I am new to Unreal Engines, and am running into a bizarre bug with a project I am working on. The game is a basic trivia gameshow type of deal, with the code intended to read a few sets of questions as Strings from a JSON file and store those read strings into a set of FString arrays that are later loaded and displayed on screen when one of those strings is called for.
When packaging a build and running the above with a “Questions.json” file in the directory with the executable, the Questions for Round 1 appear to be read in as expected, but the Round 2 questions displayed always match the Default inputs for “DefaultGame.ini”, despite UE_LOG lines outputting Debug statements to the log that confirm the Round 2 questions are being found in JSON file the same as the Round 1 questions are. The code block in which these Debug statements appear even includes a “RoundTwoQuestions.Empty()” line to eliminate any values the array was populated with by default, which adds further confusion since I would assume if the JSON input was not used then the Array would simply be empty and no questions would appear for this round. My only immediate theories are either that the Round 2 Questions get repopulated somewhere else in the code and re-replace the JSON, or that one of chars used as part of the JSON strings (“@”) is reserved or otherwise not liked in the final build and thus the line is read for debugging but discarded before adding it to the array for some reason.
What is confusing me in particular is that when playing the game via Editor preview (Viewport, new Editor Window, Standalone Game Window, or “Simulate”), the Round 2 questions loaded match the Config of the JSON file as would be expected, alongside the other values read in from the JSON. Since it works in the editor but not in a Packaged build, it makes debugging tricky to do, not least of which because I am unsure if this would mean the issue is in my Blueprints somewhere, an issue with the project settings when Cooking a Build, or some other factor I am simply not aware of out of inexperience.