I’ll tell my tale of woe. It started roughly a couple weeks ago. I decided to download the Conan Exiles editor because I wanted to try and make some changes to the game. Their editor appears to be based off of 4.15. It loaded up, finished it’s asset discovery, then proceeded to compile the shaders and after maybe finishing 1500 of them it froze up my computer. When it say it’s freezing or locking, I mean it’s killing the entire system and requires a hard reset. I fired it up again and roughly after the same amount of shaders compiled it locked again. Opened it a third time and it completed the few hundred shaders that were left over and then the program ran fine. Once I started to browse the files and open some things that required more compiling, it locked up again. This was the theme. It worked fine unless it needed to compile.
So I decided to download the regular Unreal editor and do the things in there that I wanted instead of using the Conan editor. I downloaded 4.17 since that was the current version just over a week ago. It loaded up and everything was working perfect. I started to move some of the files I needed from Conan over to the regular Unreal but because it seems I can’t transfer the uassets such as materials, I had to build the material myself using the texture file. In the process of creating the material, connecting nodes and having it loading and compiling, it froze up. I attempted it a few more times, even testing specifically to see what might be causing it, and it only froze when it needed to compile.
Thinking it might be a hardware issue at that point, I started monitoring my system as it was happening. There was nothing odd going on. None of my hardware was really being stressed all that much and none of my temperatures got to a point that I would consider too high. So I wouldn’t say it’s an overheating issue or anything like that. I didn’t know where to go from that point so I figured just in case something was wrong with my system, I did a complete wipe and reinstalled Windows. It’s currently a new computer basically that is fully updated and I have all my drivers and necessary stuff installed.
I downloaded Unreal, this time getting 4.18 since apparently that has released over the past few days. It got up to the project window where you select a new project and stuff, then it started to compile shaders and immediately locked up. I tried to start it again but this time it locked up when it was maybe 80% done loading the editor. I figured maybe the settings I’m using in my BIOS are screwing with something. It’s not necessarily set up as overclocked, just set up to give me the speeds I’m supposed to be having. But I reset my BIOS which ends up lowering the speeds of everything. This time the editor opened up, it compiled all the shaders, and I thought it was working until I decided to stress it some more and play with some material editing which caused it to lock up.
So to sum it up, nothing I’ve tried has worked. Resetting my BIOS to it’s default specs did nothing. I’ve been searching for this issue and there is lots of people reporting freezing over the past 2-3 years but nothing that has been said helps me. My system doesn’t appear to be getting stressed. Since the computer is freezing every time, there’s no errors or anything being reported and nothing is showing up in the logs. I’m getting no information from the computer’s event viewer besides it reporting that the system wasn’t shut down properly.
The part that is irritating me the most is that I’ve been using Unreal for the past year or two with absolutely no issues. The last time I used it was maybe around April or so and then I reinstalled Windows and just took a break from things. The last version I was using was 4.15 but I’ve also used various versions in the past. Now for some reason I can’t keep it running, or even sometimes can’t start it up without it killing my computer. I’ve even tried to replicate the same system I had at the beginning of the year when it was working by installing the same video drivers and anything else I could think of. The only thing that is different about my system is the various Windows updates which I can’t do anything about.
I don’t know anymore. For the time being, Unreal is completely useless and I can’t work on my projects that I already had going. Either this gets fixed or I have to consider moving over to Unity or something, which I really don’t want to do.
Here is my dxdiag so you can get my system information and stuff. I just took a look through it before attaching and at the bottom in the fault codes thing, it’s mentioning something about a radar pre-leak with UE4. Not sure what that is.