What we've shipped

Fixed

• UE 5.4 / 5.5: generated Third Person characters finally animate properly. These engine versions have no Retarget Ops, so retargeted clips left their travel on the pelvis (the lurch-and-snap-back) and the duplicated animation blueprint's parent was never saved (the T-pose slide after reopening the project). Travel is now rebased onto the root and every duplicated animation blueprint is saved.
• Feet no longer pin to the floor after reopening the editor. The template's foot-IK Control Rig re-enabled itself on every editor load; it is now removed from generated characters' animation blueprints entirely. If an existing character is affected, regenerate it.
• No more crash dialog when closing the editor. On UE 5.4–5.7 an engine bug asserts if async compilation work is still queued at shutdown. The plugin now switches compilation to synchronous and drains every queue before the engine tears down — including landing-animation recompression, which could also break the landing pose in the same session a character was generated.
• Character shadows render correctly. Per-part shadow bounds were too tight once animated, so Virtual Shadow Maps clipped and cached bad shadows under generated characters. Every part now carries widened bounds, re-asserted on UE 5.6 which silently reset them.
• Batch generation without an output folder no longer crashes the editor.

Added

• Three ways to quiet update prompts: Dismiss (this session), Already have it (that version stays quiet), and Don't show this again — backed by a new Hide GDB update prompts setting under Project Settings → Plugins → GDB Character Creator. The toolbar badge still shows available updates either way.

Fixed

• Characters no longer sprint away from their capsule. Retargeted locomotion clips carried their travel on the pelvis instead of the root bone, so under held movement input the body could run metres ahead of the capsule and snap back. Travel now lands on the root, where the engine expects it.
• The retarget driver skeleton is chosen deterministically. Generation now picks the canonical base-model skeleton by majority across your equipped parts. Previously the pick ranked parts by bone count — which could crown a hair mesh as the animation driver, and could change with the order you clicked things.
• The source-code package is smaller. The retired web stack no longer ships in the source SKU.

Added

• Report a bug from inside the editor. The report dialog now asks for the details an issue actually needs, captures your editor log and an optional screenshot, and files the report directly to our issue tracker. You get a confirmation when it is sent, the dialog remembers your email, and a local copy of every report is kept as a fallback in case the network fails.
• Part thumbnails are baked at import. The part grids draw thumbnails baked into each asset instead of loading and rendering every mesh on the fly — browsing large packs is much faster and no longer stalls the editor.

Fixed

• Update notifications reach you again. Installed plugins were checking for updates under a product id the release ledger never answered for, so every install was told it was up to date. Both ids are now registered on every release — existing installs start seeing new versions without reinstalling.
• The import progress bar moves. Progress events were being dropped on their way to the panel; imports now report their progress as they run.
• Opening the Character Creator tab no longer writes to your project. Thumbnail baking happens when you import — a deliberate action — never silently in the background.

Changed

• Generated characters carry a trimmed skeleton — their own bones, not the combined skeleton of every installed pack.

Removed

• The embedded web runtime is gone. The editor panel has been fully native for a while; the package now reflects it. The bundled browser runtime, its helper libraries, and the local sidecar server no longer ship — the plugin download is roughly 40% smaller on every platform and engine version.