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Author Topic: uGUI flickers when using Mac with two monitors  (Read 3889 times)

JellyHair

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uGUI flickers when using Mac with two monitors
« on: December 14, 2016, 10:58:04 AM »
Very specific but very annoying bug. With two monitors on a mac having playmaker open causes uGUI to go crazy. It looks like the canvas is constantly resizing, causing all UI elements to flicker in size:



Steps to reproduce:

1, Have a mac with a second monitor plugged in
2, Have your main Unity window on one screen. Have the playmaker editor detached from the main window and on your second screen
3, Have some uGUI in your scene

If you close Playmaker it stops flickering. Docking Playmaker to the main window drastically lessens the flickering.

Details:
Unity: 5.4.0f3
Playmaker: 1.8.3f4
MacOS: 10.12.1 (also seen on 10.11)


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Re: uGUI flickers when using Mac with two monitors
« Reply #1 on: December 14, 2016, 02:23:04 PM »
Same setup, Unity, Playmaker but with OSX 10.10.5 - not experiencing this.

jeanfabre

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Re: uGUI flickers when using Mac with two monitors
« Reply #2 on: December 15, 2016, 02:23:12 AM »
Hi,

 Same setup too, with two screens, never had this problem.

 is it happening with every scene, every project?

Bye,

 Jean

JellyHair

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Re: uGUI flickers when using Mac with two monitors
« Reply #3 on: December 15, 2016, 10:27:50 AM »
That's really odd that you're not seeing it.

To be honest I was surprised when I googled the problem and didn't seen anyone else who had it because in our studio 4 of us use Macs (one 13"MBP and three 15" all retina) and it's reproducible on all of them.

Yes happens in every scene and every project. Just to check I started a new project and did a fresh install of Playmaker from the asset store. You can see the results in this video. As soon as I move the playmaker editor onto the other monitor the UI starts flickering.

You can download this project here




jeanfabre

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Re: uGUI flickers when using Mac with two monitors
« Reply #4 on: December 19, 2016, 03:22:36 AM »
Hi,

 how do you connect the second monitor?

Downloaded your project, did exactly what you did and it doesn't flicker, odd!

Bye,

 Jean

JellyHair

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Re: uGUI flickers when using Mac with two monitors
« Reply #5 on: December 19, 2016, 07:17:10 AM »
I've tried it connected through HDMI and Displayport. Had the same issue on both. Tried different monitors which had different resolutions too...

BUT! I've done some more investigation and figured out a solution:

1, It doesn't occur when you have your game window at a fixed pixel resolution, only when you use free aspect (or any other aspect ratio fixed viewport rather than fixed pixel).

2, It is definitely the canvas resizing - see this video which shows scene view and the canvas growing when the playmaker window is on the second screen.

3, It seems to be resolution dependant. If you have the main screen on the retina display and the playmaker editor on the 1080p display then the canvas gets smaller. If you have the opposite (PM on 1080p and main window on retina) the canvas gets bigger.

This points towards something funny happening with rendering the playmaker editor window at different resolutions effecting the size of the uGUI Canvas. So...

You can set apps to open in 'low resolution' mode on a retina MBP:


Hooray! This completely fixed the flickering!

Issue fixed but it's a little worrying that Playmaker seems to do odd things to Unity on high resolution displays...

jeanfabre

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Re: uGUI flickers when using Mac with two monitors
« Reply #6 on: December 21, 2016, 03:36:30 AM »
Hi,

 Have you tried the same thing but with the Asset Store window instead of PlayMaker? or another complex custom editor window?

 Bye,

 Jean