Unreal Engine 4 is a great game engine, I love it.
But if there is anything I have to say is bad, it has to be the constant crashes.
I’m certain everyone can agree with me, Unreal Engine 4 is crashing way too often and way too easily.
This is a problem that need to be worked on. It is horrific for newcomers to have the editor or their project to constantly crash all the time.
Just yesterday I had issues I couldn’t ship my project because my asset couldn’t be loaded, even though I didn’t have the asset anywhere in my computer and it couldn’t be found in the reference viewer either.
Problems like this just shouldn’t happen. Not to mention, this issue which I had, it happened BECAUSE of another crash. Earlier my editor had crashed and “that problematic asset” had suddenly disappeared.
Anyways my problem isn’t the point here.
What I want to say is, it would be nice to focus a bit more on trying to prevent the engine from crashing so often.
The checks are nothing bad. It would usually still crash without that check, just that it would be way, way harder to see and debug why it crashed. I’m doing it in my game code too, checks everywhere. Once something is wrong, you really want to have it crash as soon as possible, especially when you have a lot of threading going on.
I’m sorry to hear that your experience is being impacted by crashes. Once a crashing issue is identified and reproduced, we do prioritize resolutions, as you can see by looking through most of our Hotfix history where the majority of fixes are for crashes. That said, we know there is still work ahead of us, and we vigilantly track the stability of our engine releases to identify problematic areas. When you experience a crash, you can help us in the following ways:
Submit your Crash Report from the window that pops up. Provide useful comments to explain what you were doing when the crash occurred. We do review this information throughout every week.
Search issues.unrealengine.com to see if the crash is already logged. If it is, and if there are repro steps, upvote it so you can track it, and give us more feedback on how many users are impacted.
If the crash is not already logged, or if it is but we need repro steps, then please make a post on the UE4 Answerhub in the Bug Reports section, and provide as much information as possible regarding the crash so we can reproduce it.
Of course, please also keep in mind that not every crash is necessarily a bug. As BrUnO and John Alcatraz mentioned, some crashes can be expected to occur when coding mistakes are made; so consider the expected result prior to logging a bug report.