How to Fix Players Cutting the Course by Skipping Checkpoints

Speedrunners and cheaters love a track where you can ignore a hairpin and rejoin past it. The fix is to make checkpoints mandatory and ordered rather than decorative, so any skipped gate leaves the lap incomplete.

How to fix it

1. Track an expected checkpoint index

Store nextCheckpoint per car and only increment it when the car overlaps exactly that gate. Overlapping a later gate does nothing, so a cut leaves the sequence stuck at the gate you skipped.

2. Validate the full set at the finish

When the car crosses the finish, only count the lap if nextCheckpoint has wrapped through every gate. Otherwise show a 'wrong way / missed checkpoint' message and do not count it.

3. Make gates wide and tall enough

Size each checkpoint volume to span the full drivable width and a generous height so legitimate lines always register, preventing false 'missed checkpoint' results on jumps or wide lines.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unreal Engine error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.