I would like to draw wider attention to an issue several members of our studio are having in regards to perforce integration. It appears that submitting assets via the perforce client and NOT via the content browser (so far, anyway) seems to cause reference-related errors that can cause projects to be completely un-useable.
We have been having this error crop up occasionally over the last few months of development very sporadically, which at first was just met with frustration because we couldn’t work out what was causing it. We have since come to the conclusion that submitting assets through perforce is occasionally causing these breakages, and it appears to be related to the reference system. Our project is completely unstable at this time, and with less than a few days to go before we need to show off the current version of it, time is running out for us quickly. We’ve had to revert to the old method of USB Sticks and Hard-Drives to circumvent the problem.
Obviously this is less than ideal, and the issue is particularly apparent with Blueprint assets for some bizarre reason. I feel this is an issue that needs some attention for a while!
That’s why I don’t use the integrated SVN / Perforce tool. This only lets everyone commit too much trash (local files which aren’t needed on repo). We do it manually (save, add, commit to repo)
Sorry to point out the obvious, but assuming this is not easily or quickly fixable on Epics part (you will have to wait for 1-2 releases at best), why not just use your own vigilance; either always commit P4 Changelists via the Editor, or close the Editor and submit through P4V before re-opening? I’m not trying to be rude here, I happen to work in a game studio where artists were always mixing their method of submit and it did cause issues (mostly status in the Editor, we have never seen what you are describing); I simply asked people why they were doing this and they didn’t really have an answer, as their isn’t really any reason to do it [mix method of submit], so I basically told them to pick one method and stick with it…haven’t heard an issue come up since.
As for repairing your assets that are not loading and/or crashing the editor; what steps have you taken to isolate or debug them? Can you provide these assets and/or logs/debug info for their crashes? If so, you should provide all of this info on your AnswerHub request as it will make it into the hands of a developer much more quickly.
Also, how is removable media a workaround for your problem? Assuming you are implying that you are now simply “sharing” file changes using this method you are already having to close and re-open the editor to accomplish this; so replace your USB drives with P4V actions.
Lastly we have submitted over 3k changelists to Perforce for our UE4 project, some people using the Editor directly (mostly content developers) and some who exclusively use P4V (mostly engineers) and what you are describing has never happened; I’m thinking something is very unique about your situation/setup, otherwise many more people would be seeing this.
I’m not saying it can be fixed overnight, and the issue IS sporadic which is why it was difficult to track down.
The problem is, you can’t always commit through the editor because some files (such as config files when you change inputs), are not checked in via the editor. We work in a studio as a four-man team in a studio of five teams, and the issue has cropped up during the process of polishing up our game-jam for EGX, but also at a few different points on our major project. I don’t think it’s either the editor of Perforce’s committing system that causes the issue and the files are just binary so you would have thought it makes little sense.
Our technical support is more than experienced with Perforce, and is looking into writing a simple tool that could fix the broken references. Perhaps the team is doing something particularly strange but I’m not convinced. It does however, ONLY seem to happen with Blueprints, so perhaps we’re using some Blueprint functionality that is somewhat buggy. (We have been opening the editor occasionally to find nodes have disconnected themselves, but the pins still show that they are connected… that I’ve never seen outside of this project).
There are logs on that Answerhub post, but I cannot share assets publicly. Perhaps we have just been unlucky.
