Upgrading to Unreal Engine 5
Hello everyone!
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve successfully upgraded our Project Smelogs Playground from Unreal Engine 4.27.2 to 5.1! 
This was a massive undertaking, but we’re confident that the new features and improvements in UE5.1 will elevate the quality of our game.
Challenges we faced
During the upgrade process, we encountered some challenges. One of the main issues was with certain plugins that we had to update to make them compatible with UE5.1. This required additional work, but we were able to successfully update the necessary plugins and ensure that they were working properly.
Changing from Apex Destruction to Chaos Physics
As part of the upgrade process, we also transitioned our destructible meshes to work with Chaos Physics. While the transition required some manual finetuning, we’ve already seen improvements in the stability and behavior of our destructible objects.
We’ll continue to refine and optimize our use of this feature as we move forward.
Ghost References
Another issue we ran into was with some old unused plugins that were causing problems. We found that simply removing the plugin references from our project didn’t fully resolve the issue, as there were still some lingering references that were causing errors.
We got a couple of errors like this:
UATHelper: Packaging (Windows): LogStreaming: Error: Couldn't find file for package /Script/ApexDestruction requested by async loading code. NameToLoad: /Script/ApexDestruction
How we resolved it
Here’s how we solved the issue:
- Open up any reference viewer
- Type in the NameToLoad: (in our case “/Script/ApexDestruction”)
- It will show in which assets it is referenced you then just need to save those asset resolve it.
The benefits of UE5
Despite these challenges, we’re happy to report that the upgrade was a success, and we’re already seeing some benefits from using UE5.1. We’re especially excited about the Nanite technology and improved lighting capabilities, and we’ve also experimented with the experimental Wave Function Collapse feature and other things.
We’ll report more on these soon. 
Thanks for reading, and we’ll keep you updated on our progress with the upgraded Project Smelogs Playground! 
Endnotes
If you have any questions or feedback about our upgrade to UE5.1 and the challenges we faced along the way, we’d love to hear from you.