When things don't work, check everything. Everything.

Recently, I faced a frustrating yet common issue in development. Everything looked logically sound. There were no errors. Yet, things just didn’t work. This can happen with anything, and in my case, it was with unity store assets. The project was URP (Universal Render Pipeline). I was importing 3D URP assets that had good reviews and were very simple. Yet, they did not work. Everything was pink. I checked the compatibility. I tried many of the myriad solutions found online. I reimported the assets. I tried different assets, then repeated the same process with those assets. Everything, yet still nothing.

After a lot of running in circles, I started to realize something. Many of the things the online solutions told me to do were not there. I initially thought that was because Unity might have moved or renamed them—not an uncommon occurrence. But now, I was getting skeptical. "Nothing works... maybe it has something to do with the options I can't find. All the URP assets do not work in this supposedly URP project. Surely it can't be THAT..." Then I did the thing I should have done from the start: I checked the project settings.

Lo and behold, in the graphics section, there was no Scriptable Render Pipeline setting assigned... The project wasn't URP. We were all just told it was, so we believed it. No one had checked.

You might be thinking, “That should have been easy to spot.” Trust me, it wasn't. Doubly so when working during Ramadan. So always doubt the validity of everything.

That concludes my suspense horror story. I hope you are now paranoid.

‍

‍