How to Fix RTS Control Groups Keeping Dead Units in Unreal

If recalling control group 2 selects fewer units each battle, the group is holding references to units that have died. Pruning invalid entries keeps recalls accurate. Here is the fix.

How to fix it

1. Store weak pointers

Hold each grouped unit as a TWeakObjectPtr rather than a raw pointer. A destroyed unit's weak pointer becomes stale and can be detected with IsValid().

2. Prune on recall

When the player presses a group hotkey, iterate the array, drop any entry where IsValid() is false, then select the survivors. This self-heals the group every time.

3. Unbind on death

Subscribe to each unit's death delegate so it removes itself from any groups it belongs to immediately, avoiding accumulation of dead entries.

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.