Custom AnimGraph Node not working on Standalone Game or Packaged Build

Development Programming & Scripting
1

Gretings, I made a Custom AnimGraph Node, properly separating it into the Runtime and Editor Modules, and having it work as intended.
That was until I tried testing it as a Standalone Game, the code inside the Custom Node seems to just not be executing, the skeletal mesh just stands in its reference pose, I also have various AddOnScreenDebugMessage that don’t show up either.

The project Packages without errors, but when launching the executable I get the same behaviour.

To test If I made a programming error inside my Node’s h or cpp files, I made a new custom AnimGraph Node where I just copy pasted the code from the TwoWayBlend AnimGraph Node. I am still getting the same behaviour in this new node, where it works as intended inside editor but not in Packaged builds or in Standalone Game mode.

After this I though I made a mistake in the implementation of modules and found in the AnswerHub this Question

but its solution of manually implementing the modules just causes a packaging error, and the same still happens in standalone game mode.
Here I leave the code inside the Game.Build.cs file

using UnrealBuildTool;

public class PackTest : ModuleRules
{
	public PackTest(TargetInfo Target)
	{
		PublicDependencyModuleNames.AddRange(new string[] { "Core", "CoreUObject", "Engine", "InputCore", "HeadMountedDisplay", "AnimGraphRuntime" });
	}
}

and the GameEditor.Build.cs

using UnrealBuildTool;

public class PackTestEditor : ModuleRules
{

    public PackTestEditor(TargetInfo Target)
    {
        PublicDependencyModuleNames.AddRange(new string[] { "Core", "CoreUObject", "Engine", "InputCore", "HeadMountedDisplay", "PackTest", "UnrealEd","AnimGraph",
                "BlueprintGraph"});
    }
   
}

Any help answering this question will be greatly apreciated.

Edit:

Seems like this was a bug for some time UE-22734

it says that it got resolved in january of 2016, but I’m experiencing the exact same circumstances described in it, so is it still a bug or is my code wrong?

2

The issue you linked is marked as resolve but ‘won’t fix’. No info why, but from the output it looks like they had an editor module dependency in runtime code, so perhaps the issue was unrelated.

Maybe post links to your full log output (packaging log and also packaged build execution log), unless you’re certain there is nothing related in either of them?

I haven’t done custom anim graph nodes before, but if you see this issue even when duplicating an engine node, the only thing I can think of is perhaps it’s related to module load order?

I’d try debugging the blueprint compilation, you should see your custom node being processed here. Though I don’t know if this gets rerun specifically during packaging.

Then at runtime, you can check if it’s being found here. You probably need a source engine install to debug this stuff, but it would at least let you know where the data is getting lost.

3

Hello,

I looked into this for you and the bug was closed as won’t fix because the engineers know that this works in other projects. They suggested looking at “Platformer Game” as an example.

Hope this helps.

4

I ended up redoing everything from scratch in a “cleaner” way, and also tweaking some things, which turned out to work. If anyone is also banging his head doing Custom AnimGraph Nodes, I share my insights on the following forum Post

1 Like
5

Use this setup for MyCustomAnimNodes.uplugin and standalone will work:

"Modules": [
       {
          "Name": "MyAnimNodes",
          "Type": "Runtime",
          "LoadingPhase": "PreDefault"
       },
       {
          "Name": "MyAnimNodesEditor",
          "Type": "UncookedOnly",
          "LoadingPhase": "PreDefault"
       }
    ]
6

that post not solve problem for standalone!