GUI not showing on other PCs

[Teku Studios]

Hi there,

When building our current game, everything is OK and works correctly when we test it in our studio's PCs. However, I've tried it in my home's laptop, and although the game runs smoothly, the GUIs do not show at all. They all work, but they are invisible.

We are using the UIAnchor system with the panels and buttons, and when testing it here with different screen resolutions everything works fine as expected, so it shouldn't be related to that. Also, we are not scaling anything, and we aren't changing any alpha properties either.

There's nothing wrong in our code, nor does the development build rise any exception or errors, why may this be happenning?

[ArenMook]

You've given no info that would help me pinpoint the issue here. What are the specs on the laptop? What videocard? What is its max texture size? What size is your atlas? Does the videocard support shaders or is it a shoddy old Intel card? Details are key.

[Teku Studios]

I will look at the precise specs this evening as soon as I arrive home.

But yeah, it is a shitty Intel card.

[NerfHerder]

You've given no info that would help me pinpoint the issue here. What are the specs on the laptop? What videocard? What is its max texture size? What size is your atlas? Does the videocard support shaders or is it a shoddy old Intel card? Details are key.

I have been having the same lingering issue since the start when I bought the system.

Frankly, I think it is something I am doing wrong.

1) The GUI is built around a GameController object. Essentially it is one persistent body that has all the GUI's. Each GUI set, with camera, anchor, panel etc. is a child of the GameController, eg.
GameController/MainMenu, GameController/SinglePlayerMenu

To switch between menus, GameObject.SetActive() is used.

NOTE - this works perfectly well on 3 computers. One is WinXP with GeForce 9800GTX+ (dev machine).
I have been testing the builds on a computer with GeForce GTX 670 and another one which I don't know the specifics of, it works perfectly on those two and also possibly on a third.

Two computers, a laptop with GeForce 540m and another computer with unknown graphics card had problems with it - none of the GUI's displayed at all, but the GameController successfully printed out debug messages that state them being activated, deactivated etc.

Atlas being used is SciFi Atlas, each of the GUI's (6 of them each with ~30 items) uses it. I don't know what actually goes on with the atlases, or how to check the size of.

I hope we can work out a solution for this problem - I bet there will be more people running into this same problem. It would be *preferable* that a game could work on as many of the clients machines as possible, using this GUI - which I actually love using and have been promoting to colleagues. Besides this minor unforeseen hickup, I think this GUI system you've built us is excellent work! Both thumbs up for you and your work!

[ArenMook]

To figure out the size of the atlas texture, just select it. If your atlas is called "Hello World", the texture will have the same name.

Do the problematic computers display NGUI's examples correctly? What shader is used by your atlas? As I mentioned earlier, details are key here.

[NerfHerder]

To figure out the size of the atlas texture, just select it. If your atlas is called "Hello World", the texture will have the same name.

Do the problematic computers display NGUI's examples correctly? What shader is used by your atlas? As I mentioned earlier, details are key here.

SciFi Atlas.psd
596 kB

Imported as 4096 Truecolor, used as a part of the NGUI feature SciFi Atlas. Material uses Unlit/Transparent Colored shader.

I will run a test with NGUI examples and report results asap.

[ArenMook]

4096 is just the maximum size and doesn't mean that the actual texture is going to go that high. You can see the texture's dimensions by selecting it -- it's in the preview window.

[NerfHerder]

4096 is just the maximum size and doesn't mean that the actual texture is going to go that high. You can see the texture's dimensions by selecting it -- it's in the preview window.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gcldub8l4v4y7dg/Tasharen.PNG
512x512 RGBA 32 bit 1.0 MB

[NerfHerder]

I also now tried a build made out of the last example scene that comes with NGUI-

Test platform
i5 2410
Gf 540M
6gb Ram
Win7

The result was simply a couple of full-screen background color changes (less than 2 seconds) and then a blank gray screen.

With the actual build of the game, the background scenery was perfectly rendered, but none of the NGUI's GUI.

Note that the test platform runs Starcraft 2 and MechWarrior Online, among others, with 40-60fps.

-----
Edit:

I am baffled. I have not encountered any other reports of categorical issues with NGUI on different machines. Overextending these findings, it would almost look like some computers were unable to draw NGUI entirely. Note that this is not a confirmed finding.
This has halted all progress with our company's GUI development. We need to be able to tell people that if they buy the game, it will work on their computer, especially when better looking AAA games do work on their machines.

[ArenMook]

Have you tried creating a new project, importing NGUI there, and building it as is? If that works, then the issue lies somewhere in your project -- possibly within Quality Settings (maybe you have high antialiasing enabled and the device can't support it for example).

[NerfHerder]

Have you tried creating a new project, importing NGUI there, and building it as is? If that works, then the issue lies somewhere in your project -- possibly within Quality Settings (maybe you have high antialiasing enabled and the device can't support it for example).

It looks like you've cracked the case!

Yes- default quality settings and NGUI works with the other machines perfectly. Now rest is up to me to find a perfect balance of settings that works on the machines but also allows optimal settings.

Thank you so much!

[NerfHerder]

Except that I still didn't get the actual game project to build so that the NGUI works.

I reverted all quality and player settings back to initial values, but to no avail.

I wonder what next. If I need to create a new empty project template and move everything, it will take time. But, I don't know if there's any choice.
I'm not confident that it will work, but I'll try.

[NerfHerder]

Ok, so for anyone encountering these issues - creating a new project folder does help.

At that time, you will probably hope that you're using a lot of automation and not a whole lot of inspector-assigned things.

[Teku Studios]

Ok, we've found where the problem lied. We had setup our GUIs to have no clipping at all ("None"). In the studio's PCs it worked perfect, but in my home's Intel card laptop the GUI didn't show up at all.

We've now configured every panel to have alpha clipping with an area that shows the whole menus, and it works in every machine we have tested.

[JamieFristrom]

FWIW, I'm seeing something like this too. I just released an alpha of Energy Hook and most of the players can't see the UI. Haven't figured out the rhyme or reason. It works on my Intel 4000 and Intel 3 gpus, but not on my laptop with integrated Intel 4 and not on other people's high-end nVidia cards.

I've made sure antialiasing is off - I tried the clipping fix - I made sure I was using the shaders NGUI ships with (I had some custom shaders for Oculus support but went back to the originals to see if that would fix this) - I've turned off HDR and all image effects. I'm going to try moving the UI into its own project to see if that helps now.

If anyone has any other ideas on how to track this down... please.