A Fix For Unity 2020 Crashes With SteamVR Entering Play Mode

If you are also experiencing Unity 2020 crash/close when trying to make it work with SteamVR like me, the solutions could be here.

First Short Solution:

Upgrade your Unity version to Unity 2020.1.17 or the latest release, you are prompted to create actions file and everything works very well 🙂

Longer Path, Try to solve it with current version:

I was trying to make SteamVR work with Unity 2020.1.6. With no error, when I press play, the editor closes down with no error message. This wasn’t helpful to solve the case so cue Google search, “unity closes when I hiit play”, (yes with the typo).

This answer on StackOverflow lead me to LogFiles page on Unity Docs. As it was stated in the answer I went and looked at Editor logs from “C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Unity\Editor\Editor.log” path and there at the last line I saw the error;

[XR] [OpenVR] [Error] Action manifest file does not exist at path (J:\Work Station\Unity__Fall2020\SteamVR – 2020\Assets\StreamingAssets\SteamVR\actions.json)

In 2019 version of the editor when we enter play mode with no actions for SteamVR Input, we are prompted and create one and if we opt out in creating one we see an error in the console

In 2019 version of the Unity editor we are prompted to create actions if the file does not exist

If we are stubborn to not create one we see this error log in console

To solve this in 2020.1.6 we need to follow Window -> SteamVR Input -> Save and generate (Only the screenshot taken in 2020.1.17, for details have a look at first shorter solution)

Actions to create actions 😀

Then our project will be good to go 🙂

It works with no closing on us now

Hopefully, this will be helpful for your problem too. If there was a point not clear please let me know.
See you in the next explorations.

---

To how to setup SteamVR in Unity 2019 you can have a look at this blog post or the video that I have created.