Hi Epic Games and fellow UE Developers,
I would like to propose a critical feature for future Unreal Engine updates that could save thousands of games from being review-bombed in global markets.
[The Problem]
Many indie and mid-sized developers still use legacy or standard 1-byte ANSI functions for file I/O operations (e.g., saving games to FPaths::ProjectSavedDir()). When a player’s Windows username (%username%) contains non-ASCII characters (Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic, etc.), the path breaks, and the game fails to save or load. This leads to a massive amount of “Mixed” or “Negative” reviews on Steam for otherwise great games.
[The Proposal: Engine-Level Guardrails]
Epic Games should implement a strict build-time check or compiler warning within UBT (Unreal Build Tool) or the engine itself.
- Enforce Safe APIs: Prevent compilation or trigger a severe warning if standard unsafe file operations (like standard
open()or non-wide string path manipulation) are used for standard paths. - Automated Conversion: Force the engine’s file manager to automatically internalize all OS-dependent paths into broad/wide-character types (
wchar_t/FStringsafe methods) under the hood, regardless of how the developer calls it.
If the engine toolchain yells, “Error: You are using an unsafe file path function that will break in Non-ASCII OS environments!” during compilation, developers will fix it before shipping.
Let’s make Unreal Engine truly global and foolproof by eliminating the classic 2-byte character bug from the root!