Lets talk about bug report UE-43692

This is NOT a repost. This thread is addressing the bug report UE-43692 and how it is being handled by the Answerhub staff.

Look at the bug report for UE-43692. You can find the link here:

At the bottom of the page, it says: “Have Comments or More Details? There’s no existing public thread on this issue, so head over to AnswerHub just mention UE-43692 in the post.”

So here I am, making a public thread on the issue. I am bringing this up because there is a serious problem with the staff at Answerhub. I posted evidence demonstrate this bug on March 25th, 2017. The staff member, Steve H, acknowledged the bug and was able to reproduce it using the project file I provided on Github.

First post demonstrating the problem:

Github project:
https://github.com/mgumley/hism_random_order_bug.git

The problem is that the bug report has been marked “Cannot reproduce”. I have tried to resolve this issue in many ways, and everyone is ignoring me. My team has spent thousands of hours and hundreds of dollars in developing with and learning the Unreal Engine, and now Answerhub is giving me the cold shoulder.

Sincerely,
Maxwell Gumley

Just started trying to implement Hierarchical Instanced Static Mesh Components a few days ago, and it turns out it’s an incredibly broken feature, and has been broken for some time now.

There’s another huge problem with HISMCs too in that in 4.17 - 4.18.2 (tentatively supposed to be fixed in 4.18.3) removing instances by index is completely broken (it reorders the arrays, making all cached indices of other instances become useless). The only fix for this right now is a terribly inefficient workaround involving clearing all instances and re-adding all instances you didn’t want to remove.

Just dropping by to say that the entire ISMC / HISMC situation right now seems to me like a basket case that no one at Epic really seems to keen on tackling at the moment. Really disappointing, I hope the situation changes soon.

I will be monitoring your threads on this matter, as I’ve now also run into similar problems as yourself, as well as bizarre problems with NetMulticast methods on replicated HISMC actors causing meshes to disappear at random (also solved by clearing the HISMC and re-building it, and also extremely inefficient).

Very disturbed by the other bug you brought to light regarding crashes on dedicated servers when removing instances. It’s been over a year and it has not been fixed, and the small patch posted by a helpful user stopped working in 4.18.2: Remove Instance (Foliage) - crash dedicated server - Programming & Scripting - Unreal Engine Forums

Please let me know how you fare with wrangling ISMCs. I’m thinking about abandoning them altogether.

Thank you for the acknowledgement. I was wondering why I seemed to be the only one working with HISM. I just sent you a PM on the unreal forums here:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/privatemessage/index