Unable to get virtual assets to work in Unreal 5.3

Hello,

This is a problem we haven’t seen before but from your log output either:

  1. The .upayload file is not being written to disk before submission.
  2. The .upayload is being written to the wrong location.
  3. The call to p4 add is failing in an unexpected way that we are not catching.

To help me try to narrow down the problem can you try running the process again then after the error check if the temp workspace mentioned in the log (VASubmission-1500d517-43d8-bc77-dd3b-dd86c943f4c2 in the snippet you posted) actually exists and if so does it have the .upayload in an added state and in that case exactly where is that .upayload on disk?

From your log snippet it does look like the workspace is created and something is in an added state (hence it not being cleaned up) so that should be a good lead.

One final question, is your engine installation in the same disk as your project?

If you feel comfortable you could try running the Microsoft tool Process Monitor (Process Monitor - Sysinternals | Microsoft Learn) to watch for .upayload activity on disk and check if and/or where they are actually being written.

EDIT: You could also try running the editor with -logcmds=“LogVirtualization Verbose” as with verbose logging enabled the virtualization process will log the file paths of each .upayload file written to disk for perforce submission.