Can't get passed "ConnectingToNewRemoteSession" in Viewing a Remotely Rendered Model Tutorial

Question

Hello,

I have gone through the Viewing a Remotely Rendered tutorial twice, following step by step as instructed and can't seem to get through the "ConnectingToNewRemoteSession" message on the editor to then be able to see the model. I'm aware it says it can take up to 5 mins. The first time I waited close to 20 mins and nothing happened. The second time waited for 10 mins and still wouldn't get passed that stage. The first time I created the project from scratch following every step. The second time I downloaded the Complete Tutorial given by Microsoft to use as a reference and just finished configuring the settings and tried it and still got the same result. It does advance to "RemoteSessionReady" but again it simply stays there. I can't see what I'm missing. I'm using Unity version 2019.4.17f1 and used all the packages and versions recommended in the tutorial. Any idea what could be causing this? I saw in the tutorial that it could be something related with the Update function. I checked my script with the one from the Complete Tutorial version and they are exactly the same. Is it perhaps something related with the credentials? As I have no clue what the difference between "Account Domain" and "Account Authentication Domain" is. I have looked everywhere on my Azure portal and all I could find is the Account Domain but not an Account Authentication Domain. Is there something that I'm missing?

Answer 1

Hi David,

your GPU is a Broadwell (Gen8) based one, we only support Skylake (Gen9) based GPUs and above due to hardware constraints, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology#Broadwell for a list of intel integrated GPUs and their corresponding generation.
The trace unfortunately does not show this and neither does the log, we will hopefully improve this gap in the near future.

Cheers,
Christopher

Answer 2

Thank you so much for your question and apologies for the trouble. We will make a pass over our documentation to provide clearer guidance on this, but in the meantime please note that:

• "Account Authentication Domain" field should be set to the "Account Domain" you find in your Azure portal. Please check out Configure authentication section if you have not already.
• "Account Domain" field should be set to the Remote Rendering region you are would like to run your session in, typically a region closest to your physical location.

If you are still having trouble with remote rendering session readiness, would you please share session ids for us to investigate?

Answer 3

Hello Katya,

Thank you very much for getting back to me and for the explanations. It is much appreciated.

I had previously looked at the "Configure Authentication" documentation, and as you can see in the link it does describe what the Account Domain is, but it doesn't mention Account Authentication Domain. Hence, my confusion.

Yesterday, I adjusted the settings in the project based on your explanation (thank you), and the switch from just ConnectingToRuntime to RemoteSessionReady did happen quicker. It happened around the 3 min mark. However, again I waited for things to progress and still nothing happened. I stopped it aboout after 6 mins or so and in the Unity console I could see that both ConnectingToRuntime and RemoteSessionReady had been called a total of 150 times and still there had been no progress.

The Session info was the following:
Host name: -was empty-
Id: 27cb5988-b584-4523-b763-eef7033d8c1e

I ran another session this morning to see if anything happened and after 11 mins still it didn't progress and remained stuck in the same stage. By the time I stopped it ConnectingToRuntime and RemoteSessionReady had been called a total of 350 times.

The Session Id was: 65267c26-a9c6-4d31-ab4c-9c65efe09a07

Please let me know if you would need and other information and I'd be more than happy to send it over.

Again thank you for all your help and I hope you have a nice start of the week.

All the best,

David

Answer 4

Hello David,

These two remote rendering sessions, 27cb5988-b584-4523-b763-eef7033d8c1e and 65267c26-a9c6-4d31-ab4c-9c65efe09a07, had been successfully created and reported as ready. However I see no connection attempts for either of these sessions in the server side logs indicating a client-side issue.

Could you please double check your firewall settings per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/remote-rendering/overview/system-requirements#network-firewall to make sure remote rendering VM ports are not being blocked preventing connection from being established?

To get further assistance, please record a client-side trace per instructions in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/remote-rendering/how-tos/performance-tracing and share it with us.

Alternatively, you can try https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/remote-rendering/quickstarts/render-model to see if you are able to connect with that. This is our minimal example that does a print out on connection failures.

Hope this helps, and please keep us posted!

Answer 5

Hello Katya,

Thank you for getting back to me.

I have spent quite some time this morning trying to figure things out with the Firewall settings and see if it is blocking the corresponding ports. Unfortunately, after a couple of hours of going down different rabbit holes I haven't to make much progress on that end. I tried different tools as checking from the command line to see which ports are active/being blocked and it doesn't display anything. I then tried to activate the logs and check for dropped ports and 1 for some reason my laptop doesn't open the folder where the Firewall logs are, and when I put in the direct directory on File Explorer it says it doesn't exist. So really have no clue yet if the ports are being blocked or not.

So I then decided to try the quick start guide (which I had tried previously and also couldn't make it work) and this one quite quickly showed up an error after I pressed play in the editor. The error message I got was the following:

On the console the output was:
General error connecting to runtime: NotInitialized
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
RemoteRendering:LogMessage(String, Boolean) (at Assets/Scripts/RemoteRendering.cs:156)
<ConnectAndLoadModel>d__30:MoveNext() (at Assets/Scripts/RemoteRendering.cs:347)
System.Threading.Tasks.TaskCompletionSource`1:TrySetException(Exception)
Microsoft.Azure.RemoteRendering.ConnectToRuntimeAsync:OnCompleted(ConnectToRuntimeAsync) (at Library/PackageCache/com.microsoft.azure.remote-rendering@0.1.76/Runtime/Service/Async.cs:486)
Microsoft.Azure.RemoteRendering.ConnectToRuntimeAsync:CompletedStaticHandler(UInt64, IntPtr) (at Library/PackageCache/com.microsoft.azure.remote-rendering@0.1.76/Runtime/Service/RemoteRenderingApiUnity.cs:7270)
Microsoft.Azure.RemoteRendering.NativeLibrary:arr_remote_manager_update(UInt64)
Microsoft.Azure.RemoteRendering.RemoteManager:Update() (at Library/PackageCache/com.microsoft.azure.remote-rendering@0.1.76/Runtime/Service/RemoteRenderingApiUnity.cs:10511)
RemoteRendering:LateUpdate() (at Assets/Scripts/RemoteRendering.cs:182)

I'm not sure if that provides some information/hint on what the problem could be. If it doesn't and it is a dead end, I guess I'll try and activate the performance tracing and see what I can find. Need to work on other things right now but will give it another go in the evening to see if I can get more information.

Thank you so much for all your help and patience Katya. It is much appreciated.

I hope you have a nice day.

All the best,

David