Unity 5.5 build process hangs at "Packaging assets - globalgamemanagers.assets"

I'm updating a project from Unity 5.4.3 to 5.5.0f3. Everything seems fine until I try and make a build of the project. The build process proceeds as normal until it hits the Packaging assets - globalgamemanagers.assets stage. At this point it hangs indefinitely. I've left the window open for an hour or so and nothing changes. The same project builds fine in 5.4.3.

I tried googling the problem and couldn't find much that was relevant to the issue. Anyone else having this issue or know a way to resolve it? It's frustrating as the rest of the upgrade process was very smooth.

 

I had a similar problem, where the build took really long. I found that the Always Included Shaders option was the problem. The list contained many custom shaders, where each featured many variants due to the shader_feature keyword.

I believe I read somewhere in this forum that Unity compiles all shader variants, even when not used, if it's added to the Always Included Shaders list and this can become a gazillion variants quickly and thus takes a lot of time to complete.

In my case, I simply removed all those custom shaders from that list, so that only Unity built-in shaders stayed there and the build times went down to normal again.

 

That was indeed the problem @Peter77 - funnily enough I had this exact problem years ago and had since solved it so it never occurred to me that the problem may have returned just from upgrading to 5.5. Very strange, but thanks for your insight!

 

Even if you get it building fine, also check out the documentation for the image effects you may have in your project as they usually carry many keywords that could be removed reducing compilation time and preventing unused shader junk in your final build.

 

In my case it was Beautify, after deleting it it builded in less than one minute

 

Use the Build Options button located on top of Beautify’s inspector to automatically disable effects that you don’t use and speed up compilation. Note that the build will take some time the first time Unity compiles the shaders - then they get cached and next builds don’t have to build them again. Check out the docs (FAQ section) for more details.