My experience with Unreal so far.

[LeoSilvaDF]

Well, so I wanted to delve into Unreal to prospect if I should use it on a real project, and so far, i got a LOT of promises and a living hell for an experience. Here is what i found:

1. As for the promises:

• The engine offers an awesome loads of features, modern graphics, wonderful systems like Lumen and Nanite, amazing workflow with blueprints, etc.

But then, when you try to put those features in use, your nightmares comes true:

I spent quad the time solving engine issues than game issues:

• Editor crashes a lot. And I mean, A LOT!!!
  . Crashes with empty projects
  . Crashes with full projects
  . Crashes saving blueprints
  . Crashes compiling blueprints
  . Crashing building maps
  . Crashing with lights
  . Crashing with meshes
  . Crashing with C++ compilers

And speaking of C++:

• Setting up the C++ environment is not so straightforward. Many steps involved, many necessary reloads.
• Unreal Build Tools auto corrupts itself… loses the DLL, needs to run repair often. Waste about 2-3 hours each time.
• Unreal 5.3 comes with built-in automation script bugs - won’t run. You have to go to the forums to find out why (manually had to edit CheckForHacks.cs and BgScriptReader.cs.
• Can’t use live code. It breaks my blueprints. I try to compile solution outside editor (Visual Studio IDE), closes editor, the build does not affect the editor.
• I close the editor and when I reopen, all my blueprints are totally BROKEN and useless. Have to rebuild nodes, reassing variables, remake code, etc. More wasted hours for nothing, because when I close the editor… all over again.
• Speaking of broken blueprints. Also, the Visual Studio project also breaks often, have to right click the uproject, select remake visual studio project.

I tried enabling Live Coding, disabling live coding, building from IDE, building from editor. It works when it WANTS to. Nothing else.

The editor also has its problems:

• Usually overloads your system even on empty maps.
• If you use dynamic lighting, your GPU memory is swallowed in no time. I frequently got messages of “memory budget” and “dramatically lost of performance”, even in small maps. I tryed enabling Ray Tracing, disabling, use Lumen, don’t use Lumen…

I read the requirements for the engine, I don’t think I got the BEST hardware, but I got:

• 12th gen Intel chipset with 12 logical cores.
• RTX 2060 - 6GB integrated laptop GPU
• 32GB of RAM
• 2TB NMVe SSD Storage.

Latest Visual Studio 2022 Community build, Windows 11 with latest patches, and latest NVIDIA drivers.

So, I want to ask you, the community, how is your experience with this engine? Is it REALLY worth it?

Because up to now, I don’t think (at least 5.3) is ready to production. Shouldn’t be a stable release.

And I also ask if these problems are me (I just need L2Code, L2Use, L2Setup, needs a better computer, etc). Or are those REAL issues? And if these ARE issues: are there ANY stable release with Lumen and Nanite enabled? Because certainly, many titles shipped with Unreal engine, so it MUST work someway. Only not works for me, or the dev teams are spending a HUGE time only dealing with engine problems, rather than develop a game.

Sorry for the long post, needed to vent this.

But anyway, any insights on those issues? How are your experiences with the engine so far? 1 month into unreal and I am thinking of giving up and switching back to Unity or Godot or something else.

Thanks.

[MichaelEber]

Thank you.
I posted about how the editor on Windows 11 crashed all the time. In fact, it crashed so much I wiped my drive and installed Windows 10. It still crashes especially when I try to implement localization.

I posted this asking if people experienced many crashes and I got more posts saying they had no problem than crashes. But the reality is that the editor is corrupting the heap then killing itself and the exception isn’t caught so it goes to the operating system and it crashes to the desktop. This kind of event doesn’t just happen on certain platforms so developers are lying when they say they have no crashes.

So, what happened under Windows 11 that made me take such a reaction? I had just done an action which completed successfully, I turned to the side and had some coffee, and returned to the launcher returned to the desktop (ie. the editor crashed)

When you have software crashing when you get a drink of coffee you have serious issues going on. And worse yet, the Epic team has decided that the only people that can report bugs are people that pay them $150,000 for a license.

[ATomCZ1]

I have a lot of "Unhandled Exception: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address " usually after the editor opening, it sometimes also fails during shader compilation. Some projects like OldWestLearning I cannot even open, but others like ElectricDreamsEnv works fine. Also, cooking the project is a huge lottery. It started when I switched to the new more powerful computer with RTX 4090 and also with Windows 11. I thought that I was having some HW issue, I tried all possible RAM and GPU memory testers and CPU testers, bios default settings. I tried rendering in Blender, Cinebeanch benchmark. I tried to play 4k games like Cyberpunk. I tried driver verification. I tried to clean Windows 11, without any 3rd party software. And I have no other issue than with Unreal Engine, everything else is solid stable. But before the update to the new HW Unreal Engine was working quite well. So it probably somehow depends on the HW. I did not try studio NVIDIA drivers, I’m using just the Game Ready driver, but since it is the game engine I would expect that it should be a better option, right?

But otherwise, another very poor side of UE is documentation, this is also very bad. I almost entirely rely on community tutorials, demos, etc.

But sometimes even the community did not help

Difference between FieldSystem vs PhycisField and RadialForceActor / Thrusters

I’m so confused with so many different physics-related stuff in Unreal Engine. There is RadialForce and Thrusters And then Physics Fields described here But even this isn’t very clear, because in UE actually exists two components FieldSystem and PhysicsField. I did not find a difference between them in this documentation. Are Physics Fields just a modern replacement for RadialForceActor with the support of new stuff like Chaos Engine and Niagara system? I’m currently using RadialForceActor …

[ATomCZ1]

I see currently on 5.3 this

this:

Fatal error!

Unhandled Exception: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0xffffffffffffffff

0x00007fff61a5d880 UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!libmetis__CreateCoarseGraphNoMask() []
0x00007fff61a5f553 UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!libmetis__Match_SHEM() []
0x00007fff61a5cc64 UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!libmetis__CoarsenGraph() []
0x00007fff61a5447b UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!libmetis__MultilevelBisect() []
0x00007fff61a541ca UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!libmetis__MlevelRecursiveBisection() []
0x00007fff61a5400b UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!METIS_PartGraphRecursive() []
0x00007fff61a266b2 UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!FGraphPartitioner::BisectGraph() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Developer\NaniteBuilder\Private\GraphPartitioner.cpp:181]
0x00007fff61a027c8 UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!`FGraphPartitioner::PartitionStrict'::`8'::<lambda_1>::operator()<TYCombinator<`FGraphPartitioner::PartitionStrict'::`8'::<lambda_1> > >() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Developer\NaniteBuilder\Private\GraphPartitioner.cpp:305]
0x00007fff61a0286e UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!`FGraphPartitioner::PartitionStrict'::`8'::<lambda_1>::operator()<TYCombinator<`FGraphPartitioner::PartitionStrict'::`8'::<lambda_1> > >() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Developer\NaniteBuilder\Private\GraphPartitioner.cpp:321]
0x00007fff61a0286e UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!`FGraphPartitioner::PartitionStrict'::`8'::<lambda_1>::operator()<TYCombinator<`FGraphPartitioner::PartitionStrict'::`8'::<lambda_1> > >() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Developer\NaniteBuilder\Private\GraphPartitioner.cpp:321]
0x00007fff61a33239 UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!UE::Core::Private::Function::TFunctionRefCaller<TYCombinator<`FGraphPartitioner::PartitionStrict'::`8'::<lambda_1> >,void __cdecl(FGraphPartitioner::FGraphData *)>::Call() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Public\Templates\Function.h:480]
0x00007fff61a1f560 UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!`TLocalWorkQueue<FGraphPartitioner::FGraphData>::AddWorkers'::`18'::<lambda_1>::operator()() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Public\Async\LocalWorkQueue.h:119]
0x00007fff61a33634 UnrealEditor-NaniteBuilder.dll!LowLevelTasks::TTaskDelegate<LowLevelTasks::FTask * __cdecl(bool),48>::TTaskDelegateImpl<`LowLevelTasks::FTask::Init<`TLocalWorkQueue<FGraphPartitioner::FGraphData>::AddWorkers'::`18'::<lambda_1> >'::`11'::<lambda_1>,0>::CallAndMove() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Public\Async\Fundamental\TaskDelegate.h:171]
0x00007fff888a8cd5 UnrealEditor-Core.dll!LowLevelTasks::FTask::ExecuteTask() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Public\Async\Fundamental\Task.h:627]
0x00007fff888a8bbc UnrealEditor-Core.dll!LowLevelTasks::FScheduler::ExecuteTask() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Private\Async\Fundamental\Scheduler.cpp:172]
0x00007fff888880e2 UnrealEditor-Core.dll!LowLevelTasks::FScheduler::TryExecuteTaskFrom<LowLevelTasks::TLocalQueueRegistry<1024>::TLocalQueue,&LowLevelTasks::TLocalQueueRegistry<1024>::TLocalQueue::DequeueGlobal,0>() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Private\Async\Fundamental\Scheduler.cpp:350]
0x00007fff888d08c2 UnrealEditor-Core.dll!LowLevelTasks::FScheduler::WorkerMain() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Private\Async\Fundamental\Scheduler.cpp:378]
0x00007fff88898b60 UnrealEditor-Core.dll!UE::Core::Private::Function::TFunctionRefCaller<`LowLevelTasks::FScheduler::CreateWorker'::`2'::<lambda_1>,void __cdecl(void)>::Call() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Public\Templates\Function.h:480]
0x00007fff88a7f773 UnrealEditor-Core.dll!FThreadImpl::Run() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Private\HAL\Thread.cpp:69]
0x00007fff88eb4e32 UnrealEditor-Core.dll!FRunnableThreadWin::Run() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Private\Windows\WindowsRunnableThread.cpp:149]
0x00007fff88ea8667 UnrealEditor-Core.dll!FRunnableThreadWin::GuardedRun() [D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Private\Windows\WindowsRunnableThread.cpp:79]
0x00007ff89a91257d KERNEL32.DLL!UnknownFunction []

Crash in runnable thread Background Worker #12

Or even nothing, the editor just disappears.
Sometimes it also causes BSOD or Windows to freeze.