what does the external objects folder do anyway?
The external actors folder is part of a system called âOne File Per Actorâ. Basically it stores actor level information inside of itâs own file, which is great for source control or massive worlds that already house a ton of data. For normal levels you can disable/enable it, but for world partitioned levels, itâs built in. World partition is supported on Mac, so I would assume there wouldnât be illegal characters in what it generates, but in your case that was incorrect.
Thanks
If you still hadnât deleted the original backup you made, Iâd also recommend making a bug report, since itâs definitely not intended for a core system to be generating illegal characters for MacOS. If youâre contacted they may ask for more information, but more than likely not if this has been reported befoe.
Was this reported as a bug?
Iâm a brand-new Mac user (Apple Silicon support in 5.2!) and I seem to be getting this error over and over. Most new projects I try to create are crashing right away with this error.
Hey there @Bigcatrik! Welcome to the community! This bug has been reported a number of times, though a fresh report with 5.2 wouldnât hurt if this is the same case. This bug is specifically related to OFPA as mentioned before, which shouldnât be applicable to empty projects upon initial launch, just every launch after the external actors are generated for the starter map.
Does this occur on fresh blank projects for you? Does the userâs fix above work for projects that have been generated?
Thanks for the response.
Iâve determined that my problem doesnât seem to be related to whatâs discussed above, but the ._ files created by MacOS on some disks depending on formatting. When UE encounters one it crashes.
I eventually found this forum post from 2016 where a problem with these files existed, though then it seemed to be mostly failing in the build process whereas I experienced constant editor crashing (until my workaround described below), including in a newly-created project.
It doesnât say whether the problem was fully resolved then. If it was resolved then it would seem to be reoccurring.
My story: UE is installed on my system drive but Iâm trying to put projects on an external drive formatted with exFAT, where (I now know) MacOS creates a hidden ._ file for extra file attributes in any file it encounters. Thereâs a command line utility to clean them (dot_clean) and I got into the habit of having a terminal open to run it periodically while working through âYour First Hour in UE 5.2.â Not convenient, but it worked. But packaging a project failed since that process creates ._ files constantly as it churns through the projectâs files, and my attempt to automatically rerun the dot_clean command wasnât fast enough to catch them in time. I copied the project folder to the system drive and it packaged correctly since that drive is APFS and ._ files are not necessary.
So was this resolved back then but itâs come back somehow? And why isnât UE ignoring these rather irrelevant files anyway?
I jumped in with my 2020 MBAir because of the Apple Silicon support in 5.2. Other than this issue itâs been running fairly smooth. And, all things considered, quite fun.
If the answer is âonly use APFS formatted drivesâ that should probably be noted somewhere. The majority of external drives one might easily pick up are not APFS but work just fine on a Mac.
Fantastic insight! Itâs entirely possible a regression occurred. As a primarily windows/linux user I would usually attempt to test things before going straight to recommending a bug report, but in this case I canât and it seems you actually narrowed it down to the excess files it creates. Would you mind submitting a bug report? Itâs rare to get such good data!
Thanks. Bug report submitted. Iâm officially âCase # 00571444.â
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