Existing project now crashes on every attempt to load

I was working on the road on my laptop running OS X 10.9.2. Everything seemed normal and I was saving regularly as always. The laptop was shut and opened multiple times through the day without incident. Since I got back home at the end of the day, Unreal Editor crashes every single time I try to load the project. Other projects have no trouble loading as normal. I let the project sync through Copy to my Windows 8 machine and it has the same issue there.

This is a rather serious problem and I’d really appreciate any advice you have on salvaging my work. The code given was:

b800858a57e8dae4e80c8a9d1c19234d

Hi SF,

Can you revert back to a previous version of the editor and see if it is still working there? I want to see if this is a version specific problem or if there is something else going on. Thank you!

I have UE 4.0.2 installed but it won’t let me attempt to open my project in that engine version, at least through the graphical interface.

I found that I was able to finally get into the project by editing the DefaultEngine.ini and pointing the EditorDefaultMap setting to a bare bones example map. It turned out that all of my assets and the project file itself were fine, but the most recent iteration of the game’s (only) map was causing the crash. Reverting to an autosave meant I only lost about 1.5 hours of work in the end (whew!!).

If it helps, all I can recall doing in the map since that autosave was organizing the level’s actors into folders and creating a new post effects volume with a blendable attached. I might have also changed the staticity of a couple directional lights.

Posting this as a partial answer in case anyone else gets locked out of their project:

If a map is causing your project to crash every time it is loaded, you can circumvent the crash by editing Config/DefaultEngine.ini and changing the EditorDefaultMap value to a different path. This will let you access your assets and the project itself from the editor, and you will be able to load an older autosave of the offending map.

Hi SF, could you create a new project and try out the post process step again (create post process with the same blendable)? Let’s try and whittle down the list to see what could be causing your crash.

Hi SF,

We have not heard from you in quite some time. I am marking this as answered for tracking purposes. If you are still experiencing problems please comment with the information requested. Thank you!

I’m sorry I somehow totally missed this! I did try creating a fresh project with the same blendable and it had no issues. I’m afraid the autosave is long gone now, but I haven’t had a similar experience since.

HI SF,

I am happy to hear you aren’t experiencing this anymore. I will mark this question as answered for tracking. However if this bug should arise again please feel free to comment here and let us know so we can continue to try and diagnose it. Thank you!