okay sorry

Is it pointing to the right path? Do you have an install specifically of unreal gold, or just the regular unreal without return to na pali?

Apologies if this has already been fixed, but I've run into a pretty consistent problem of skeletal mesh decorations crashing the game when I look at them after loading a save. Testing the same meshes in UT, the crash does not occur.  I can avoid making decorations with skeletal meshes, but the real issue is when a pawn with a skeletal mesh is killed.

My steps were: put down a knife in a map, give it a skeletal mesh, open the map in Unreal, look away from the decoration, save the game, quit, load the game, look at the decoration. Alternatively, I would place a pawn with a skeletal mesh into a map and kill it - but unlike saves with the knife, which crash 100% of the time, saves with skeletal mesh corpses seem to work on a rare occasion.

A few things I've ruled out:
-Improper material names (e.g. skin1 instead of skin01)
-Models not being vertex-welded before being exported
-Skeletons not following the traditional "Bip01" naming convention
-A model having a high polycount

The error in the log:

Critical: USkeletalMeshInstance::UpdateSkeletalFrame
Critical: URender::DrawLodMesh
Critical: (SkeletalMesh SkeletalSlith.SkeletalSlithMesh)
Critical: DrawMesh
Critical: URender::DrawActorSprite
Critical: URender::DrawFrame
Critical: URender::DrawWorld
Critical: UGameEngine::Draw
Critical: UWindowsViewport::Repaint
Critical: UWindowsClient::Tick
Critical: ClientTick
Critical: UGameEngine::Tick
Critical: UpdateWorld
Critical: MainLoop
Exit: Executing UObject::StaticShutdownAfterError
Exit: Executing UWindowsClient::ShutdownAfterError
Exit: UALAudioSubsystem::ShutdownAfterError
Log: DirectDraw End Mode
Exit: UOpenGLRenderDevice::ShutdownAfterError
Log: Resetting gamma
Exit: Exiting.
Uninitialized: Name subsystem shut down
Uninitialized: Log file closed, 08/31/20 18:01:38
 

Great, thanks!