Hello everyone.
I’m working with UE 4.27 on a modding project for a game that packages its own bundled version of UE 4.27 as an SDK with its game assets accessible for modding.
An issue that we repeatedly run into is that if the cook/build process ever runs out of virtual memory, the cooker will start over from the beginning and skip over assets that it already cooked. This would be fine, except it spawns a ton of “ERROR: Engine or Game Content being referenced by DLC!” These are completely bogus errors, as if you ever manage to cook your mod without running out of virtual memory, these errors never pop up.
This is an issue that I’ve seen noted by Epic in a bug report once upon a time, but it never got resolved.
I’m working with 64 GB of RAM that I purchased mostly explicitly so that I would have enough RAM to cook our mod, but our mod has recently expanded so much that that’s not possible. We’ve already split out our mod into a couple pieces and just have them reference each other, which works via Steam Workshop, so that’s a potential solution, but one we want to avoid to prevent users from having to download many different mods.
I also have ~80 GB of pagefile, but for some reason UE4 doesn’t take advantage of that nearly as much as it should. By the time I’m using up around 63 GB for cooking and the virtual memory limit gets hit, I still have around 50 GB of pagefile space available.
It would be absolutely fantastic if anyone knew how to resolve this issue. Obviously, the worst problem is the completely worthless DLC Error that prevents a good cook for no apparent reason. If that can somehow be excised out of my local UE4 copy in some way, shape, or form, that would be wonderful. Barring that, forcing the UE4 cooker to use more of my pagefile would also be a great solution, as I can likely add enough to that to get a good cook without the virtual memory limit being hit.
Failing either of those two solutions, if there’s any possible way to cook specific chunks one at a time, that may also be a solution. Chunk 0 could be our core gameplay BPs, Chunk 1 could be a lot of model and environmental assets, Chunk 2 could be some of our maps, etc. If I can cook those one at a time, I should be able to completely avoid hitting a virtual memory limit; to be clear, I’m talking about starting the cooking process for one chunk, having it finish successfully so it cleans up memory, and then doing it again for the next chunk.
There is supposed to be an incremental cook option, but apparently it’s disabled for DLC which for some reason our mods count as.
If anyone has any ideas that could help, that would be extremely appreciated. This frustrates our entire modding community, so any solution would help out a bunch of people.
Thank you for your time.