I also have this issue, i have sparrow, greystone and gideon.
If i open the sparrow BP first it’s all good if not i get the crashes.
i’ve tested this with several clean projects and always get the crash even without any modifications.
Being trying to solve this for around month now to no avail.
Only a single character works just fine.
Perhaps it’s a disk write error. Material Parameter Collections can be assigned and shared across the whole project. They are probably passed in as a shared pointer (that is my guess).
Here is my theory:
Either they are getting corrupted in memory and saved causing their file counterpart to be corrupted (could be due to a bad memory module)
Or they could have some write restrictions when it comes to file management (maybe running as administrator might fix this?)
Maybe the two materials point by accident to the same space in memory? They do seem to have similar if not the same names (maybe a rename and fix up redirects could help)
They are legacy models after all
I haven’t personally had any problems with mat collections.
There was a thread in the forum where the staff mentioned that they can become corrupted specifically on Mac systems, but that was in an older version of the engine so I’m hoping they patched that out.
I’m on Windows 10, i’m just running the editor without any IDE, i kind of ruled out any hardware issues as my system is quite stable execept for this one crash.
Regarding the image above, yes i think this might be related to all the duplicated stuff in the assets but trying to consolidate everything in a new structure as proven to be a nightmare.i.e just trying to move the folder that contains those files also causes the crash.
i’ve also tried to leave just one delete the others and change refrences to the that one but then end up with access violattion.
They have the same guid. I don’t thing that should be the case.
GUID’s a short for Global Unique Identifier.
There are also UUID => Universlal Unique Identifier
I’m sure UUID should’t overlap but I’m not a 100% sure if unreal’s GUID == UUID. I have my doubts.
But they probably shouldn’t overlap.
If I make a custom material collection. Fill it in with data and then duplicate it, even though the data is identical the guids to NOT overlap
^^^^^^^
This is most likely the problem.
There should either be 1 file or a new guid generated for the second file.
If I manually duplicate OrionGlobalGameplayCollection and compare it to any of the character imports the guid is different. Yet the guid between the two paragon character is the same.
This seems bad
Perhaps someone from the epic staff can analyze this.
@Tim_Hobson could you maybe pass this on to the staff?
Maybe the import function should merge same guid actors into a common folder?
Yes, I think this is related to all the duplicate stuff in the assets, but i can’t restructure everything to get rid of these dupes, i’ve been trying to do this but it’s proven to be a nightmare.
Just by copying/moving a directory which contains those files causes the editor to crash.
Originaly these assets where probably under the same hierarchy but in order to released them separately they are now on their own hence all the dupes and the issues.
I don’t really know, just starting to learn how to walk here.
I think this is very close to the truth. Since open Greystone blueprint will cause the shader compiling with Shinbi’s MaterialParameterCollection asset, an duplicated GUID can be the explanation.
I think i’ve got a workaround for this thanks to @3dRaven analysis.
So i created a clean project and added a bunch of characters to it, for each one i duplicated the MPC file and deleted the old one changing the references to the new one.
Seems the crashes are gone but i didn’t have time to test it thoroughly right now.
@TalhaUysalArt I have my theories on why it’s happening and the possible solution.
Some collections are cloned with their GUID.
This is because they are copied in from the epic games launcher. If they were imported properly via the engine then the assets would probably be assigned unique GUIDs during the import process.
The cloned guid also probably points toward the fact that in the original paragon project where all of the characters where in the same game, they most likely shared the same parameter collection among themselves.
To be able to put each character separately on the market place page they cloned the shared asset to each individual character. This most likely causes a problem during import because assets are recognized by the engine via the GUID so the engine at some point doesn’t know which one of the assets it should point to, most likely corrupting one of them depending on memory access.
The solution that comes to mind is to delete the clone collection and in the popup set it to replace it with the one from the other character (always choose the same one to narrow down to until no clones remain).
@3dRaven Thank you for your answer, but I really stopped looking for a solution as of today. I no longer deal with the problems of ready-made products. This is the first time I have dealt with these assets. It could be a functional entity if it worked properly, but unfortunately it is. It’s just that I’ve been looking at it from time to time for a month and sending reports, but there is no solution. As someone who was tired of trying to solve errors, I deleted them all. Maybe I’ll continue in a month. Maybe the Epic team will figure it out.
Thanks to @3dRaven I could fix it for my project!
I had three Paragon Character in my project: Aurora, Kwang and Gideon. Once I added Gideon Unreal would consistently crash on startup. At that point even when i removed the folder for Gideon in the file explorer it would still crash.
However, I removed the MaterialParameterCollection for Kwang and Gideon (also in the file explorer) and could then open the project again. I kept the one from Aurora.
Ofc now all Materials for Kwang and Gideon were broken. However, I now could go through the materials on Kwang and Gideon and assign the missing MaterialParameterCollection that I still had in my project bc I did NOT delete the one for Aurora (see screenshot).
It was suprisingly little work since they all derive from some base materials. It would probably be best if the “Global” folder is reused for all of the paragon characters but for now my project starts again and my materials work so im moving on.
I just resolved this same frustrating problem with thanks to advice above, but an easier way.
The file that caused the problem recently was for sure the OrionGlobalGameplayCollection, that is for certain.
My solution was to just copy one of them, delete the other one, and replace it with my new copy. Fixed it for me.
Hey guys I created a YT video on this because it was driving me crazy and huge credit to @3dRaven because his solution worked (I just did 1 or 2 things in addition to what he mentioned): https://youtu.be/9-QPWrxrReQ
I have every Paragon character in my main project and so far no issues so again thank you all for discussing this and I really hope my video can help some people!
There really is no direct solution that epic could give. It’s a logistic problem at this point.
The only real solution for for them would be to have some sort of system in place where you could download specific characters where it would first download the shared assets and then one by one there characters or a pack of all of them with the fixed shared assets in the correct directories.
It would need a specific new modular download in fab that probably isn’t present.
