We Got Version 2 Badly Wrong. Here Is What Happened.

We owe you an apology, and it needs to come before anything else: the Version 2 migration was a mess, it went on far longer than it should have, and if you bought Character Creator during it, you paid for a tool that spent weeks not doing what we promised. That's on us. No caveats.

This post is the honest version of what happened, what broke, what we fixed, and what we're changing so it doesn't happen again.

What we were actually doing

Character Creator didn't start life as one plugin. It was three separate pieces that had to be installed together and kept in lockstep — a core framework, the Character Creator module itself, and the web layer that draws the interface. That worked when there was one of us and one engine version to worry about. It stopped working the moment we tried to ship across Unreal 5.4 through 5.7, on Windows, Mac and Linux.

So we folded the whole thing into a single self-contained plugin. One download, one folder, one version number, nothing to keep in sync. It was the right call and we'd make it again. What we got badly wrong was the assumption that it would be a tidy piece of surgery. It wasn't. Rebuilding the foundations meant genuinely rebuilding the plugin, and a great deal that used to work quietly went out from under us at the same time.

What broke

Being specific, because vague apologies aren't worth much:

• Downloads failed. For a period, purchasing worked and downloading didn't — the worst possible combination. A misconfigured storage setting meant the store handed out links to files it then refused to serve.
• The updater got stuck in a loop. It would tell you an update was available, install it, and then tell you the same update was available again.
• The panel didn't render on Linux. The interface simply didn't appear for Linux users. That one took us the longest, and needed a complete redesign of how the panel is hosted rather than a patch.
• Importing packs was slow, then it wasn't slow — it was fatal. Large asset packs would crawl and then take the whole editor down with them. It turned out we were importing everything in one enormous batch and running machines out of memory.
• Imports quietly made a mess of your project. A single pack could create hundreds of unnecessary skeleton assets, and every import was saving the mesh but not the skeleton it referenced — leaving broken references behind in your content folder.
• Generated characters came out wrong. Invisible characters from batch generation. Hair picked as the base mesh. Colours that reverted to the pack's original materials. Saved characters that wouldn't load their parts back into the panel.
• Progress bars that told you nothing. Long operations looked frozen because the progress events were never actually being delivered to the interface.

If you hit several of those at once — and plenty of you did — Character Creator wasn't a slightly rough tool. It was unusable. We understand why some of you asked for refunds, and we gave them.

What we changed

The last few weeks have been almost entirely repair work, not features:

• Imports are chunked and memory-safe, and now build one shared skeleton per project instead of one per asset. Skeletons are saved properly, so no more orphaned references.
• The Linux panel was rebuilt from scratch around a separate display process, which is what finally made it render reliably instead of fighting the editor for control.
• Batch generation was rewritten to build one character per editor tick, so the editor stays responsive and the progress bar tells the truth.
• The saved-character path was fixed end to end — load a character and the panel now repopulates correctly.
• Colours, materials and attachments now survive generation instead of reverting.
• Body morphs bake into the generated meshes, so what you build is what you get in your Blueprint.
• Every build is now produced from a clean checkout on a dedicated machine per platform, with automated checks that refuse to package a build missing any part of its runtime. Several releases that would have shipped broken were caught by exactly those checks.

Where things stand

Character Creator 2.0.20 is out now for Unreal Engine 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7 on Windows, Mac and Linux. The Mac builds are signed and notarized with Apple. It's the version we'd have wanted to hand you at the start of all this, and it's the only version we want anybody on.

If you own Character Creator, it's a free update — head to your account and download the build for your engine version and platform.

What we're changing about how we work

An apology without a change of behaviour is just noise, so:

• We won't call something fixed until it's been confirmed working in a real project, not just built successfully. A worrying number of the problems above were "fixed" more than once.
• Releases go out on a proper pipeline, with the packaging checks described above, instead of being assembled by hand under time pressure.
• You can report problems from inside the editor. There's now a bug reporter built into the plugin, so a broken import doesn't require you to leave what you're doing and find our Discord.
• We'll be more honest in public about what's actually shipped. Some of the frustration during the migration came from us being quiet while things were broken. Quiet is worse.

Thank you, genuinely

The people who stuck with us through this, filed detailed reports, sat through builds that didn't work and told us plainly when something was rubbish — you're the reason 2.0.20 exists in the state it's in. Several of the fixes above came directly from your reports.

If you're still hitting a problem, please tell us: use the bug reporter in the plugin, or find us on Discord. We'd much rather hear it than not.

Thanks for your patience. It was worth more to us than you probably realise.