[Solved] Deleting materials

[ThePriest909]

Being troubled with a "delete" issue for the last few months of our game development however I didn't bother to ask till now.

We have a bunch of "testing" materials we used in game's alpha stage that we do not use anymore. However UDK thinks that we can not delete them as it always connects them with something importand although there's not any use of them. They're just extra MB in our HDs.

The obvious way of deleting them would be to remove any of their references from our game, replace them with the new improved mats delete the old ones and in the end the textures they come from so that nothing that needs to be deleted depends on anything... And so we did...
However UDK pops the usual message that looks something like : "blah blah blah....may help if the object is loaded at startup"..

We made sure that these objects are not used anywhere but still UDK proves us wrong for some odd reason.. any ideas by the more experienced ones?

Thanks for your time.


EDIT:
Additional question by the way... wth are those ""name"_MAT_flattened" textures that popped up next to our materials since the last update. Kind of messy looking browser with all that stuff around.

[BoleroDan]

Have you removed all reference of the material you want to delete, from any UnrealScript packages you have compiled? I know that I cannot remove a material, if UDK loads a unrealscript package that I compiled that has a reference to it in its code.

Once I removed it from my code, recompiled, I could delete it.

[ThePriest909]

Thanks for replying!

We did. I checked more than twice, scripts/meshes/levels.
However some stuff keep bugging us.
As an example besides materials there are a couple of static meshes that we can not remove no matter what, although they're not in any possible use.

It's not a major problem since UDK will kick them out from the final game cooking but.. it'd be so much easier for us to work without those "no need to be there" stuff messing up the browser.

[MattK]

When you attempt to delete the material what comes up. You should get some text about what is referencing it. You can also get this without deleting by selecting "list objects that reference this object" when right clicking a material in the content browser. That will give you a good indication of why it cant be deleted. You might also try using force delete as this attempts to remove references before deleting.

[NikSha]

Deleting most of the stuff for me ends up giving references that just don't exist. Sometimes materials are being referenced by themselves according to UDK.

So I just started force deleting such materials/meshes/textures. Haven't seen any issues because of this even though UDK warns that it can screw up something big time. I DO make occasional backups of the content just in-case something goes wrong because of this though.

[WolverineFRS]

If the "force delete" doesn't want to delete something then I use to move that stuff to another new package and just delete it from the explorer or total commander.

[Tom Shannon]

Make sure you're deleting your journal, checkpoint and manifest files and letting them get rebuilt too. Sometimes references can be stored in those. Also, if you'd post shots of the messages and log, somebody might be able to see something you didn't in 'em.

[ThePriest909]

Thank you very much all for replying.
Feedback was very helpful.

In order to get rid of them (force delete caused crashes) we moved them all into a trush package and delete it manually (Wolverine's suggestion).

By loading our maps for the first time, a couple of warnings popped up although our maps were ok. We saved the maps again in order to get rid of those warnings too.

The thing is that those warnings were about deleted (non wanted) mats that were refernced to non existed at this time meshes or meshes that use other materials by now... :0\
Thankfully by re-saving every map we got rid of them without ay issues but obviously it was some kind of a bug -if I can call it that way- as expected.

And again thanks the help.