Unreal Engine 4.17 Released!

Our team had to revert back to 4.16 after upgrading to 4.17 because it’s completely unstable on Linux. Normally we’re pretty confident in tackling these updates since we edit a lot of engine source code and can usually fix any issues we find, but after a few days of getting nowhere it was time to call it quits.

The memory updates broke Linux Server and provide different crashes in GenericPlatformMemory.cpp, LinuxPlatformMemory.cpp, or MallocBinned2.cpp depending on whether Async Loading and/or Event Driven Loading is enabled. It looks to me after reading some bug reports that some inexperienced developer overhauled the memory management to fix a specific issue with Linux and neglected to test the broader stability of their changes.

As if that’s not bad enough their CEF updates are also totally screwed up, even if I use the old libcef.so from 4.16 (which is the only binary that changed). I tried reverting the CEF and WebBrowser build target files to how they were in 4.16 and even compared commits between 4.16 and 4.17 in the WebBrowser dependency and UnrealCEFSubprocess project to no avail.

Long story short, whoever worked on the Linux updates for this version wasted a few days of our time and should really be more careful making such major updates. Perhaps they should consider consulting with more experienced developers first.