Hey Ben,

I’m getting a large number of NullReferenceExceptions when I try out the Detonator-TestWall scene. I created a clean project (no Standard Assets), added the Detonator.unityPackage, opened the Detonator-TestWall scene and hit run. It seems fine and dandy until I click the scene, at which point it detonates exceptions into the console (but the scene is left without any explosions).

A brief summary of the Exceptions are as follows:

NullReferenceException
UnityEngine.Material..ctor (UnityEngine.Shader shader) 
Detonator.DefaultHeatwaveMaterial ()   (at Assets/Detonator/System/Detonator.cs:434)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
Detonator.UpdateComponents ()   (at Assets/Detonator/System/Detonator.cs:288)

NullReferenceException
DetonatorSound.Update ()   (at Assets/Detonator/System/DetonatorSound.cs:27)
    (a whole bunch of these)

Preceding all of them is this message:

Shader 'HeatDistort': no subshaders can run on this graphics card

Which leads me to believe that either my graphics card is too weak (it’s an NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB GDDR3) or Detonator is relying on some Unity Pro features that I don’t have (I have just Unity Indie). Either way, I hope we can figure this out (I hope it’s not just me forgetting something stupid) and best wishes!

Slippy

P.S. Also consider putting your project up on GitHub. Although it’s less formally organized, it’s open nature might result in Denotator off-shoot libraries that do crazy things you never imagined it could do… without you having to lift a finger. ;-D

Alright, I investigated further and it seems that:

• The problem occurs with all explosion types (in the test scene), not just the one(s) using heatwave distortions.

• The exceptions can be prevented for all explosion types (even the ones using Pro features) by replacing the 2 occurrences of «Shader.Find(“HeatDistort”)» with «Shader.Find(“Bumped Diffuse”)». It doesn’t look pretty, but it works.

I’m sure you’re thinking what I’m thinking for a solution; either:

• Have both a HeatDistortPlain and a HeatDistortSubshader shader and have the code choose the one to use depending on Unity type or graphics card (I’m still not sure which is the culprit).

• Have the HeatDistort shader decide whether to use subshaders or not internally.

Regardless, (now that I can see it in action) the framework looks fantastic! I’m trying to figure out we can work it into our Unity Awards entry… I don’t know if I can survive now without explosions of this caliber. ;-D

Great job and keep up the good work!

-Slippy

Hi Ben. I’ve recently downloaded and checked out Detonator, awesome work

I have an issue you may be able to give some advice on. I’m able to open the unity scene in my project and it runs no problem. But when I try to use the prefabs in my own scene I can’t see anything. The explosions do appear in the hierarchy when instantiated though when I pause and look in to the instantiated explosion inspector, it shows all the material texture slots as being empty. When I do this in the detonator scene, all the textures can be found. Can you tell me how to resolve this issue?

Sorry I can’t be more specific as I’m not at my Unity computer right now. Please let me know if I can pass you more details.

Thanks for any help you can give, and for Detonator

Best regards, Martin