Two extremely vague editor errors in Unity 5.1 and 5.2

I have two extremely vague editor errors that cannot seem to solve, but they seem related to a character folder I have. When I have this folder in my project, I get these 2 errors, when I delete this folder, the errors disappears. Anything built with the error gives a black screen and the game will never load.

Errors:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. value.byteStart + value.byteSize <= dataFileEnd
3. UnityEditor.BuildPlayerWindow:BuildPlayerAndRun()
4.  
5. Invalid serialized file header. File: "".
6. UnityEditor.BuildPlayerWindow:BuildPlayerAndRun()
7.  

I have surmised based on the error, there is some sort of file name "". that is either blank or contains a dot (illegal character) that is causing the build to do this. The only problem is, I have no idea what this file is or how to weed it out unless I go file by file deleting everything in this folder, until I find the culprit (build times are about 5 minutes)

I should also note, I have added this folder to a blank project and built it, with the offending character in the scene, and the error does not happen. I think it might be an incompatibility with one of my assets? I mainly use Uber and Alloy. I have also checked all the files for illegal characters and from what I can tell there are none.

Can anyone give me a clue to what causes this error or how to better figure out how to solve it?

 

Hi Karl,

That's the thing. That is the entire error. That is why I was saying it was extremely vague I searched for the error in the Editor.log but I was not able to find it.
Thanks that helps me narrow things down a bit, I will try looking at the .meta files for anything odd. Or perhaps just deleting them all and resetting it.

Here is the Editor.log http://pastebin.com/9KUyNsBt

 

I'm getting the same problem here. Just started happening.

 

I submitted a bug report for it.

Case 729849

 

Hey guys,

I got these errors when trying to make a PC or Mac build. Which were also not working due to massive null refs.

I noticed that our build size on disk went from around 2.25GB to 9GB!! Obviously a huge problem. Did some digging and it turned out that a BUNCH of Unity sprites that were previously being atlased had lost their packing tags. I added the tags back and rebuilt the atlases and our build size went back down, no errors, and they work again.

So I'm guessing the errors have something to do with too large of a build or scene asset files(our scene1 went from 500m, to 7gb) possibly involving the build being set to x86.

Hope this helps!!

 

Interesting. I was on vacation but I had returned to see if 5.2.2 resolved this as well as trying J's solution, unfortunately I don't have any sprites and I don't use any tags in the project. Its a relatively clean project separate from our main game used to construct and test the visual aspects of the game, rather than the game-play. Unfortunately I am still experiencing this issue and I have no idea how to stop it, or what I could possibly reset or clear out in order to solve it.

It's actually causing quite the hindrance to our project and moving forward as all the builds with this error are unplayable. Anything at all would be a great help.

Any hints?

 

@karl.jones That's very strange, I tried again.

Can you tell me if 738362 works? Thanks so much.

 

Im still getting these errors in 5.2.2 :-( if I include the level that is causing it then my game goes pink and white..

 

I have the same problem, and still have not found a solution...

 

I am seeing "Invalid serialized file header." errors spamming in my console in the editor.

This is not happening on my mac pro or my windows 8.1 machines. Only on my Windows 10 machine.

The project is using perforce and none of the other computers exhibit this issue.

 

So I isolated my issue by forcing the newly effected files to binary instead of text in Perforce. This only happened to items recently submitted to the project (5.2.1p# maybe?). In any case, it seems that there is a problem with text file headers recently introduced in to Unity.

 

I Solved my own problem accidentally by resetting the Editor (Edit->Project Settings->Editor) it builds fine now, it seems it was set to Force Text rather than Mixed serialization, I was lead to believe it was related to myGUI code blocks by the non-sense I read on the Internet regarding a similar problem that resembled this one, I went on a tangent trying the test my GUI related code within MonoBehaviour code blocks, it was a total waste of time, Either way resetting Unity Settings everywhere solved the problems, I hope this may be your solution. Avoid going on a tangent like me thinking its a bigger problem than it really is, its more likely to be a minor issue with a setting somewhere.
Thanks & Best Regards

 

Hmmm I have tried switching asset serialization mode to Forced Text, Forced Binary as well as my default, Mixed. with the same results. I know specifically it only happens on any scene which contains one of my characters. Something in that folder is corrupted. What is odd is today I deleted the library folder and had Unity to rebuild the project and building the game worked. What I realized though was that the materials for several props I have weren't applied. Upon re-adding these materials to said props, the error has appeared again.

I am at a complete lost as to what the problem is. I thought it was one thing, but now this new test shows I have no idea what the actual problem is. Karl has taken my test project. Hopefully he can figure out and solve this dreadful problem once and for all.

 

Any of the materials in the 'Props' Folder. I thought that too, but it wouldn't make sense because of the problem with the character folder I mentioned previously. It seems I either have no 'Psycho' character or no 'Props'. Still very confused Maybe I shoiuld go over the props folder and try to see if anything is out of place, but when I did check I did not see anything out of the ordinary. Would you suggest re-doing the materials?

 

Ah! Thank you Karl. This is indeed my problem and explains why deleting these two different folders as well as the removed materials from the objects caused things to work. I will have to extend my limited knowledge on the new asset bundle system.

EDIT: As a quick work around to this issue for now, I set some of my biggest textures to use the new 'crunch' compression which solved the issue. I will resolve this fully with texture streaming however as well as asset bundles.

 

The issue says it is fixed but many people are still commenting that they are having issues. Any updates?

 

why is the sharedAssets file limited to 4gb at all? It can't be that unity is limited to 4gb of assets...
I have a bunch of movie textures in a super simple application for an interactive installation. what workarounds can I use?
- can I make unity create an sharedassets1.assets?
- resources.load and set as movie texture inside of the script that starts playblack
--> I do get the similar errors now for the resources.assets file though since it is +5gb. while the scene builds and works fine the resources.load call seems to return null since I get a null reference exception in the debug console