I am just getting into game development with UE5 and C++. I store my projects on an external hard drive (G:) so I can work on the project from my desktop or my laptop, while my UE5 engine is stored on my F: drive on my desktop and C: drive on my laptop. When I go through the Programming Quick Start Guide, the FloatingActor class works fine. However, when I try and load up the same project, no changes, on my laptop, everything breaks, and if I go back to my desktop, again without changing anything, the same stuff is broken and I can’t fix it. Right now the error coming up when compiling with Live Coding is “Module G:\Games\Unreal\DOOMOUT\Binaries\Win64\UnrealEditor-DOOMOUT-7518.dll is not currently enabled for Live Coding”. I have had errors in the past related to Visual Studio 2019/2022 (I have both installed, which might be causing other issues?), and when I try to validate the data, 160 assets are unable to validate and 1 fails ([AssetLog] F:\Games\Epic Games\UE_5.0\Engine\Content\Tutorial\InWorldBlueprintEditing\TutorialAssets\IWBE_Blutility.uasset: Default__IWBE_Blutility_C is not valid.). I wish the errors were as simple as a bug in my code but this goes into the engine itself and I have no clue where to start.
Hey there @benny.mp4! Welcome to the community! So Unreal (and almost all programs) use lots of direct and hard references to things. Every path is referencing another, and you’d think this was self contained, but in reality it’s dependent on so many different variables.
Now the good news is UE is actually really close to fully portable, but natively it’s not. So it’s actually recommended you use source control to pass the project back and forth if necessary.
My recommendations are Git/Github, PlasticSCM, or Perforce.
External hard drive either SSD or HDD is really risky for development. That’s why cloud storage is a better way to go as what @SupportiveEntity said.
I myself had this issue and now I just use my hard drive just to back up my work. This is because during development unreal needs the disk to update/receive/remove data to be running in real-time but the problem is when there’s a slight disconnection occurs it causes file corruption which may lead to the worst case disk damage.