I would appreciate stronger consistenty between PIE/Standalone/Shipped project functionality.

[SwiftIllusion]

@RhythmScript;285153

Obviously this doesn’t SOLVE the problem, since PIE and Standalone/packaged should not BE inconsistent (otherwise what’s the point of a WYSIWYG editor like that?) but for debugging, if you have a general idea of where the problem is, I would try just using a shitload of PrintString calls attached to various events and branches.

Just stack them all over the place (in a duplicate of the project if you can, so you don’t have to go back and find them all t remove them) and just have them print what they’re doing when they do it. This may at least help narrow down where the issue is (you can see when functions are called in a different order, for example with initialization of things, or where functions aren’t called when they should be, etc).

This is how I debug interactions between multiple blueprints; a call prints on one BP “[whatever]Sent!”, then the other prints “[whatever]Received!”, and then maybe I print the value that should have been sent or print success and fail messages after a branch or switch that relies on it, etc. Usually this enables me to pin down when the problem is an incorrect reference or one object begins play after another rather than before, etc.

For example, with stuck enemies print their capsule collision hits, print whenever their AI is instructed to move, print when they’re possessed, etc. You can then tell if it’s a collision issue in PIE, or if your navmesh is improperly generated, oe if enemies are spawning without their AI controllers, etc. Obviously those things SHOULDN’T happen if it works in PIE but it would at least get you closer to a useful bug report for AnswerHub if you can’t work around the issue…

Yeah that’s how I feel, Unreal Engine is an incredible WYSIWYG editor…except, it doesn’t really hold true to that when it breaks inconsistently when trying to share the project.

Thanks a lot for your response, I have used print strings to debug things when developing the game inside the editor too, however as mentioned it doesn’t really solve the issue regrettably, especially when I would have to test both the standalone game, and the shipped game, and then I wouldn’t even know if a workaround I might have been able to come up with would work, and if I spent time developing it-I would then have to retest it both in standalone and shipped, and I can’t even imagine how long that would take when the game has longer content that needs to be tested.

The problem also extends to the fact that some of these bugs seem to be inconsistent, for example the enemies in the first room seem to at least see me and attack, but when entering more rooms some of the enemies don’t even rotate towards me-though they are playing the run animation so their behavior tree should have triggered for them to turn towards me. (It’s nothing to do with navmesh as I don’t use that for my AI).

I just really really wish that I could develop a game and test it and expect as I should that I could at any point share what I have working with others, but that doesn’t seem to be the case and it’s incredibly demotivating to not even know if or when I could ever expect my game to function for others as it does for me, can’t exactly ask anyone that may want to try my game to download Unreal Engine and send them a copy of my project especially when this is the first I hope to develop commercially.
Hence my feedback hoping they’ll put more focus into making their engine export what you expect it to export as functional.