase.

 

I placed a new object with and wrote a quick script, the screen flickered, then all of a sudden my character controller started to accelerate uncontrollably all over the scene.

The object and script made no reference to the controller what so ever.

I combed and combed the code to figure it out and disabled every component one by one, but had no luck.

Then, for whatever reason, I moved my controller out of its parent and POOF! it worked again.

There is absolutely no code connecting the parent to the controller that should have done this.

 

I spent ages tracking down a 'bug' that ended up being my virus checker blocking access to the .dll compiled by my script editor. But only sometimes.

 

This qualifies as a ghost story to me.

 

Well, everyone I showed it to did started to have their faces show up as blurs in photos then died five days later.

 

What was the issue on the odd chance I'd stumble upon this bug with my mouse?

 

I have an issue with mono sometimes pasting gibberish. I know it's not what I have on the clip board because I paste it into a note and it comes out fine,

 

My weirdest bugs were when using MonoDevelop. Like it would not read code that was there. I tried it again last month and after about ten hours I had something going on that shouldn't have..spent two hours commenting out and putting code back in..The code was 100% correct and then Unity crashed. I reopened it and used Unitron and the toolset worked just fine.

 

Yeah, sometimes when trying to post some code into Answers or forums it spews bunch of chinese characters. Have to go through notepad as well. Minor nuisance though.

 

Going through note pad doesn't fix it. I just paste it in there to save it while I restart mono. Have to do this every couple of hours.

 

No, you're supposed to paste into notepad and then copy again from that notepad window. Then paste where you really want to paste it.

 

Yeah, I know. Still pastes gibberish. I actually had it type gibberish a couple of times. Once it typed out about half a word and the typed the rest of it backwards. So it was like "backsdraw"

 

Weird. Then we seem to have similar, but ultimately different issues.

 

That's a feature you guys. You can't paste in Mono. Also Mono will rewrite script names inside Unity based on the currently open tab in Mono... regardless of what it is in the file system. Closing and opening a tab on a renamed script fixes it. So much weirdness.

 

Twice this year I have encountered an issue where, during import of assets freshly downloaded from the Asset Store, hundreds of useless windows will open on my desktop... one for every process/service/dll that is running on my computer at the time Haven't been able to reproduce it reliably, though.

(Windows 7 64-bit, Unity 5.X versions)

 

Weird. Try scanning computer for viruses. It may not be Unity's fault at all, however it is possible it's because of some weird interaction with other process running in the background such as aforementioned virus.

 

The PC has been thoroughly checked. No other applications running at the time (except possibly Chrome) with a bare minimum of processes (I routinely check for rogue processes), all windows updates installed, uBlock and Ghostery extensions for browser, have ran all kinds of anti-virus checks, Malwarebytes scans, etc. with no results ^^ Couple of months between each time it happened

 

This is a known issue, theres some info floating around about it. Can't remember if it was sorted out or not.

 

I had a strange encounter once with a navmesh agent / rigidbody issue on all enemies in the scene that were heading towards the player... all the sudden they all started spinning crazily at once, and sliding on the ground in one direction... as if some huge amount of wind 'pushed' them. Some even flew fast enough that they bounced off walls in a hilarious way. Then after a handful of seconds they all resumed traveling normally like nothing happened.

I have not encountered this issue anymore since Unity 5, but I have a feeling it is not fixed. I basically fixed the issue myself by setting the rigidbodies to kinematic as a workaround.

 

Once when i installed Unity 5 after formatting my PC, it kept on crashing on startup. I spent days finding solution on internet but none helped. In the end, it was just that I needed to run Unity 5 in the administrator mode. Still strange, because now I can start unity 5 without the "run as administrator" mode also.