DevVlog 11 - Unity vs Android: Uploading Symbol Files

welcome back to the dev vlog today we're going to continue looking at android development in unity and this time i want to focus on something that has puzzled me for some time and i have finally worked it out so i wanted to share it with you and share for posterity for when i forget later that is how do i upload the symbol files when i upload my build to the google play store you might ask why would i want to do that well if there is a bug and there's a crash and some user gets a gets a crash that will generate a crash report and that crash report can come back to us as developers we can look into those look at them and if the symbols are included we can see the call stack of what it was that was going on at the time that that user had their problem and maybe we can use that to figure out what the issue is and fix it in a patch for future versions so it's certainly helpful to have that and google allows you to upload those so we want to take advantage of it let's see how to do it i'll be showing the spur punk project for this one and this project is small enough we do not have to do the the asset bundle packing that i was showing with the previous package this the entire package fits in a small enough that we can upload it as a single package so let's see how to build that using unity just using the standard unity dialog you can build this if you've got all your settings set up we will want to build the app bundle definitely want that checked and it doesn't come checked by default but you want to create a symbols zip file so we'll go ahead and build that uh ready to go i'm gonna put it in the build folder and i just happen to this is my num my naming convention i use the year 2022 the month february the date the 13th and then i put an a for the first version i did today all right so let's wait for that to build so welcome back the build has finished let's take a look at what we got we have here our aab file we'll be uploading that directly into google play and as soon as that upload has finished you then have the opportunity to add the zip file that contains the symbols now this would appear to be the file that's side by side with the aap file however it depends on which version of unity you're currently in if you're in the latest version of unity you're fine that's the zip file that you want in fact actually there's one other checkbox you need to check we'll look at that in a minute what if you're in an older version of unity what do you need to do why is that different for some reason unity has chosen not to back in their fix for this into older versions so if you have a game built in an older version of unity for example this is 2018.4.13 in this particular version let's take a look at what we get inside the symbol file let's open it up it's just a zip file here we are here's the contents let's unzip those and we'll just put them side by side right in that same folder all right we get two folders because i have selected to build both the arm 7 and the arm 64 architecture and inside each one are three files the so debug the sim and the sim.so file and we'll see that's in both of the different architectures what do we do to fix these step one delete the debug file from both we don't want the debug file step two you need to rename these extensions google doesn't want it to be called dot sim it wants it to be called dot sl so we'll change it change that one and this one that says sim iso that'll confuse it to just call it eso okay and let's do that for both architectures this one becomes so and this one becomes just.so next we need to zip that back up and this is a mistake that i made i put them both into a folder and then zip that folder google will not take that it has to be just like it was if we look at this again inside the zip is two folders immediately inside there so let's zip up these two folders just like that just select them and then if you right click you can send to zipped folder it's built right into windows you don't need anything fancy okay there we go this that is the zip file that you need to upload and so far google has been accepting that um so that's the trick now i mentioned it's a little bit different if you're using modern versions of unity if you've got version 2021.1 and newer you don't have to do those shenanigans instead you can just use unity's base interface directly so here is my stream test example and i am in 2021.2.8 so that's newer than the 0.1 version and if i go here to the build settings let me show you where that is right underneath the build app bundle checkbox which you definitely have is the create symbols.zip dropdown and now it's not checkbox it's a drop-down and we can choose which symbols we want i believe it defaults to disabled which is no symbols we're going to want our symbols so we'll choose public and the we do want by the way we do want public not debugging the debugging symbols includes extra symbols that we would need uh for ourselves we just want the public ones the ones that we're going to upload to the public server so if you are using the base unity dialog box to do your build you just hit build right from here and you're ready to go on the other hand if you're using those asset packs those asset bundles that we talked about in the previous video then you only need to go to the google build and build menu and build from there let's do that stream test build android uh and let's build a stream test 2202 13a and let's see how that turns out all right and it's finished let's take a look at what we got here we are we have the aab file and right next to it the zip file that unity happily made for us let's take a look what's in there and make sure it conforms to our rules okay we once again have the two architecture folders and in there now only the dot so files i also noticed there's three of them here instead of the two that we used to get so far that seems to work just fine so there you have it that's how you do the z the symbol file for android if you're doing a unity build if you're using a modern version if you've kept up to date this is no problem just check the dropbox and that will generate you exactly what you need if you're on an older build prepare to be frustrated by that you will have to unzip the stuff and make those changes to the extensions and then re-zip it before you can upload okay that's it for tonight and i'll see you out there

Channel: Matt Whiting

Views: 1,882

Keywords: DevVlog, unity, android, symbol, symbols, symbol files, zip

Id: 1mNotWNpijo

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 14 2022