Devlog

Building Second Chance

What was attempted, what broke, and what the fix turned out to be. Written for anyone building something similar.

• 2026-09-27

  Two Bright Readings

  Street lamps that switch on at dusk while the street stays black because the exposure is still pinned to daytime, a lightning bolt from Blender that imports invisible because FBX flips the UV V channel, a lightning flash light placed 312 m up that turns every roof and road white like snow, and a WidgetComponent petrol pump screen that is almost unreadable because the widget material is lit, all in Unreal Engine 5.8.

  unreal-engineblueprintlightingexposurestreet-lampsweatherlightningblenderfbxuvumgwidget-componentinteractionmulti-agent

• 2026-09-26

  Background Hum

  A decal that lays across parking bays, then renders upside down and paints the bollards green in Unreal Engine 5.8, an editor that runs out of memory setting material instance parameters with a big World Partition level loaded, an impure Blueprint call inside a return node pruned with "Exec pin is not connected" so no car lamp could ever light, and a refused pick-up that leaves an invisible item in the player's hand.

  unreal-engineblueprintdecalsmaterialsout-of-memoryworld-partitionvehiclespost-processinteractionmulti-agent

• 2026-09-25

  Crosshair First

  An interaction line trace in Unreal Engine 5.8 that starts at eye height instead of the camera and misses small objects under the crosshair, a grow lamp that looks lit at start because another actor's BeginPlay resets it under World Partition, pressing E with a full hand silently destroying the held item, and a translucent ghost that is invisible at 5% opacity and darkens the room instead of glowing.

  unreal-engineblueprintinteractionline-traceworld-partitionbeginplaytranslucencymetahumanelevenlabsaudio

• 2026-09-24

  Substantially Enclosed

  An NPC who stops three metres short of a nightclub toilet because a 1.05 m doorway is too narrow for a navmesh agent radius of 35 cm, a heater whose emissive material pulsed to the music, a light A/B test in Unreal Engine 5.8 where 400, 120 and 0 lumens all looked the same, and a hall and cellar blown out white by a pinned exposure and the editor sitting on Low scalability.

  unreal-enginenavmeshnav-linknpclightingexposureemissivescalabilitynightclubblueprint

• 2026-09-23

  Shuffle Turns

  A MetaHuman walk clip that made two snooker players walk 20 cm crouched because it carried another body's bone lengths, a turn-in-place animation whose planted foot skated 20-70 cm because the clip was a shuffle, a one-metre teleport at every corner of an offset path, and an Unreal Engine 5.8 editor crash in USoundCue::Parse from a SoundNodeRandom whose child_nodes were set from Python.

  unreal-enginesnookeranimationmetahumanroot-motionfoot-skatesound-cuecrashblueprintplaytest

• 2026-09-22

  Two Frames

  A Blueprint snooker solver in Unreal Engine 5.8 pinned at its MaxSubsteps cap and a

  unreal-enginesnookerblueprintperformanceaudiolip-syncmetahumanplayteststandalone

• 2026-09-21

  Empty Sleeves

  A garment loaded in Marvelous Designer 2026.1.149 sits above the avatar with both arms

  marvelous-designerhiggsfieldmetahumanwardrobefabunreal-enginesilent-failuretooling

• 2026-09-20

  Collapsed to a Point

  A mesh that imports into Unreal Engine 5.8 with smaller bounds than the file it came

  unreal-engineblenderstatic-meshmaterial-instancemetahumancollisionsilent-failure