One of the biggest and most painful parts about developing in Unreal is having no ability to select your install location of anything. Pair this with the absurd pain/frustration of moving things, and you have yourself a really bad situation. If you get an asset on fab (ex: MW Auto material), it puts a big folder inside Content. Ok, how do you move it to another better place, i.e. Systems? Drag and drop it, wait… Right click, fix redirectors… wait. Unreal crashes, great. That’s really helpful to my development experience.
We should be able to specify where we want stuff. Our ‘Content’ folder is not a garbage can.
You might find the Advanced Copy feature useful. I’ve been using it since UE4, and it’s a reliable way to move entire folders while keeping references intact. Make sure to enable Generate Dependencies so all related assets are included. It’s best to move newly added content, give the editor enough time to finish the operation, then restart the project to confirm everything updated correctly. And of course, back up your project or use source control - things can still break occasionally, but in my experience it works smoothly about 95% of the time. I use this feature to move folders to a third-party folder inside the main blank project and even to a content only-plugin folder as well. Only after checking everything is correct, I merge the content to my main project. The best practice is to move it to a plugin folder.
Thanks for the idea and the feedback. I’ve tried this and it does work but a lot less for me. The premise of how it installs stuff is just plain wrong though. As I said, there’s no reason to install to a default place, it should ask you where you want to install so it is done right in the first place. Advanced copy causes engine crashes which I report frequently
I understand, it’s a good idea, though. In my case, I always transfer fresh content to a blank project, then move things around first before merging it to my main project. The crashes happen to me when the content was already linked to many assets not included in the folder I was trying to move.
