Introduction:
Creating art/assets in Unreal Engine is become very enjoyable and surprising when it works out better than expected. The accidental bugs I create are also always surprising.
Torches:
Creating things in general is always fun and today was no different. I was able to make a torch using a few shapes mixed together. Next step was to add the wood look to the handle and the cloth/burning end using materials. And of course it’s not a torch without a flame, so I added a burning/flame particle effect which I think turned out pretty well.
Bugs:
However, something went wrong. Whenever I added my torch to my character the movement/input keys got all mixed up and “W” became ‘move right’ instead of forward, for example. I actually ended up fixing the bug after half finishing this blog post.
The bug was due to an Unreal Engine crash that happened while I was in the middle of making the torch. Specifically the “Collision Preset” option got reset to default and I didn’t notice after recovering from the crash. I believe this meant while I was pressing “W” to run forward, the character thought it was running into a wall (aka the torch) and automatically ran sideways to get around the obstacle. However, the character was holding the torch/obstacle so all the movement was broken as a result.
Unreal Engine does a good job for the most part for file recovery during crashes, this was the first time the auto-save wasn’t recent enough to catch the above setting change before a crash. I’ve had Unreal Engine open for many dozens of hours and this is only the 2nd time it’s crashed.
Conclusion:
Bugs are a part of development of any kind, but understanding and fixing them is a very important part of learning. I enjoy problem solving.