Something rather strange happened today.
I worked on my project until half past one in the morning, saved everything cleanly and then opened it again today.
Bad surprise:
I couldn’t move anything in the level anymore, I could select the transform tool but I couldn’t move meshes back and forth in the level. As if a snap from 9999999999999 had been set.
Also dragging new Static Meshes into the Level was strange. I could only drag and drop to the 0,0,0 relative location of the viewport camera, no matter where i drag and dropped into the level…
Furthermore, the light setting in the level was different. The sky looked completely different in the level and for me this was a death sentence for my project. Thank God I make regular backups.
The last backup was 3 days ago, so I copied the latest content from the bugged project and pasted it into the backup from 3 days ago. Everything is up to date again.
But have you ever experienced something like this?
Is it possible that a hacker is tracking the progress of my project and secretly changing things?
Is it technically possible? If you were on the watch list of some government agency (The Mossad Are After You!) then, technically, it might be possible. But they wouldn’t just mess with the project, they’d either do nothing, or do something much more sinister.
Is it at all probably that the problem is some third party connecting to your computer? Not at all. You either accidentally hit some key, or made some typo, or tickled some bug in the engine that caused that behavior. If you saved the corrupted version as well, it might be interesting to do a diff between the old and the new to see what changed, especially around project/editor settings, to see what the problem was.
There’s lots of generic utilities floating around, so do a search and take your pick. But for now Windiff is one maybe (compares files / folders and files individually). But its not particularly new or feature rich. As for the other stuff in the thread title… Here’s a few observations…
Unreal is capable of crashing and trashing the config files at any time. There was a period where UE would trash these just closing down the editor normally and reset all the Project and Editor settings. Its a pain as it silently resets Epic USAGE telemetry settings, sets BP splines back to their defaults along with many other useful settings.
The editor often eats up a huge amount of storage space temporarily without warning. PC’s often ship with little space, so its easy to not notice saves failing silently. After appearing to actually perform a save, the only clue is the ‘*’ next to the map tab name. If you rush to close the editor out in a hurry, nothing is actually saved, so watch out for that. On the flip-side Auto-Save is a favorite for some. But it can also crash the editor when you’re out of storage, and then you lose everything that’s unsaved in the editor.
Ran into a possible NTFS glitch a couple of times. After making substantial changes to a map while working late, the map timestamp was updated, but nothing else was when it was opened the next day. Not a storage space issue this time, it was OS or Editor. Not sure how to troubleshoot this, as Eventvwr logs are useless. Can’t even pair drive-assigned-letters to actual drive references, its all so opaque (thanks Microsoft). Must find a way to investigate NFTS Journal / Transaction failures sometime. SysInternals maybe…
As for being hacked, you’re not the first person to think that. Your particular use of the net is probably a good predictor of your risk. But for most the risk should be low… And if you want you can always work unplugged. The Launcher is so adversarial and useless anyway, its better to manage all your projects and assets yourself. A cheap Linux box with Lutris offers a better Launcher UX too. That’s one of the pluses of Unreal. Unity has phone-home DRM. But UE lets you use the editor 100% air-gapped. Not that Epic can’t be trusted. Its more a case of who wants to pay Microsoft for an OS that behaves more like Meta Facebook / Instagram. They’re ‘free’ at least. But paying for Forced-Updates and Phone-Home telemetry about user search preferences, tastes and machine usage??? Its no wonder MS is more valuable than Apple.
