I think this issue is now on Joachim's radar so hopefully pretty soon. He's got a lot on his plate, but he has been pretty good about sorting out crash stuff once he is aware of it.

Sorry, Chris is correct. It's the second time you hit play. my apologies on the poor intial repro reporting.

its any shader for me. Just updated to 5.4.1f1 and the issue still is still there.

GPU instancing sounds fantastic in concept, but the issues are in the implementation. Some nice guy in the unity forums made a version of the big unity standard shader that i tried....my scene ran slower(doubt its that guy's fault, he just implemented based off of their docs)...so either it's going to be some growing pains and more of a 5.5 feature and/or its more a situational feature based off its caveats(no lightmaps ect..)...maybe it is good on foliage and other things that are too dense for dynamic batching but have properties that make them unable to be flagged static. While i will welcome when we can get the ability to add these features in Shader Forge, it is prudent to see unity actually implement this in their shaders first and getting the bugs out before Joachim burns cycles implementing it (imho).

here is the error that pops up:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object

System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Reflection/MonoMethod.cs:222)

i'm sure its on 1.27, files are timestamped to today/yesterday. SF will not open from either method available. i get 20 some warning all about formatting when i import SF into my project, all similar to this... "There are inconsistent line endings in the 'Assets/ShaderForge/Editor/InternalResources/GPU Rendering/SFN_Parallax/SFN_Parallax_UV.shader' script. Some are Mac OS X (UNIX) and some are Windows.This might lead to incorrect line numbers in stacktraces and compiler errors. Many text editors can fix this using Convert Line Endings menu commands."

so i pulled down 1.27, and unfortunately there still seems to be a problem. Shader Forge window pops up when launched and instantly closes. it tried it in both a clean and working project. Any thoughts on this?

sqwee! I am looking forward to this. Thanks so much.

Longtime fan. Love Shader Forge. When do you think 1.27 will be available Joachim? I am on a time sensitive project that is forced to use 5.4.0b23 or higher. I can pop back and make stuff in 5.3 and then copy it to 5.4 but the workflow is not great moving through projects like that.