How to Fix a New Spawn Wave Starting Before the Previous Wave Is Cleared

If wave 3 spawns while wave 2 enemies are still alive, two separate triggers are racing. Require the live count to hit zero before the next wave starts. Here is the fix.

How to fix it

1. Track a live enemy count

Increment a counter when an enemy spawns and decrement it from a single death or despawn callback. Make sure pooled enemies decrement exactly once when returned.

2. Gate the next wave on count zero

Only start the next wave when the live count reaches zero and any minimum inter-wave delay has elapsed, so a slow timer cannot overlap waves.

3. Separate spawn-in from wave-start

Spawning enemies over several frames is fine, but mark the wave as fully spawned before checking for completion so a mid-spawn count of zero does not end the wave early.

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.