Well I realize (based off the recent post about the wiki page of supported hardware) that my Nexus 7 2012 hasn’t been tested, but overall it’s abysmal. Tappy Chicken runs great, but that’s about it.
I used the template of the little puzzle game (with a grid of cubes). Touch input is laggy. I also added code to rotate the cubes (in lieu of figuring out how to show FPS), and from my guess the FPS is single or low double digits. (I also have mobile HDR off)
The build time was also 10 minutes for this from hitting launch to it showing up on my device (much faster for Tappy Chicken). I noticed that it generated a 450mb .so file in the process, which then (thank god) was stripped down to fit in a 20mb apk.
Compare this to Unity for example, which is something like 20-30 seconds and has much better performance.
Guess I will come back to check on Unreal’s progress in this regard in a few months…
Its better than you think, It just doesn’t have great “out of the box experience”. Some of the settings are coming over from desktop so Quality > Performance (or most tested to have at >30 fps on nexus 5 w/ the power house Snapdragon 800).
Almost all of that 450mb (probably ~350 is just from all the high resolution textures, in all the varieties that android devices need). I have a blank 3D prototype project and it is down to ~80mb… so it is not bad, but it can definitely improve. The engine alone takes up about ~25mb, but this is getting better.
Just like any system, you just pick up on stuff and it make sense but I can guarantee you the epic team is focusing on the out of the box experience (Documentation, Examples/Samples, Easy Config settups, Quality of Life Features, Compatibility). I’ve spoke with some staff members personally and after seeing the iterations showing it, i believe them. I’m sorry its not quite where you would like it to be, if you need any help and let me know and i’ll try my best to help.
Thanks for the reply. I went hunting and found a wiki page on mobile performance. In render settings I disabled Separate Translucency (even though I believe I had no translucency in this to begin with). I made custom materials for the 3 materials. They are marked fully rough with lightmap directionality also turned off. I also deleted the box brush that was used as a backdrop and replaced it with a 2 tri plane. None of these materials have textures, only color. None of the materials change over time.
I did find out how to show the FPS. It’s 23 on the device (a visible improvement from what it was before, but I don’t have a figure for what it was before).
Still this is: 9 cubes * 108 triangles + 2 (974 total) for the backdrop and absolutely no textures and as far as I can tell no postprocessing (although I really don’t know if there’s a global disable option) and minimal lighting and shader features afaik as well.
This device is certainly not top of the light, but it’s no slouch: it runs Epic Citadel at an average of 55 FPS (which was UDK 3).
I converted this simple thing to run via Unity and it gets 60FPS (vsynced). I understand there can be some differences between engines or my lack of familiarity with UE4 causing me to kill performance on mobile, but if so I’m missing it!
I have made the same experience. Very frustrating process. Have tested the whole day today. The mobile demo levels run on my Galaxy Tab 2.0 7", but all sample levels (fps, tps, sidescroll ect)
are not running on the device. At least i have done the baking without errors (in 1m50s on a I5 Laptop!). But there must be some “hidden feature settings” in the mobile demos, which are missing in the standard demo levels. I have read much about all that stuff today and as it seems i’m not the only one. Has anybody sucessfully exported the Third Person Template to Android? Then please make a Video how!
I also haven’t so much problems with unity. As i can remember, push the button and it was done. With a reasonable filesize and performance. I also have the feeling, that the engine is very hungry for cpu/gpu power even at very simple scenes. The Engine consumes constant 30% of cpu power on my I5 Laptop in idle mode…
Yea buddy i noticed it too , first i noticed everytime i run the engine my cpu fan starts to run faster than before , so i checked my cpu performance , at a completely empty level , it takes about 25-30% , i’m sure udk was running alot smoother . but meh , i still love ue4 .
As they have stated they are working on everything for the engine and mobile is up there with the most fixes/updates 4.3 was 500 updates which is huge I say give it a few months and mobile will be great
Can I just ask what you did exactly yo reduce the file size to 20mb? I have a small game that uses 3 textures. And a few plane assets. However the overall size after packaging is 60mb! I’m not sure what else to do to reduce it further
I guess there is no Android optimized shaders and lightening to get maximum performance. Android compatibility and performance is heavy work, UE4 is better concentrated on desktop what is good, it will need time before having a smooth Android experience.
Sorry but they have a dedicated team that is all working on Mobile ONLY! They are pushing out great progress so far and will keep doing so , as I said before give it a few months and mobile will easily support older phones but also guys its up to the designer to make a mobile friendly game, 3d side and programming.
On my Note 2 everything runs fine. but any older it has issues.
I think we should get back to android not in few months but in year or so. I tried ue4 android 6 months ago for the first time, now after almost half a year the state of documentation and amount of dark spots is the same.
We’re still not where we’d like to be, but I think it’s exaggeration to say that nothing has improved in the past several months (4.0 was released almost exactly 5 months ago). There is now an Android Quick Start guide, and we have significantly increased our testing matrix and number of supported Android devices, which will continue to improve over the next few releases.
We have also added new features such as Google Play support, HTTP/libcurl, proper back/menu button handling, and general ES2 rendering improvements across all mobile platforms (Android, iOS, and HTML5), with more coming soon like an in-editor mobile preview
yes yes all those great cool features but when you go and make simple box with physics simulation and expect it to fall down under gravity it did not work on android (Anyone encountered problems with physics simulation on android? - Mobile - Epic Developer Community Forums)
Meanwhile in unity such simple things work fine. So I thinking to myself if such simple things fail to work in ue 4 what about creating something serious?
Unreal starts to remind me autodesk 3ds max where they introduce more and more features but fail to make work good most of them.
I have created a bowling simulation app and it was very straight forward (with lots of complex physics emulation using physx on android), and worked as expected. Sorry you were having difficulty with it. I’m sure that was a partial example to a larger list of frustrations, but if you could tell us how you were set things(and what your trying to achieve) it would be helpful. Lastly, what kinda device are using (with Android OS version) we can probably give you some helpful hints.
I set physics simulation checkbox on simple box with collider it worked as expected(it falls down) on pc but not on android(it hangs in air).
Again using unity 3d exporter such simple scene ran without any problems on my device at first try.
I’m surprised by the issue with the simulated box not working on mobile. I’d be interested to know if you’ve run the vehicle example on mobile. In this level we have some simulated boxes that the car can drive into. These boxes are just simulated so it would be good to know what kind of results you get there as this would help us narrow down a repro case.
I was also trying to export to Android with Uhnreal Engine4. But no way, extremly sloppy fps… not useable for mobileDevices. Flappi Chickenworks but thats all. Like in the highTech Demo, great graphics, but all they can play is flappy chicken…
Bad experience on Mobiles I think I will stay on Unity3d.
