Unreal Map Check Automation

Map Check automation tooling for Unreal Engine development.

Map Check overview

Map Check is a error checking tool for your levels while developing in the Unreal Editor. You can find details about how this works on Unreal's documentation.

The normal way to run Map Check is to navigate to Build -> Map Check while you have a level open in the editor.

Among some other generic things, this iterates over all the actors you have in a scene and calls the CheckForErrors method, which traditionally populates information into a MapCheck FMessageLog.

Running the Commandlet

Running this process via a commandlet allows for headless operation (ie without the Unreal Editor window needing to open). This pairs nicely with your build machines, and the commandlet can even produce a JSON file of warnings and errors for you to parse.

To run a commandlet through the editor, pass the argument -run=MapCheck. This is based off of the name of the commandlet, so if you do locally make changes to the name, you will need to update any script that requires this argument. As seen in the above image, you can append additional arguments to further control output of the commandlet. You may prefer to parse the logged output of the execution.

By default, the parameter for jsonoutput is appended to the Project's Saved Data are (this is often excluded from version control considerations).

Dependencies

MapCheckAutomation.Build.cs/.cpp/.h files are included in this repository in case you want to use this as a module by itself.

Within your .uproject you can add the module like:

"Modules": [
	...
	{
		"Name": "MapCheckAutomation",
		"Type": "Editor",
		"LoadingPhase": "Default"
	}
],

Implementing MapChecks

See the BadActor example for how you can implement MapCheck via CheckForErrors.

The below image shows some actors that are being checked by the requirements in BadActor.cpp, with corresponding colour highlighting for if they are producing errors (Red) or warnings (Yellow).

By including a FUObjectTokens in your Map Checking logic, you make it much easier to track down your issues in editor, since clicking on these tokens will refocus your editor to the appropriate object.