How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Git LFS Pointer Files Showing Up Instead of Your Game Assets

Q: What causes Git LFS pointer files showing up instead of your game assets?

Your large assets are tracked by Git LFS, but the cloning machine never installed or initialized LFS, so Git checked out the small pointer files instead of downloading the real binaries.

Quick answer: Install Git LFS, run git lfs install and git lfs pull in the repo to download the real files, and confirm .gitattributes tracks the right extensions so LFS handles them.

After cloning, your .psd, .fbx, or audio files are a few hundred bytes of text starting with version https://git-lfs.... Those are LFS pointers, not the assets.

How to fix it

1. Install and initialize LFS

Install Git LFS, then run git lfs install once per machine. Without the LFS filter installed, Git leaves pointer files in place and never fetches the binaries.

2. Pull the real objects

Run git lfs pull in the repository to download the actual asset content for the current checkout, replacing the pointer files with the real binaries.

3. Verify tracking rules

Check .gitattributes for entries like *.psd filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs. If an extension is missing, add it and re-commit so those assets go through LFS going forward.

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 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.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.