Enabling Windows Long-Path Support Fixed Unreal Engine 5 Build Failures, Not Short Paths
A development team troubleshooting Unreal Engine 5 packaging failures found that shortening folder and project root paths was insufficient to resolve persistent MAX_PATH (260-character) errors during the cook stage. The root cause was that Windows long-path support had not been enabled on their build machine, a configuration requiring the registry key LongPathsEnabled to be set to 1 and the application to declare itself long-path aware. Once the team applied the setting via PowerShell and restarted the affected processes, the packaging pipeline completed successfully with longer asset paths intact. They cautioned that Windows caches the registry value per process, meaning a restart of Unreal Engine, AutomationTool, and build agents is necessary for the change to take effect. While keeping project paths short remains good build hygiene, it cannot substitute for a correctly configured Windows runner in CI/CD environments.
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