Oculus recommends ASTC compression when deploying for Gear VR. UE4 docs don’t seem to mention it, so I assume it’s not implemented in UE4. Could you please add that compression method to UE4 ?
Hey Motorsep,
UE4 actually already supports the ASTC texture format. You can find it by going to File->Package Project -> Android then select the texture format you want from the list.
However when using UE4 to make projects for Gear VR you should use the ETC2 texture format. You can read more about Gear VR and UE4 development in the official documents that are linked below.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Platforms/GearVR/index.html
Hope that helps and please let us know if you have any more questions.
Ah, thanks!
Although I am still confused about why Oculus recommends ASTC and Epic recommends ETC2. Since Gear VR only works with Samsung top phones, I assume the hardware is designed to work with ASTC. Why use inferior ETC2 ? (I understand that ETC2 is useful when deploying to a large fragmented range of Android devices)
P.S. For everyone who is interested in the subject Using ASTC Texture Compression for Game Assets | NVIDIA Developer
I use ASTC. It works just fine on my S6.
Smaller package size, better texture quality. Everyone should use it for Gear VR. I honestly see absolutely no reasons to prefer ETC2 over ASTC.
There is one very good reason - unlike Unity, UE4 takes ages to compress textures with ASTC. It takes a while to build with ETC2 on my PC, but ASTC takes it on a whole new level of crazy. Therefore ASTC is unusable.
Haha yes, UE4 build times are ridiculously long. My content compressed to ASTC for 3 hours (with low quality, I assume production-quality will take more than 10 hours).
However, I have to admit that ASTC compression is really exhaustive even using standalone tools (except the case you use GPU-accelerated tools).