Fatal Error In Packaged Project With TMS Overlay

Cesium for Unreal
1

Dear Kevin and community,

I’m packaging an Unreal Engine 5.4 project with the Cesium plugin and running an nginx proxy to serve TMS tiles via a configured tilemapresource.xml. In both Editor and Standalone Play, the Cesium Sun/Sky, BingOverlay+Terrain 3D Tileset and CesiumTileMapServiceRasterOverlay all load correctly.

However, when I build as Dev or Shipping, the game crashes with a “Fatal Error” window exactly when the TMS overlay tries to load (the Bing overlay has already appeared; see screenshot).

Since the same setup works in-editor, I suspect either the CesiumTileMapServiceRasterOverlay or my tile‐serving setup is at fault. Has anyone seen this issue or can suggest a fix?

Thank you for your help and insights.

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2

Hi @Kevin_Ring and @janine ,

We fixed the fatal error by reverting the Cesium plugin’s tinyxml2.lib to its original build. As you know, the tinyxml2.lib mismatch between nDisplay and Cesium is a well-documented issue. We’d swapped in nDisplay’s library so another project with nDisplay would compile, but that broke the CesiumTileMapServiceRasterOverlay: The project compiles but shows the “Fatal error!” on start. Cesium clearly depends on its own build. We’re now working on merging/patching tinyxml2 to support both plugins. Any suggestions or known solutions?

3

Hi!

I’m a collegue of @VI-JH with more focus on the C++ side. I could fix it for us and wanted to share my solution here.

My first idea was to do a custom Unreal Engine 5.4 build from Epic’s GitHub repository and fix the dependencies of nDisplay’s MCPDI library to a rather old version of tinyxml2. I guess this would be the most beatiful but also very time consuming solution.
Thats why I decided to go a rather simple way, which might not work, but fortunately with a little bit luck it did work for us as a dirty fix :slight_smile:

Short Explanation:
I downloaded tinyxml2 (tag: 9.0.0) and made a small change to the code. I simply added the old required constructor of XMLPrinter with two parameters and was hoping the ABI is still correct. Here is my diff:

diff --git a/tinyxml2.cpp b/tinyxml2.cpp
index 31925d9..c6396de 100755
--- a/tinyxml2.cpp
+++ b/tinyxml2.cpp
@@ -2571,6 +2571,9 @@ XMLPrinter::XMLPrinter( FILE* file, bool compact, int depth ) :
     _buffer.Push( 0 );
 }
 
+XMLPrinter::XMLPrinter( FILE* file, bool compact )
+: XMLPrinter( file, compact, 0 )
+{}
 
 void XMLPrinter::Print( const char* format, ... )
 {
diff --git a/tinyxml2.h b/tinyxml2.h
index 452ae95..10f459d 100755
--- a/tinyxml2.h
+++ b/tinyxml2.h
@@ -2243,7 +2243,8 @@ public:
     	If 'compact' is set to true, then output is created
     	with only required whitespace and newlines.
     */
-    XMLPrinter( FILE* file=0, bool compact = false, int depth = 0 );
+    XMLPrinter( FILE* file, bool compact, int depth );
+    XMLPrinter( FILE* file=0, bool compact = false );
     virtual ~XMLPrinter()	{}
 
     /** If streaming, write the BOM and declaration. */

Note that I also had to change the existing constructor to not have default parameter values.

Thats all I changed. Compiled it and copied (overwrite) the used tinyxml.lib files from nDisplay AND Cesium.

nDisplay’s tinyxml2.lib: C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.4\Engine\Plugins\Runtime\nDisplay\Source\ThirdParty\MPCDI\Lib

Cesium’s tinyxml2.lib: C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.4\Engine\Plugins\Marketplace\CesiumForUnreal_5.4\Source\ThirdParty\lib\Windows-AMD64-Release

How I built tinyxml2 on Windows

  • git clone https://github.com/leethomason/tinyxml2.git
  • git checkout 9.0.0
  • Open vs/tinyxml2.sln with Visual Studio 2022
  • In the Solution Explorer
    • Expand tinyxml2 → Source Files and right click on xmltext.cpp → Remove
    • Right click on project tinyxml2 → Properties
    • Navigate to General and set “Configuration Type” to “Static Library (.lib)”
    • Click OK
    • Apply above mentioned changes to source.
    • Right click on project tinyxml2 → Build (make sure to select “Release” built in toolbar before starting)

Now you should find your tinyxml2.lib in $SRC/vs/x64/Release or folder.

Compiler Version: I used v143 (14.38.33130); Location: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.38.33130

Thats It.

In case you want to give it a quick try, I uploaded my tinyxml2.lib to my drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rKMqOYUIdc_Rz69MzQ0bFDfnskcGV05B/view?usp=sharing

Best
Manuel

PS: I’m aware that there is no gurantee that this will work forever or is considered “safe”, but it works for now.

Updated (13.05.25): I wrote Unreal Version 5.5 but we are currently bound to 5.4.

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4

Hi @Manuel_Freiholz, welcome to the community! And thanks for sharing your solution.

Unfortunately, those are exactly the kinds of dirty tricks we sometimes have to resort to for third-party dependencies in Unreal’s “dump every plugin into one executable” compilation model. Well done getting something that works!

In theory, in UE 5.5, it should be possible to compile cesium-native against UE’s version of tinyxml2. We have an issue for this, but haven’t tried it yet:

Even though cesium-native can’t use Unreal’s tinyxml2 successfully when we just hard-swap it in, I think that if we actually compile against the corresponding headers then everything will work correctly. We won’t know for sure until we try it, though.

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