My project crashes randomly, how to fix it?

A few details about the issue:

  • My project crash for no apparent reason always returning errors EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF but sometimes with different address)
  • The error source depends but the same error is always returned.
  • The error can happen everywhere: PIE, built game, editor, etc.
  • The error can happen anytime: from a few seconds to multiple hours. It can be triggered at any click on the editor and sometimes even if I’m doing nothing.
  • It happens so often that I can’t really continue my 3 years old project.

Here’s some investigations I made and could be the source of what’s happening:

  • The error started to appear after two separated actions:
    • I cleaned my project, removed and moved old files to new folders. Sometimes my editor crashed during the process but I always used the editor for this cleaning (I didn’t used the Windows Explorer). The error may happen from broken references but I fixed all Redirectors in the project already.
    • I started to use IKRetargeter to retarget my main character from another old Skeletal Mesh. I retarget directly from my main character’s animation BP.
  • I may be also using too many lights with Lumen in the project. However I recently started to clean them but the error is still happening. And that’s also the first time I see this error (I used UE5 from the Early Access on multiple projects and never saw this bug happening)

I built the engine from source (release branch) and my project is also a C++ project.
It’s also not an issue coming from my PC or its performance because the error also happens at the same frequencies on builds I test on my Steam Deck.

I’d really need your help so thank you so much in advance!

well so many things that could go wrong. :crazy_face:

first the build of the engine lol. then the moving of files which is a big issue when working with animations and the character system with the skeleton and similar stuff.

so :man_shrugging: :face_with_diagonal_mouth: