UnrealGameSync support for sparse streams

Is there UGS support planned for “sparsedev streams” in perforce? We notice that there are several bugs when attempting to use UGS connected to a sparse stream including

  • UGS is unable to identify which client workspace a uproject is associated with if the uproject is upstream in a sparse stream
  • UGS is unable to consistently get a list of changelists for a workspace, sometimes it sees changes from upstream that are not merged
  • UGS does not correctly identify sparse stream merge operations that have Code changes in them

Sparse streams | P4 CLI Documentation (2025.1)

Perforce seems to be recommending sparse streams going forward. For example, please see their note at the top of “task streams” Task streams | P4 CLI Documentation (2025.1)

"Consider using Sparse streams instead of task streams because of the Sparse streams have significant advantages over Task streams..

It is best practice to use sparse streams instead of task streams unless you need to use a feature that sparse streams do not support."

Thank you!

Steps to Reproduce

  1. To reproduce make a normal project in perforce including source code and precompiled binaries.
  2. Create a “sparse development stream” as a child stream
  3. make a workspace pointing at this sparse development stream
  4. try to add a UGS tab with this workspace

Hi,

Sorry for the delayed answer, we are short on staff for UGS. At the moment, we don’t have work planned to support P4 sparse streams in UGS. Our current P4 server version (2022.1) doesn’t support it, so we haven’t tested UGS with this feature at all. I found some internal Slack threads discussing this P4 feature, but until we upgrade our P4 server, I don’t expect any development going on for this, especially that we are short on staff for UGS right now. Do not expect this for UE 5.7, it’s very unlikely for 5.8. After that, I don’t know, it just speculation.

Regards,

Patrick