Firstly, I want to say I can see the potential in UE. I had developed my own 3D engine for use in some software I am developing for a contract, but after playing with UE I made the decision to switch over to using UE. 4.6 seemed to work quite well, but did have some problems which I thought would be fixed relatively quickly looking at your release rate. I have to say though, that each version since then has got worse. Yes, they have more features - but the bugs remain and in fact have got more frequent.
I’m at the point where I’ve had to pause my work until these things are fixed - and I’m having to make a decision on whether to keep using UE, or go back to my own 3D engine. I’m worried that the delays this has caused will affect my contract - and I have a family to feed.
The following bugs are my main concern, can someone on the Epic team assure me that they will be fixed soon? I do very much want to keep using it…
Since 4.7.2 I have been experiencing random crashes - even when away from the computer and with autosave turned off.
There is no way I can find to transfer Matinee actors and their cameras to another project - no migrate option, and copying/pasting looses the link from the Matinee path to the camera (easy to reproduce) meaning I have to recreate them each time.
Textures are still loosing their tiling and zoom factors after a build (I read that is fixed in 4.8?)
There is a problem with compiled classes - Some of my projects with added classes have stopped working with an error stating that the modules cannot be found, recompiling does not help. This is a biggie as I have custom code to integrate UE into an existing window - I cannot get this to work until it is fixed.
Can someone please respond and let me know the status of these bugs?
Thank you for the feedback and I want to see if we can narrow down some of these issues and try to get you a fix or at least get some correct logging information for a solution and a workaround if possible. I will try to address each as you presented them.
1 - For your crashes, are you submitting a crash log through the crash reporter? If so, can you post you Machine ID which is generated by the Crash Reporter at the time of crash? This will help me track down each crash and see if we can not narrow down the exact cause. Also, just so I am dealing with the correct data structure are you working on a PC, Mac or Linux machine.
2 - Matinee data is a part of the UMAP (Level) file, so to successful migrate the Matinee data to a new project, you would need to migrate the entire UMAP file. This is the cleanest and safest method. You can also export the Matinee file as an FBX and reimport it back into a new Matinee in the new level and all your matinee assets should reimport correctly within Matinee , though you will, as you mentioned, have to fix a few Actor to Group associations in Matinee.
3 - You will need to be a bit more specific here. Are you referring to Materials on a BSP, this issue should be corrected in 4.7.4? Changing the Zoom and Tiling Settings in the actual Texture Editor? Where did you read that it would be fixed in 4.8, did they happen to mention a reference Number like UE-#####?
4 - Can you post a screenshot of the error as well as provide a sample code project that is giving you this error for us to test?
Let me know and I will get back to you with more definitive answers -
Yes, most of the time I submit a bug report - recently I’ve only been getting crashes that don’t trigger the error reporter though. I’m using PC only at the moment. I haven’t been able to find my machine ID - is it anywhere I can find without an error reporter window?
Unfortunately I’m wanting to import the matinees into different maps with a similar layout and am wanting to automate the procedure. The export and then import works very well, so I can use that method - the cameras appear to be correctly attached to their groups which is what I was after (thanks). Just Copying from a project and pasting to another is still not working, the camera group appears in the Matinee, but does not work. Out of interest, how would I go about fixing those group associations?
Awesome I am glad we could help you out on a lot of the issues here. Now regarding the remaining ones -
1 - There is actually a couple of things you can do to get your Machine ID, the easiest is to go into your engine bring up the console command and type ‘debug crash’ (without quotations) and that should crash the engine and bring up the Crash reporter which will have the Machine ID in it. Also you can type my name in the Description (something like per Eric Ketchum’s instructions) and, if submitted (so don’t forget) I can run a search and it will let me find all of your Machine IDs crashes.
On another note though, if the crash reporter is not coming up that means the engine itself is not crashing but something in Windows (usually) is - think system files versus engine files here. You can use Windows Event Viewer (searchable from the Windows Start Menu) and look up the Critical or Error Issues that have occurred during the time frame of the crash you experienced. Once found you can save them out as an Event Viewer File and zip them up and upload here, that can help us narrow down the root cause.
2 - Fixing the Group Associations, its a little time consuming as its individual actor (or at least via groups). Click on an actor or actors which were in the group in Matinee, then, with them selected, right click on the Group in Matinee > Actors > Add Selected Actors. This will place the actor or actors back into the Group, usually you can tell if the Camera icon appears where there was not one previously.
3 - I am glad we did not have a reoccurence of that issue.
I’ve sent a bug report with the description “per Eric Ketchum’s instructions” - my machine ID is 9F7E67B64145C5D673C6F493CF3E5C1C. There was nothing in the EventViewer, had already checked that. I’ve updated to 4.7.5 now and (touch wood) haven’t experienced any crashes in the 6 hours since, I was even able to finally build the lighting for a 250km^2 scene without issues which hasn’t worked until now.
Thanks, I thought there must be a way
All in all I’m much happier now and feel confident to continue using UE - It was love at first sight, and I’m very happy to be able to use it for my contract and personal work.
If I encounter any troubles with 4) I’ll let you know.
Ok, just had 4.7.5 crash from a source build - I thought it was another project that crashed using 4.7.4 (if you see the error report I sent the comment is incorrect, it IS 4.7.5 that crashed) - I was away from the computer when it happened - and lost the work I had done again. I REALLY need to get to the bottom of this, I can’t afford to loose all my work like this!
We are looking into your crash reports now, but if you happen to come across any reproduction steps that would help us immensely.
I do want to comment that if your scene is 250 square kilometers you really should be using dynamic lights, look into the Distance Field Ray Traced Soft Shadows. It is the lighting we recently used on the Open World Kite Demo which was only 16 square kilometers. I don’t honestly think this has anything to do with your crashes but it may help with game performance in the long run.
I do want to check are you currently using any UMG in your project? If so can you give me a run down of what the UMG is doing? In the mean time we will continue looking through the crash logs.
Thanks, Yes I’ll start using dynamic lighting for the large map. I am using UMG in most of the projects including the 250km one - that has an inventory system and health bars etc. The others use UMG for a navigation and progress bar.
If you would not mind running a test for me, duplicate the project that most often will crash for you and then remove all UMG blueprints, code and references to UMG from the duplicate. Save and as best as possible see if the game functions as expected. Then leave it as you would have left the previous project and see if it crashes.
Ok, done that (this one also has the Mesh Distance Fields and dynamic lighting) - I’m out for the day so will leave it running and see what happens when I get back…
It’s still running ok - this morning I’ve also opened the UMG version and have that running as a control - it hasn’t crashed yet either but has only be running for about 4 hours. Another issue I’m having is when debugging from DebugGame in visual studio - when stepping through code it goes all over the place, repeats blocks of code - it doesn’t appear to be following the source properly and is not stepping into methods - is there something I have to do to get that working properly?
Thank you for running those test and please let me know if the crashing returns. For others clarity of finding similar issues, can you post the debug code issue as a separate question?
Thanks for the response. I haven’t had any more crashes - is it possible a Windows Update fixed the problem? Apart from an update (I haven’t looked at what it changed) and pre-loading GTA V nothing else has changed that I’m aware of. Good point re debugging issue, will do that now.
