I don’t think it’s actually possible to make a game using blueprints.
Doing even simple things keeps leading to project corruption. I post and ask how to fix it and no one knows so no one responds.
Last night my project corrupted, mostly through my own fault with over-zealous deleting. Today I tried to reconstruct everything from scratch and it took ages, I was at the last step.
I moved two blueprints into a folder a directory below. Project is now corrupted again.
So, how do you recover a project ruined by a corrupt blueprint? Not a specific one, but in general.
[=Veovis Muad’dib;201072]
In future, the best way is to simply revert in Perforce/Git/SVN.
Without version control, I’m not sure. Have no experience with corrupted project myself.
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Thanks for the tip. I’ve never even looked into it because I’m new to the coding side of things. My understanding of git is they’re aimed at open source, so my game wouldn’t qualify? I remember making an account before.
What would you recommend for a solo dev/artist making a game? Something quick, basic, and free preferably. I wouldn’t mind if the version control simply backed up to my external hdd on my media PC in the lounge. Online would be better, though.
I recently saw in answer hub the other day with someone with the same kinda issue, but can not find it again. Have a look around there and you might find your solution.
You definitely want to do frequent backups. If I am correct Blueprints commit properly with Git and Perforce, so look into those (The former for simplicity since you’re new).
I tried perforce. It doesn’t do what I want and seems incredibly counter-intuitive and convoluted for one person just wanting a backup.
This is what I want: It should have a backup of my project stored on the server. When a file changes locally it should make a backup. If something crashes I should be able to go through the file history and restore.
It should be automatic and behind the scenes and only there when I need it to be.
Before I used perforce, everyday I would make a copy of the project and delete old copies if needed. Simple but at least you’ve got a backup if things go wrong.
The problem I found with creating simple backups is that if you corrupt your actual project file then it won’t even matter because you will have to create the blueprints again in a new project. So maybe at least keep copies of the project file as well.
But yeah, source control is really the best way to save yourself. I would also just recommend being very careful with any moving or deleting of files. It is like playing Jenga with your project.
When I am not moving or deleting existing files, then everything works great forever. If I delete something that I know for sure wasn’t referenced in any of my blueprints but just happened to be in the project, things start to explode.
I think there are some leftover or junk files called redirects in folder of unreal project. Those tend to mess everything in.
I tend to close finished (or just matured) blueprints into macros, comment them well then save as macro library.
If anything gets corrupted i can copy macros from backup and recreate easily.
However once i messed whole folder structure to the point that i recreated whole project, but with macros copied over.
And yes blueprints are not meant for huge games, they are fast tool to make small things. Use them for what they are made for.
Epic showing off they can do games, is just makreting, there is reason they use C++ for Fortnite instead of pure blueprints.
I disagree that blueprints are not meant for huge games. That is like saying you can’t make huge games in Lua, C#, or Python. You can do it if you know how to handle the nuances of blueprint. There are cases where C++ makes more sense than blueprint, but that is mostly special performance cases and unique features not yet exposed to blueprint. Plus, if you have a team of C++ programmers, why not move certain things into C++ after prototyping them in BP? Would be a waste of manpower to do otherwise.
As far as I have seen, if you can avoid circular dependencies or otherwise corrupting the file system, blueprints are gold.
The project itself shouldn’t be corrupt by moving the files to new folders, are you making sure to rereference those blueprints in areas that you have called them (other blueprints, etc)? We are currently looking into methods to automatically re-reference when files are moved, however for now the best practice outside of simply not moving a file is to make sure to re-reference any file that you have moved in any areas you have referenced it. This will prevent errors/crashes as those files are no longer looking in the wrong location for the file. Additionally, you can go to your backup folder in \Unreal Projects\PROJECTNAME\saved\backup\ to access previous versions if you make a change that causes an error. you have to do at that point is move whichever backup files you need into the appropriate content folder and you will have access to them. For instance, if you move a blueprint and it causes a crash and won’t re-open, you can manually move that file or the backup file into the original folder, re-open the editor and then rereference as needed to prevent future crashes.
You dont need source controls, in the folder youProjects\Saved\Backup they are copys of your blueprints, if you use autosave. So you only lost the last 10 minuts of work. Change the name and overwrite the file.