Issues when using Nova and updating unity.collections to 2.1.4

[NicolasVIscool]

I'm currently evaluating if Nova UI could be a good fit for our next project.

I tried to upgrade unity.collections package to 2.1.4, and it gave me a bunch of errors regarding NativeHashSet, I rebooted Unity and now nothing is rendering, uiblocks components are empty, and I've got some null reference exceptions when I start the scene.

Setup :

• Unity 2022.3.1f1
• Latest Nova Free Trial (1.3.1)
• Project is using Core 2D URP Template
• Everything was ok until I updated the com.unity.collections package (installing com.unity.entities package causes the same issue)

Have you any idea of what I'm doing wrong ?

Thank you very much in advance.

[adgray1]

Thanks for checking out Nova!

You're not doing anything wrong. It appears version 2.1.0-pre.18 of the collections package introduced an API-breaking change, so we'll need to publish an updated version of the free trial asset to support collections v2.1.0-pre.18 or newer (e.g. v2.1.4).

The entities package is dependent on collections v2.1.0-pre.18 and will pull it in automatically, which is why adding com.unity.entities to your project has the same breaking effect.

In the meantime, at least if you don't necessarily need the entities package to proceed with your evaluation, you can downgrade the version of the collections package in your project to v2.1.0-pre.11 or older (v1.4.0 seems to be the latest non-pre-release version that will be compatible) to get Nova working again.

Thank you for bring this to our attention! We'll be sure to update this thread when the updated version of the free trial is available.

[NicolasVIscool]

Thank you very much for this quick reply, I'll try to evaluate it without entities until the update is published.

[NicolasVIscool]

Could you confirm both Nova Free Trial and Nova (paid) are affected by this issue ? Thank you in advance.

[adgray1]

We're only seeing this problem while using the Nova Free Trial, not with Nova (paid).

For some additional context, the API-breaking change Unity introduced in the newer versions of the collections package is subtle. They modified the return type of a NativeList<T> method used by Nova from void * to T * (changelog). Because the free trial is precompiled, it (currently) has a fixed dependency on a method signature that technically no longer exists in the new collections packages. The error comes from the compiler complaining it can't find the exact method the free trial is expecting. Nova (paid) isn't precompiled, so it's able to reference the new method signature, and all the places in Nova expecting a void * return type but now receive a type of T * can handle the type conversion automatically.

[dkonik]

The fix for this has been published (2.0.0)!