Is UE4 this much buggy?

Development Programming & Scripting
1

Hello,

I’m new to UE4 but I’m having a hard time with the engine.

I have some programming background (around 15 years studying it) so I started learning the engine with a tutorial I found in UE’s youtube channel called “C++ Battery Collector”. And man… What a hard time I’m having dealing with the engine.

I’m at the tenth video of the tutorial and I already found a lot of bugs, ranging from the editor freezing and crashing to more WTF stuff like the transformation gizmos of some Actors becoming invisible or the blueprint editor not showing the correct datails of a given inherited component, etc.

The first bug I found I posted a report (Inherited ACharacter components fail to refresh in editor - Blueprint - Epic Developer Community Forums) hoping that would be fixed in some near future. Then I googled a bit more just to find other bug reports of this same bug since 2013. Man it is very frustrating. Given the situation I did follow with tutorial and found a lot of other bugs, even more frustrating than the first one.

I have to be honest but I couldn’t figure out that this was the current state of UE4. I can find a lot of good games being developed with UE4 but I really don’t know how they manage the frustration of facing this current instable state of the engine/editor.

I have this project of emulating a MMORPG client in some engine. I first tested Unity3D, but because its script mechanism is based on a very old version of the Mono Project (which uses c# 2.0) and because I have more background with c++ I decided to give UE4 a try. I managed to develop a prototype of my project in Unity without facing even one bug aside from some very few crashes (mainly when I was messing around with some low-level code). Given the situation I’m having deep thoughts to stick with Unity as it seem so much smooth to work with than UE4.

Sorry if I posted in the wrong place (I did it here because the bugs I’m facing seems to be very related with the c++ part of the engine) and sorry the wining too but I would love to know what you guys have to say about it. Are you facing this too? How you manage to handle this situation?

2

C++ Battery Collector was made in 4.9 IIRC and since then the code base has changed quite a bit. Could you please tell us what were the compile error messages?

3

I don’t have any problem to compile the code. All the problems came after the code was compiled and doesn’t seemed I was coding something wrong, my guess is that the engine code that sync the editor with the newly compiled dlls have some serious troubles.

4

Are you hot-reloading?

5

Yes. You think this could be the problem? Which are the alternatives to hot-reload?

6

1: Exit the editor

2: Open your project solution file

3: Press F5

This will delete the old hot reload files (in the output log you can see Deleting old hot reload file …) and build fresh new dll files and launch the editor from visual studio.

7

Hum, but that takes a lot of time. I googled a bit after you asking me if I was using the hot-reload and it seems that there are some particular cases where the hot-reloaded is recommended like when you just modified code inside functions - if you add some new variable in any header you shouldnt be using hot reload because it apparently can cause the bugs I’m facing. Is that right? If yes, doesnt it make the actual workflow for anyone that work heavily with c++ in UE4 a nightmare? I mean, if I really need to recompile the whole project (takes around 1 to 2 minutes here with a very small project) for every modification I make that changes any global state of the code it will take forever to create an actual game IMO.