My last post ended with me being disappointed about the state of our webgl build of Kweetet. I'm happy to say that I solved a lot of the remaining issues in the past holidays, against my expectations! The WebGL build might be a viable production target after all.
Nevertheless we still need a standalone build, because it's clear that WebGL is not fit for older systems. The memory usage has become less (around 1GB) but it's still a lot and we have a target audience that sometimes has only that.
Creating a standalone version went fast, i was done in a day, but that doesn't come as a surprise since standalone windows and webplayer builds are very alike.
A colleague of mine always had the weirdest crashes in the webplayer. It was always only on her pc and we could never reliably reproduce it. The log of the webplayer pointed in various directions, but we could never determine the cause of the crashes. Now with the standalone build she had the same crash and behold: there was a crash.dmp file! I've always made builds for mobile and web platforms so I had no idea that standalone build generated dump files. I opened it in Visual Studio immediately. I couldn't do much with it at first, but googling around brought me to this thread on the Unity forum where I learned that Unity has a symbol server! There you can download the pdb files for a standalone build, or even better, you can add the server to your debugger settings in Visual Studio:
Once you've done that you have an accurate callstack of the crash. The callstack was completely different than anything reported in the webplayer log files, but it explained completely every crash my colleague has had. It was an easy fix after that.
Trying to reproduce hard to find crashes in the webplayer or even the webgl builds with a standalone build can really pay off.
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