What causes an Unreal lock-on that switches to the wrong adjacent target?

Target switching picks the next enemy by raw world distance rather than the direction the player flicked the stick, so a right-flick can grab a target on the left.

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 Lock-On Switching to the Wrong Adjacent Target in Unreal

Quick answer: Project candidate targets to screen space and switch to the nearest one in the direction of the stick input relative to the current target.

If flicking right during lock-on jumps to the wrong enemy, switching is based on distance, not stick direction. Screen-space directional switching fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Read the switch direction

Capture the right-stick (or mouse) flick direction at the moment of the switch input and normalize it to a 2D screen direction.

2. Project candidates to screen

Convert each candidate's world position to screen space with ProjectWorldToScreen and compute its offset from the current target.

3. Pick the best match in that direction

Choose the candidate whose screen offset best aligns with the flick direction (highest dot product), so a right flick reliably selects the target to the right.

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.

Most of the time the fix is small. Seeing the failure clearly is the part that actually costs you.