Devlog
Building Second Chance
What was attempted, what broke, and what the fix turned out to be. Written for anyone building something similar.
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Mean Free Path
A MetaHuman neck tattoo that looks missing in PIE in Unreal Engine 5.8 but is rendering under the hair and across a UV seam; also a released player re-arrested inside the police station within four seconds, river water that reads opaque lime and then orange as its absorption path is tuned, the log line IXWORLDITEM no mesh row, and a scissor pouch skinned inside a pair of jeans.
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Kicking-Out Time
A Local Fog Volume that vanishes around the player standing inside it in Unreal Engine 5.8; also an NPC who looks seated on nothing outside a kebab shop at four in the morning, a parcel of chips hidden inside her trousers, a barber who walks out of his own shop on a Monday, and a hairdresser's ceiling that renders black while the room below it is lit.
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Clearance
Grass growing through the ground floor of walk-in houses in Unreal Engine 5.8, because the floor sits a few centimetres below the landscape and the grass blades are 35 cm tall; also a new estate with no navmesh at all, front gardens sealed off by the agent radius, benches imported facing backwards, a D3D12 "Too many residency sets" crash on loading a World Partition map twice, and a player left lying on a cell bed forever.
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Under the Carpet
Ground-floor rooms in Unreal Engine 5.8 show grass or grey speckle through the floor because the house sits a few centimetres below the landscape; also a MetaHuman whose belly will not shrink from the side because the body is baked into the rig, tattoos that render as scattered fragments under a masked material, and Play In Editor crawling at 1 fps with VolumetricCloudShadow taking 668 ms a frame.
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Pivot Point
Foliage with material wind placed in a HISM floats metres above the ground in Unreal Engine 5.8, because the branch-wind term measures distance from ObjectPivotPoint and in an instanced host that is the host's origin; also NPCs stuck walking into their own inward-opening front door because the nav link runs down the hinge line, NPCs brushing through hedges whose collision box is shorter than the mesh, and a simulated bin round that never picked up a bin because one data list was in street order and the other in visit order.
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Blocking Wait
Unreal Engine 5.8 editor appears frozen on "Updating Texture Streaming Data 0%" and on the first save of a new material, with two ShaderCompileWorker processes idling at about 25% CPU for hours, because a Custom HLSL node read .w from a VectorParameter whose default pin is RGB (float3); also a council hi-vis vest cut from a Fab shirt, MetaHuman bodies whose pinned girths Fat and Muscularity sliders cannot move, road-profile FBX files that import 100 times too small at 0.01 scale, and 1.14 million cubic metres of cut and fill for a new estate.
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Off Duty
NPCs stuck at zero speed just inside their own open front doors in mirrored houses, because the door's nav links ran along the hinge line where the open leaf lies; thousands of "Blueprint Runtime Error - Attempted to access BP_Citizen_C pending kill or garbage" lines from a None check that a destroyed actor passes; a council worker whose walk to work ended at a navmesh island; and a whole cast re-dressed in parametric MetaHuman garments from Fab, where a recolour bound on the mesh never showed because the build's Blueprint overrides material slot 0, a Fab shirt ignored OpacityMask, and a trouser waistband poked through every untucked shirt.
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Home Lights
A third-party C++ plugin that would not build in Unreal Engine 5.8 (UHT "Unable to find" on a using alias, TWeakObjectPtr operator bool deleted C2280, GetPolyAreaID C2660, GetAnimationBudgetHandle private C2248); a PIE crash on "Attempting to use a container element which already comes from the container being modified" when closing a looped road spline; a DirectionalLight that switched itself off 41 seconds into PIE because a house-lights system adopted it as a house light; ShowFlag.EyeAdaptation 0 outliving PIE and blowing the editor viewport white; navmesh routes over 61 cm garden walls where AgentMaxStepHeight 55 changed nothing; and NPCs who arrive at the chippy and stand outside against the wall.