I’ve seem to have come across a bug that causes my game to crash on my android device but not in the editor and I was able to isolate the cause by an obscure post on the forums but the post was made private(or otherwise disappeared) so I could only read the brief description that was shown in my google search result which reads as follows.
** * “A combination that causes the crash is: 1) Static lighting on levels 2) Having skeletal mesh with an animator 3) Unloading streamed level instance (safe to hide, but setting ‘ShouldBeLoaded’ to false crashes the game)” * **
The crashes I experienced failed to provide any glaring errors in the editor log (when running on my phone connected to the PC) and it never crashed in the editor. It crashed exclusively on the android device, the crashes were sporadic as sometimes I was able to progress fairly far but on other attempts it would crash rather quickly.
In my example the game is very uniform so it wasn’t like it crashed when loading a specific level, it just seemed to sporadically crash when the game would load/unload level segments.
In my case I have a simple phone game which uses level streaming to load in the continuous level segments, I have skeletal based morph target animations for a specific splash effect, and I had previously used static lighting but since then I converted to unlit materials therefore I was conveniently able to disable static lighting support in my project and like magic my crashing issue vanished.
I wish I could give credit to whoever made the quoted comment above because there’s no telling how much time I would’ve spent trying to figure this out… I believe this to be a bug but I’m not sure if it’s already documented or not. I did search for these exact symptoms and nothing but the since removed forum post talks about it afaik.
Steps to reproduce would be to create a new project in 4.26 (I also had this issue in 4.25) to be ran on an android device that streams in/out some basic levels (There are some youtube tutorials to set something like this up), have static lighting enabled, and then I think it’s necessary to also have something in your scene that repeatedly plays some kind of skeletal mesh animation like a quick morph target animation. Then you must launch the project on your android device.
I know this isn’t the designated area for bug reports but I was hoping an advanced user would see this and reproduce it in the way I described to confirm that it’s not just a whack issue on my end. If requested I’d be happy to share my little splash animation to save someone the time of having to create their own just for an odd ball test.