Unreal Troubles in the Unreal Engine

by William Terlop

There I was in the thick of making this game.. making magic happen.. when all of the sudden my character’s texture randomly became like a lit up Christmas tree. Bright, twinkling and beautiful. Did I accidentally change something? Was this my fault? I wasn’t sure I frantically looked through my source control to see if I made changes to the textures.. that wasn’t it.. I looked if I accidentally assigned something wrong.. that wasn’t it either.. I looked one last time at the blue prints I was using to see if somehow I was modifying something I shouldn’t. Another time I was play testing my game, and my character randomly turned into the UE4 Manikin.. again I searched high and low to see what I accidentally changed. Maybe I accidentally changed the skeleton, or the mesh, or deleted something. Again.. none of this was my fault.. well… sort of..

Unreal Engine 5.1.0 has it’s issues. That’s the moral of this post. How did I fix the holiday texture issues (it’s not a bug it’s a feature..)? I restarted the editor. How did I manage to find my skeleton issue with the animation blueprint? I restarted the editor. These kinds of issues happened so often I wondered if I made the right choice in choosing the latest version of the editor. Ironically, I chose this version because on my machine in Unreal Engine 4, I had such bad graphical issues I could not navigate the interface. Don’t get me wrong there were some issues that were my own fault, but thats where version control really saved me. I cannot stress enough how important version control is. Perforce and Unreal make it extremely easy to catch small mistakes and revert files. Just be sure you are committing you changes often!

I know that Unreal Engine 5.1.0 is new. These are just some issues I ran into.. maybe you are experiencing them right now and found this blog. If you are do what I did and restart the editor!