Unreal Engine 4.17 Preview

[MADHOUSE]

Event Driven Loading / Async Loading Thread crashes

Still critical problems in 4.17 with Event Driven Loading and Async Loading Thread..

https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...-thread-b.html

[Matthew J]

Sorry, I hadn't been able to test on the latest preview 3, was waiting to do that before submitting a bug report.

Good news is that it appears to be functional again in preview 3, apologies for not getting around to it before you had to look into it.

I'll edit the original post to mention that its been fixed too.

No worries. Thank you for confirming. If you do see this behavior again, please be sure to let us know.

[DerelictHelmsman]

I am getting a hard freeze when invoking any sort of resolution change in a shipping build. PIE and Launch seem to work fine, just the standalone shipping build. Synchronized to the latest 4.17 commit at the time of this post.

[masterneme]

Doesn't really have anything to do with modding.

Cheers,
Michael Noland

Thank you Michael.

[Kalle-H]

In 4.17 there was some modifications for InstancedStaticMeshComponent. This did break our custom dynamic foliage spawner. It seems to impossible to now initialize batch of data to gpu.
In 4.16 I could just simply do it like this. Which worked like charm. But in 4.17 this causes crash.

instanced->ReleasePerInstanceRenderData();
instanced->MarkRenderStateDirty();

So I figured new way to do this but the function that need to be called is in InstancedStaticMesh.h which is in private folder and I can't include it.

instanced->PerInstanceRenderData->UpdateInstanceData(instanced, 0, num, false);

Compile error and simplified example is here:
https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...-symbol-5.html

[jasonh2013]

Just want to let everyone know I've been working on android/daydream apps and the new audio mixer system is really cool. In terms of immersion just having spatial attenuation greatly increases the immersiveness of a game. Also, it is my recommendation to try and bring in the very latest version of google vr plugins for the eventual 4.17 release. I am fairly certain this recent commit, uploaded yesterday, solved an incredibly irritating problem I was experiencing in both 4.16 and 4.17 involving visual artifacts/erratic behavior of the virtual motion controller: https://github.com/googlevr-unreal/U...a1a6c5ca06fa86 . I don't feel confident enough in myself to say there was a definite cause and effect relationship -- quite honestly I don't understand the code that was changed -- but after I downloaded and then rebuilt everything in visual studio using this particular version of the set of google vr motion controller plugins, used in conjunction with a 4.16.2 version of the engine, my problem went away completely. I am just barely starting to learn visual studio and c++ so it's just as likely I accidentally hit some checkbox somewhere in some blueprint to either cause or solve the problem I've been experiencing so take what I write with a grain of salt.

[Michael Noland]

Can someone say if there're any updates on modding?



Does this mean that we could make a game easily moddable like Robo Recall or this doesn't have anything to do with that?

Doesn't really have anything to do with modding.

Cheers,
Michael Noland

[cyaoeu]

Did reimport behavior change in 4.17? I used to do Import to replace skeletal meshes instead of reimporting them when I needed special settings (instead of changing them in Persona and reimporting there), but now it seems like using Import just reimports with the same settings. It's a bit weird because if you only reimport the mesh the animations don't update, I guess the skeleton doesn't update when reimporting only the mesh.

[mordentral]

Hello mordentral,

I've tried a few things to reproduce the hitches you're mentioning but I haven't seen anything on my end. Could you please make an Answerhub post about this in the Bug Reports section and include a project that reproduces the hitch that you're mentioning?

Sorry, I hadn't been able to test on the latest preview 3, was waiting to do that before submitting a bug report.

Good news is that it appears to be functional again in preview 3, apologies for not getting around to it before you had to look into it.

I'll edit the original post to mention that its been fixed too.

[masterneme]

Can someone say if there're any updates on modding?

Gameplay/Scripting Updates:
The Asset Manager now has Blueprint access and is ready for production. The Asset Manager is a global object that can be used to discover, load, and audit Maps and game-specific asset types in the editor or at runtime. It provides a framework to make it easier to create things like Quests, Weapons, or Heroes and load them on demand, and can also be used to set up cook and chunk rules when packaging and releasing your game. The Asset Manager tab in Project Settings can be used to set up the rules for your game. Primary Asset Types that are scanned by the Asset Manager can be queried at runtime before they are loaded, and can then be asynchronously loaded on demand. To use the asset manager, call functions on the native UAssetManager class (which can be subclassed for your game), or call Blueprint functions in the Asset Manager category such as Async Load Primary Asset.

Does this mean that we could make a game easily moddable like Robo Recall or this doesn't have anything to do with that?

[Matthew J]

I am not entirely sure how I feel about this new console command as it stands currently. While batching is always nice and performance improvements are great, even turning this value to 0 (defaults to 1 then due to a Max call) the behavior of updating physics bodies is different than in 4.16 and previous engine versions.

I feel like this is a regression in intended behavior as you would think with the feature essentially turned off that it would behave as it did before (IE not batch or wait to send transform updates).

For instance, if you re-scale an object its physics body won't actually be changed until the batched commands go through, so you essentially have to wait a frame after setting scale3D to handle any logic that depends on the physics thread scale of the body.

This indirectly breaks any form of fast transform updates to a simulating object.

In 4.16 and before I was able to dynamically re-scale a simulating object while it was held with a PhysxConstraint, however in 4.17 it hitches badly with the same operation. I can directly alter transform on it with its BodyInstance and it has no such problem, however to get the game thread version to also update setting scale3D on it causes the batched physics change to also be called. There is no separate path to manually scaling the physics representation and the object itself due to the UpdateTransform function always being called from SetScale3D and always posting to the physics thread eventually overwriting manual changes to the PxRigidDynamic.

*Edit* It kind of feels like there is a body lock that doesn't go away until the actual update happens.

Hello mordentral,

I've tried a few things to reproduce the hitches you're mentioning but I haven't seen anything on my end. Could you please make an Answerhub post about this in the Bug Reports section and include a project that reproduces the hitch that you're mentioning?

[MADHOUSE]

Assertion failed crashes when loading a dev build client of a project..



Same problem in 4.17 preview 2 and 3. This problem does not exist on any other Unreal Engine version prior to 4.17.
https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...on-failed.html

[smbv1]

Screen Percentage bug in VR - please fix it, in Post Processing there is Misc setting for screen percentage and it break VR experience 100%, it only affecting as Zoom and break every application. This bug is critical and still exist in 4.17 P3 version.

[aussieburger]

P3 unfortunately still does not fix the new 3D widget performance problems in 4.17 on mobile VR: https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...in-417-pr.html

[smbv1]

Who have tried to export something complicated into HTML5? Such as Zen Garden here from 4.16 announce.