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Hotspot Interactions Reset

Hey there again Chris/community!

I'm not expecting this problem to be recreated however just curious if this has happened before? All my hotspots in my scene have had their Interaction box made null so none of my hotspots currently do anything as I now need to go back through each hotspot and 're-link' each of them to the correct and corresponding Interaction. The Interactions are still in the scene and the actions within them are unchanged and still work as desired - the only thing that has changed is the aforementioned issue of them not being linked to the desired hotspots.

I've just picked this up after moving from my laptop to my desktop, so I thankfully have a working scene on my laptop that I can access and then manually re-link the interactions (or delete my files on my desktop and re-try the copy/paste of my project from laptop to desktop).

  • So just checking if anything similar has happened before?
  • Would my migration from laptop to desktop (so the copy/paste of entire project) cause such an issue?
  • Where are these hotspot/interaction links stored or saved within the project (are they part the .unity scene save file, or within one of the AC managers - curious if trying to just copy/paste just these specific files might work to re-establish the links to avoid and full project re-import)?

I'm currently slightly out of date as I was about to fully update once back on my desktop however I obviously don't wish to update software yet until I sort this issue out so current versions are 2017.3.1f1 and 1.64.5.

Thanks in advance!
Mike.

Comments

  • I haven't encountered this issue before, and not knowing the circumstances of your migration I can't rule out it being an issue unique to your project. It may even be a Unity issue. AC isn't doing anything special with its data structure / storage when it comes to Hotspot Interaction fields.

    Was anything else affected? What about e.g. OnStart cutscene fields?

    If the ActionLists are scene-based, then the "link" data should be all within the scene files. I'd certainly recommend experimenting with transferring scene files over again - at least you do have a backup to recover from.

  • Just fired up my laptop and turns out the interaction links are missing on that too! When you've mentioned about the OnStart cutscene field I do recall that very recently (whilst still on my laptop and before the migration) I had an issue one time with the project whereby I had to re-establish the links for all the fields in the Scene Manager tab (such as OnStart cutscene, OnLoad cutscene, Pathfinding method, Default Camera etc) - I updated these at the time however it was only the one specific scene as all other scenes were unaffected. All I've been doing since that issue has been cosmetic stuff (updating textures, materials and models within the scene - no actual logic testing or playthroughs at all) so I now believe that this issue (the missing Interaction links) actually happened at this point only I never noticed because I've not been doing any playtesting.

    Thankfully I do keep numerous project backups on the laptop and also on an external hard drive so I'm currently in the process of accessing the latest backup that was unaffected so at the very worst I can simply manually re-link all the interaction fields (it will be tedious but at least it is doable)!

    Any idea then what may have caused the issue considering the latest development that it may well have happened before my project migration when I lost the links to the OnStart cutscene fields and other fields in the Scene manager tab?

    p.s. thanks for the fast response above, excellent support from you as always!

  • edited December 2018

    Tedious, and far from desirable. But again, it's not something I myself have encountered - so I'm not sure I can offer too much. Were the previous issues also with Unity 2017.3?

    On a technical level, the Scene Manager essentially acts as an Inspector for various components in your scene - it doesn't actually store much itself. Swapping one Scene Manager asset for another would still give you the same OnStart cutscene, for example.

    It sounds like a similar issue to your first, then - fields within your scene are becoming reset. This'd normally occur if you reverted such fields back to their original prefabbed values (all fields you've mentioned so far are originally from prefabs). One step that AC is taking is that, from 2018.3 onwards, AC scene objects are no longer linked to their original source prefabs when created. This can be done manually by choosing "Break Prefab Instance" in the top toolbar.

    Like I said, AC isn't doing anything out-of-the-ordinary when it comes to the storage of such data. It could be platform-related, or perhaps a version-control / asset serialization setting in your Editor settings.

    So as not to rule out AC completely, are you using any other assets that have their own scene-object Inspector field data?

  • Thankfully my previous backup seems unaffected (this is still in 2017.3, so the issue definitely arose whilst in 2017.3 and not any of my earlier builds).

    I'm in the process of manually sorting, I've now noticed though that not only were the Interaction fields null but so were "Object to Highlight" and "Limit to Camera" (if used). Other fields though such as label and hotspot centre are unaffected though which is weird.

    I can't see myself updating to 2018 in the near future however would you advise that I break all prefab instances for all hotspots in future? I did notice that the only hotspots that remained unaffected by the above issues were ones where the prefab instance had already been broken (I believe because I created these by adding the hotspot component onto an empty GO as opposed to creating a new hotspot via the AC Scene Manager). However even saying that not all of the 'broken prefab instanced' hotspots were unaffected which confuses me even more.

    Main thing is that I can rectify this manually - regardless of if the actual cause is identified or not the main thing for me to take away is to ensure that I up my frequency of project back ups.

  • These are nearly all "object" fields - well, almost. If the Scene Manager's Pathfinding method field changed as well, then it's hard to pin down a pattern.

    The Break Prefab Instance feature doesn't seem to work entirely in my experience - though it'll no longer be linked, you can still "re-link" it via a broken object's Inspector. This may be a long-standing issue with Unity, since the link's now disappearing with 2018.3 and their new prefab system.

    Disconnecting prefabs does seem to improve the situation - though not entirely, going by your account of things. That this has only occured in 2017.3 does suggest an issue with Unity itself. Can you share any details about when exactly things started going wrong? Even as a Unity bug, it shouldn't have occured randomly.

  • The backup that was unaffected was my copy from 29th Oct so whatever happened it only happened within the last month however I can't pinpoint or recall anything specific that may have caused the issue. Also at the time I only noticed the issue with the Scene Manager settings so considering how easy and pain free it was to fix at the time I didn't give it much thought so unless, god forbid, I run into this issue again then I can't offer much insight into any particular cause.

    I did have a vague recollection that it may have occurred after updating AC however the version of AC in the backup version that was unaffected is the same update as I'm currently running now so it definitely wasn't an AC update that caused it (same for the Unity version too).

    I appreciate that with the lack of info I'm able to give it would always be difficult to have identified what caused this issue, if it does happen again then I should be in a better position to identify and provide more info for troubleshooting. Thanks again for the responses to this thread.

    p.s. you mentioned 2018 a few times, is AC compatible with 2018? A few months ago I tried to update a backup project to 2018 just to play around and it seemed like quite a major update and don't believe AC was yet ready for it so I left it alone.

  • is AC compatible with 2018?

    Certainly - AC always aims to be compatible with the latest official release. If you do encounter an issue with using AC and the latest version of Unity, let me know here and I'll look into it. If you're hesitant to switch to 2018, however, 2017.4 is the long-term-support release for Unity 2017.

  • Thanks Chris. Mainly thinking about the HD Render Pipeline however for now I think I'll update to 2017.4 and look into 2018 down the road as I still have a lot to learn about the new pipeline and exactly how the new workflow will affect my project. Thanks again!

  • Not helpful in identifying the problem however I've just realised that the Conversation Interaction fields of the dialogue options also set themselves to null too (again I didn't notice this before because of the lack of actual game testing I've been doing, it's all been cosmetic modelling/texturing stuff). Again I can thankfully rectify this manually however just thought I'd mention that these were affected as well.

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