Missing Lighting and Textures After Map Upload

Author: Reece Meck

Written: 10/10/25

This week during development, I ran into an issue when trying to push one of our Unreal Engine maps to Perforce. After I pushed the map, other team members who pulled it found that the level appeared completely black and unplayable. The lighting, materials, and textures were missing or not loading correctly. Essentially, the environment loaded in an empty, broken state.

This problem was critical because it prevented other developers from properly testing or continuing work on that level. Without lighting or materials, the map couldn’t be used to verify gameplay features, performance, or visual quality. It also caused unnecessary confusion during collaboration, making it difficult to ensure everyone was working with the same version of the project.

After investigating the issue, I realized that the problem stemmed from how Unreal and Perforce were communicating. When I originally pushed the map, Unreal wasn’t properly tracking all the necessary dependencies—such as lighting data, materials, and references to external assets. As a result, the map file itself was uploaded, but its connected assets weren’t included in the changelist.

To fix this, I connected Unreal Engine directly to Perforce using Unreal’s built-in version control plugin. Instead of manually pushing files, I started using Unreal’s built-in “Submit to Source Control” feature from within the editor. This ensured that whenever a map or asset was submitted, all of its dependencies (materials, textures, lighting data, etc.) were automatically added to the changelist and synced across the team.

After making this change, maps pulled from Perforce loaded correctly on all systems, complete with lighting and materials intact. This solution not only resolved the missing assets issue but also made our version control workflow much more reliable and consistent for everyone on the team.