#Blessed [Asset corruption]

I was wondering if anyone else has been blessed by the yourprojectisnowscrewed god?

isn’t it great, isn’t it grand, doesn’t it just make your heart warm whenever the god of broken dreams appears just when you are getting any traction in your game? No? well that’s what I though at first, at second, at third, at fourth, but now at the fifth time the lord has graced me I now see. I see that really the lord just wants me to show me reality, and that reality is that everything is bad, everything is evil, everything needs to DIE.

Seriously now.
I have a problem with every single one of my 100% blueprint projects. they always at some point get a project crushing bug that disallows saving or compiling anything. I can still PIE but when I want to exit PIE insta crash.

I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong, I work 100% in blueprints, I NEVER touch any config files, I ALWAYS have a full compilable game when I end and save my editing session (With the exception of when the editor crashes because UMG is still buggy as hell).

Am I just cursed? what can I do?

Id also like to add that I can sort of fix this by finding the Cancerous file through process of elimination and removing that however normally that is a major file like the Main character so it is still a massive setback because ALL the references to it are broken.

Not only you my friend :slight_smile: Blueprints are great, but still have plenty of deadly traps waiting for you. You must be careful and make backups often.
Back in 4.5/4.6, I’ve had to recreate my project from scratch because one hard bug appeared and practically broken all my blueprints. It took me 5 days, but eventually I’ve spotted the bug and reported it, now it’s fixed.
My way to spot ‘bug-causers’ is to recreate problematic blueprint structure in a new project, until bug will appear. i report it to epic with repro steps, find some workaround, wait for a fix.
Well… Patience is a virtue :wink:

PS. Epic does great job improving blueprint stability in recent versions, 4.8 is good comparing to previous versions, and I think that 4.9 will be even better and more stable.

so, i gonna make one extra backup right now

*Proverbs 16:3
Commit thy works unto the LORD, and thy thoughts shall be established.
*
I have been trying for about 2 years now on how to transition from web development to games development. Things just ain’t happening. But God’s ways are higher.

On a less “spiritual” note, yes, backup, trace where the problem is, try rebuilding the project and assets, use source control.

I am very new to Unreal Engine 4 but from Unity 4 and 5 what I learnt was you need to always be able to “rebuild” your project by creating a new project and adding assets. That is, never depend on one big bloated set of files to “hopefully compile” and not have (any) backup to revert to.

Don’t forget (secure) cloud backups are important too in case all your local storage gets wiped out.

Good luck.

Well said sir! :slight_smile:
Good to see people still quoting that.

Everyone’s advice on doing backups and using source control is excellent, and should definitely be followed as a standard practice of development. I’m certainly sorry to hear about corrupted Blueprint assets though. Please let Epic know about these cases when they arise so that we can try to prevent the issue from continuing to occur. Ideally, you can move the asset into a new, empty project (along with any dependencies) where the issue can still be experienced and supply this test case project to Epic (under "Bug Reports on the AnswerHub) for further investigation.

Thanks

Is there a way to test all blueprints for some sort of corruptions, some time ago i had a macro function library which was crashing engine on start after i moved to new engine version. Or since it compiles and working now at current version its should not have any corruptions inside?

You could create an automation test via Session Frontend that opens all of your blueprint assets.

Nice tools.

There’s also Unit Testing:

https://developer.salesforce.com/page/How_to_Write_Good_Unit_Tests

I think that can apply to Blueprints as well.

Because in code you don’t want to just test if something compiles.

So there could be a set of Blueprints that you run that specifically test things like making sure the relevant actors are there, variables are correctly initialised, global variables are set, etc.

This can help in debugging at runtime since one would run those, if there are any errors you know your runtime is “buggy” from the start.

For example, you have a Blueprint that makes a particle system turn on depending on the location of the player. Eg. when player reaches within x distance some things explode and fire particles start emitting.

The unit test would be to specify the location of the player (without any user control ie. move the player there in the unit test) and see if the fire particles were triggered (the expected result).

This unit test succeding means that your player is set up properly, your particle system exists and is “prepped”, and is ready to trigger, etc.

This is better than the traditional *if !(null) *.

My 2 cents from Unity 4/5 and Web land.

Edit: I found this question from someone else on Answerhub: How to run unit tests? - C++ - Epic Developer Community Forums

It happened again… Gunshot to the face

Edit: Its not that I lose some progress that rustles my jimmies, its that I have done everything seeming correct and the universe still screws me.

Edit: AnswerHub page

Hopefully someone expert can help. Were you using version control? Any way to revert to a pre-corrupted version?

If you are using a Mac, Time Machine can be very helpful.

I don’t use version control but as luck would have it I had made a backup only 2 days earlier and only really made some UMG widgets so I didn’t lose much (This time).

Maybe I need to get some of that version control.

Edit: Version control is snazzy as heck

what is problem to add perforce?

I actually am using Subversion for my source control now.
I believe Perforce is a premium thing so I didn’t even look at it.

20$ http://allarsblog.com/2014/09/25/Setup-Perforce-Digital/
free http://www.surfacetensionstudios.com/tutorial-free-perforce-version-control-with-ue4-assembla/
also there are helix cloud, which is in beta, but it works and have straight forward setup

Perforce, Subversion and GIT are all free and incredibly well documented.

Honestly without source control you’re destined to lose work. I never do anything in a project without setting it up anymore. SVN is probably the easiest one to use (from setup > use). I recommend Perforce though personally, but I didn’t set the server up at work so not sure how easy it is to create a local depot.

I should really do a tutorial series on setting up local depots… I feel like this is something a lot of people could benefit from.