I’ve very recently (as in two hours ago) started to check out the basics of the editing tools for Unreal 4, to appraise its possible use on an upcoming project.
At first I was pretty impressed by the editor, until that is I created my first material. It’s a very simple one with just 3 textures, plus a single constant as inputs. However I’ve hit the issue being reported in this thread (and in manner other places beyond this forum) of the incredible times being spent compiling, then recompiling shaders after the smallest change to a single shader (e.g. a change to the constant value).
After the material was first created the popup reported about 300 shaders being compiled. Strange I thought, but hey I’m new to this editor, perhaps it does this on the first use of the material editor in a session. But then after making a small change to the single shader, the popup reported 372 shaders being compiled. With the next two small changes to the shader, the number of shaders being re-complied was reported as 600+ then 1100+
This all took place within the first few minutes of my using the material editor, resulting in a wait of about a minute for the 1100 shaders to complete their recompile.
I have to ask… why the need to recompile such a large number of shaders, when only one had changed and why would that large (over 200) number of shaders (assuming that the number reported in the popup is correct) rapidly climb to an incredible number (over 1100) for a scene that that has minimal content of a single landscape mesh with a single material applied to it.
I can see that in this thread there’s the suggestion of turning off some “usage” checkboxes, but to be honest for me to have hit such a big issue, so fast, that seems to be so fundamental to the workflow and there is just a rough workaround has me stunned.
What’s now stunned me even more is that I’ve just noticed that the posts to this thread reporting this issue, span two years, so I’m not expecting a quick resolution to the problem.
As the editor stands there is no possibility that I can recommend Unreal 4, as an alternative to our company’s internal tech.
The version of the editor I’m using is 4.12.4