Something I noticed right now - I got freezes to become less frequent after doing nothing but simply navigating around and turning on that option.
Then I tweaked materials and replaced old materials on some meshes - bam! freeze after freeze to the point deeming UE4 unusable
P.S. ~30 min later still having freezes. After I closed Material Editor window freezes significantly subsided.
P.P.S. It feels like 4.13 constantly compiling shaders in the background. Btw, I not longer see a pop-up says and counting shaders when I change materials. It simply applies/saves and the, without any popup it goes into grind.
I’ve just encountered almost a minute-long freeze! CPU usage went from ~15-20% to ~40% during freeze, but memory usage stayed at ~60%, no increases here.
Disregard all the “positive” things I said above - I opened project fresh (after restarting PC) this morning as still get constant and continuous freezes. 4.13 is impossible to work with
One last thing to mention - my DerivedDataCache folder is in my project’s folder (I edited .ini file so it’s created where I need for it to be created and not on C: drive) as I am running out of free space on C: drive (where UE4 places DerivedDataCache folder by default).
Not sure if it makes any difference, but I figured it’s something worth mentioning.
Hmm, I have over 30 GB left on C: and still get the freezes. By the way, I’ve noticed that the editor tends to freeze pretty hard if we e.g. minimize it, go browsing web for ~5 min and then go back to editor. In my case it sometimes takes a 10-20 seconds to un-freeze and get back to usable state. This wasn’t happening in e.g. 4.11, as I remember.
PS. Just freezed for ~15s. after just selecting Spline component in blueprint.
This type of behavior can possibly occur if the drive that your DDC is located on has a lot of read/write activity. You can use our DDC Docs to try and move your DDC to a new location. This will cause hitches as you work if you don’t pre-build your DDC, so use the build commands in the Docs.
I suspect what’s happening is that you’re experiencing hitches whenever the engine has to compile something new and store it in the DDC. The behavior when this happens would be a hitch when first loading an asset, then it no longer hitches for that asset after that.
So, I probably should have worded that better, but DDC is the exact thing you mentioned in your previous comment…Derived Data Cache.
The DDC essentially this(from the doc I linked):
The Derived Data Cache (DDC) stores versions of assets in the formats used by the engine and its target platforms, as opposed to the source formats artists create that are imported into the editor and stored in .uasset files. Content stored in the DDC is disposable in that it can always be regenerated at any time using the data stored in the .uasset file. Storing these derived formats externally makes it possible to easily add or change the formats used by the engine without needing to modify the source asset file.
So, what this sounds like, to me, is that you’ve updated your project from 4.12 to 4.13. There are a lot of custom shaders/textures/assets that you worked on and developed in 4.12. As you created these assets, they were compiled and stored in the 4.12 DDC (found here: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\UnrealEngine\4.12\DerivedDataCache).
After updating to 4.13, all of your custom assets are not a part of the 4.13 DDC. So, if you don’t “Build” the assets in that project with the build command found in the docs, then it’s going to do it one at a time as you load each asset in your project. In turn, this causes the editor to freeze while it caches that asset.
So, you were asking how to launch from the command line. This is how to build the DDC in 4.13 for your project.
Open CMD
Locate the UE4Editor.exe file in “Program Files (x86)\Epic Games\4.13\Engine\Binaries\Win64”
Drag the exe into the CMD window
Add a space
Locate your .uproject
Drag it into the CMD window
Add a space
Type -run=DerivedDataCache -fill
Hit Enter
Go get coffee
When it’s finished, try opening your project again.
If you still get freezes, let me know and we’ll go from there.
I wanted to add the argument, somehow, so I could still run Editor from Launcher, but it would be launched with -ddc=noshared (from the Launcher, not cmd)
Have you tried running Editor with -ddc=noshared ?
It sort of solved freezes for me, but not 100% sure yet. The problem with that (and I haven’t messed with working with materials yet) was that when I applied new material to a static mesh, it took forever to appear and Editor was choppy. So I had to disable "show folder"in content browser, select all assets there and right click on them to load. Took a while, including compiling 9,000+ shaders.
So I am not sure whether I have to do this nonsense every time I start engine with -ddc=noshared or if it was one time thing.
