Bug UE-66454 (link) This bug causes a duplicated sequence to not fire its own events, but, the events from the sequence it was duplicated from. The output shows this error “LogMovieScene: Warning: Failed to trigger the following events because no director instance was available: SequenceEvent_#” Thus rendering the copy useless and its events forever disassociated from its sequence director.
This isn’t the worst thing on its own, but, we’ve had the same problem and warning show even for non copied sequencers as well. All events will randomly lose their sequence director association regardless of if they were copied or not. This can happen hours into working on a sequence as well.
How this relates
This relates to bug UE-66454 as Epic staff have now pointed to this bug as having the same root cause.
One of our team members got this response back from Epic
"Hello,
After doing some digging I was able to find a known issue with the same root cause. I have provided a link to the public tracker. Feel free to use the link provided for future updates.
You can spend, hours, days or weeks putting together a sequence, and have it permanently ruined by this bug. This bug isn’t slated to be fixed until the next engine version 4.22. This is simply unacceptable for such a core tool to go this long without being fixed. No one should have to play Russian roulette with time, money, energy, and sanity. Especially not until the next full engine release. A fix for 4.21.1 Hotfix would be understandable, but, 4.22 is not.
I second this issue, waiting until 4.22 for a system as essential as sequencer to become usable is not acceptable. We use sequencer quite a bit in our workflow, and now with this bug we don’t even want to touch it for fear of losing even more our work, let alone continue developing with it. Waiting months and months for 4.22 just to be able to use sequencer properly with events is not something we can do.
I’d also like to add that this issue not only makes a sequence’s existing events stop working, but any new events or event tracks also do not work.
Yeah this really needs to be taken care of as soon as possible. I can confirm this is happening as well. Although, I don’t really know what is triggering it. I’m genuinely upset about having unrecoverable sequencers. I’ve wasted too many hours on this, and we need our sequencers to be reliable. 4.22 is months away. I hope this is just a typo on Epics end and they meant 4.21.1. Regardless, I agree that this needs to be taken care in 4.21.1 hotfix. The longer this persists the more people are going to lose work, and get really unhappy (to put it lightly).
This is a constructive learning platform so i’m going to go ahead and say you should backup your project before changing versions. And always asume new versions have errors. If you really need to upgrade engine version test it thoroughly before making the jump, or wait until 4.xx.1. But always keep that backup to rollback to in case things aren’t working. 4.21 has been out only for a couple of weeks, it shouldn’t be a big issue it isn’t stable.
Just think of those huge companies that finished their games in UE3 for fear of breaking things, lol.
You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding a few things.
This isn’t a buggy preview build we ported our project to. This is the main branch noted safe by Epic for commercial use. Major bugs are found in the preview builds, fixed, and then minor issues may persist that will be cleaned up via hot fixes. That’s how this works.
“or wait until 4.xx.1” I’m not sure you’re understanding whats going on here. Waiting for the hot fix wont fix anything as its not slated to be fixed until 4.22.0. Which is 4 months from now. All of this is written in the main post. Consider at least reading a post before making commentary in the future.
It was tested thoroughly that’s how the bug was found, and there is version control. One of the issues is the sequence director loses association it always loses association. Regardless of per sequence version control. Hence this not being a simple “stability issue”. We have specific needs only found in 4.21.
“Just think of those huge companies that finished their games in UE3 for fear of breaking things, lol.” This has nothing to do with what people are talking about. Read the post before commenting.
Once again. In the future if you’re not willing to read the post, and add something constructive to it then consider not commenting on that particular post. If English isn’t your first language then let people know in your initial comment. Then feel free to ask clarifying questions. That way people will know why you’re not understanding the context of a post, and we can help get you up to speed if you so desire.
The sequencer is one of a thousand features in UE4, I understand that bugs like this can be very annoying but you can’t expect them to take highest priority on this one considering there are problably a ton of even more game breaking problems. I stopped asking for fixes a long time ago because the response was always the same, letting your programmer fix the bug in the engine source is probably way faster. I am not using the sequencer so I am not really sure what the bug does or breaks, but I don’t see how version control and regular commits wouldn’t be able to prevent the “loss of several weeks of work”.
Like I said I don’t use sequencer and I could care less about this bug, but your response to someone who was trying to help you was pretty rude so yeah take a step back and realise that you are not the single most important person in the Unreal Engine community with your problems.
I’m not sure what you think is rude about my comment. If it came off that way it’s probably because the person obviously didn’t read the post or doesn’t have a full handle on the english language. That wasn’t sarcasm or being rude I was legitimately willing to work with that person if need be to help them get up to speed as stated above. Unfortunately it’s challenging to tell sometimes why someone isn’t understanding something.
As for fixes its best if you submit full reports with examples. Epics team does a fairly good job at taking care of things. We submitted 5 or 6 bug reports and almost all of them have been taken care of in the latest hotfix. So don’t knock them as they do a solid job.
And if nothing here pertains to you or you don’t really understand the content, and you’re not willing to learn or ask clarifying questions then perhaps you should reframe posting as well.
On the point of version control, that’s a huge part of the problem with this bug; once events lose association in the sequence, reverting to previous revisions does nothing to help, the event timeline is broken and as far as we’ve been told by epic staff, there’s nothing we can do to fix them once that’s happened.
I’m glad you’re not affected by this issue, but sequencer is not “one of thousands of features”, it’s a major engine system composed of many features, and for teams that DO use sequencer (which is many if not most), a bug that can permanently dissociate your assets is a big deal.