Play in Editor vs Standalone

Development Platform & Builds
1

I’m not exactly new to unreal, but I’m no pro. Over time I noticed that there are many differences between Play in Editor and Standalone play, and they have made my life quite a bit more difficult.

Let me note a few of the critical differences I came across over time:

  1. The game is much faster on Standalone. The fps rate while playing in Standalone mode is noticeably greater and messes up everything tick related.
  2. the game renders differently on Standalone. Sometimes the game looks much darker, sometimes much brighter, exposure seems to work differently, some materials don’t render and sprites always seem to turn blurry.
  3. Some random problems, such as traces not getting any blocking hits on the same track in Standalone as opposed to them do getting blocking hits on Play in Editor. I couldn’t find a common base for these problems.

I lately participated in a game jam and ended up exporting my game in the last moment, and unfortunately I had to scrap an entire level of my game out of the few I made because of problems such as those described above. The game also seemed to have many bugs which did not appear in editor.

I would like therefore to fully understand what are the fundamental functional differences between Play in Editor and Standalone so that I may be able to predict such problems ahead next time.

Does anyone know more about the subject? if you do, please share. Please share also if you’ve come across more differences I didn’t notice so that we may be able to figure more out together.

2

There are quite a few difference between editor and standalone, and then again between both of those and packaged.

There are various docs about the initialization order ( which is different ), but not much point in reading them, apart from academic interest, because you aren’t going to code different branches depending on what mode you’re in :), you just need to code so that it doesn’t matter.

I can speak directly to this

You need to code things on tick to take account of the fact that tick is different on every machine. If you’re running with an Nvidia 30 series, and your mate loads the game on a total potato, everything will happen much more slowly, unless you multiply by delta time

  1. I can’t say much about.

  2. Ditto.