(deleted actor) appearing immediately after launching standalone game

I recently added a second level to my game to act as a background for my main menu. Whenever I do Play as Standalone Game, a (deleted object) is added to the end of my Outliner. If I launch in PIE, it doesn’t happen. When the deleted object gets added, my scene thinks it is dirty and asks me to save, which is super annoying. Every time I run, a new entry gets added so eventually there are like 20 of them. I just found out that if I Edit->Undo, I can actually make the deleted actor disappear (but the scene is still dirty) - I also noticed that the undo text for this action is identical to whatever my previous action was (usually clicking on actor).

I’m not sure if this is related or not, but at one point I saw half of a small sphere on the left side of my camera’s viewport when running the game, and it was textured with the default gray checkerboard pattern. This object does not exist in my scene anywhere. When I pressed Control, it would slowly move left until it was outside my viewport. This is all using the default PlayerController with no custom bindings for Control.

Hi hapro,

Check your killZ to ensure that your second level is not past the killZ, if it is it is being deleted upon spawn. To fix this, increase the killZ volume in your world settings to accommodate the new level.

Hm, unfortunately it didn’t change anything. I tried reproducing the problem in a new project, but was unable to do so.

I tried creating a new level with nothing in it, setting the GameInstance to the default GameInstance class, and using the default GameMode class. The (deleted actor) appears immediately upon hitting the Play as Standalone Game button (and Play In Editor/Simulate still doesn’t have the problem), before the little splash screen even appears. Maybe my project is just corrupted somehow.

Do you have a sample project this is occurring in I can take a look at? I’d be happy to look and see what may be occurring.

In making a sample project, I’ve discovered the root cause. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or I’m misunderstanding how something works. Here is a video of the problem:


Launching in Standalone without a Player Start actor causes the deleted actor to appear. You can see in the video that the problem goes away when I add one, even though the Camera actor is being used as the viewport and there is no player in the scene. Also, the mysterious sphere which I noticed before appears when I add the Player Start actor. It seems like it’s automatically creating one if it can’t find one, and then gets deleted somehow and never garbage collected. I managed to reproduce the issue simply creating a new blank project, creating a new empty level, and hitting Play in Standalone.

Hi hapro,

I have not been able to reproduce this on my end with the steps provided. Do you have a sample project I can take a look at to see if I can reproduce it?

The problem seems to have been resolved in versions after 4.11 (verified fixed in 4.13: - YouTube ). As there is a workaround for 4.11 (ensure your level has a Player Start actor), I’ll mark this as resolved.