Downloading and loading pak files in packaged game

Before continuing make sure to have the free plugin Runtime Files Downloader in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace (unrealengine.com)

There’s a news,
I found a way of downloading and loading pak files in packaged game.

Here I use a bit from the chunkdownloader’s setup.

What I do is:
Enable “Project Settings->packaging->UsePakFile” and “Project Settings->packaging->GenerateChunks”

now the editor would be abble to create chunk files. Create folders for each asset that are meant to be chunkdownloaded and creater data asset (refer to the image below)

Now, name it as “Label_yourassetname” and then open all the data assets you’ve just created and change the Priority to “1” and Chunk ID to “1001”, “1002”, “1003” and so on.
Change cook rule to “always cook” and tick “Label assets in my directory”.

Now, as your data is labeled in the directory, we can make the download system.
In my case it was windows so navigate to your packaged game and go to “yourproject/Content/paks”, all your labeled assets with their chunk IDs are here so now we know that where are the chunk files, we just need to make a system which detects these chunk files and download in the same place at runtime. For that,

Lets say we make a ui which has a button to play the sound (in my case) or any keyboard event or action event. Whenever we press the respected keyboard button it will check for the file.


and now you’ll have to upload the file to any direct download service. In my case I will upload my pakchunk file to drive.google.com

note: your file may not be too big or direct link for google will not work, you can search for other services that provide direct download instead, don’t worry there are plenty of em’ with large uploads for free

And now search for google drive direct link generator, here: Google Drive Direct Link Generator (drivelink.eu.org) and paste this link in “DownloadFiletoStorage” node.


in the on progress and on complete you have to make a custom event and just send the data to your UI with a progress bar

After the download is conpleted and we again press that keyboard event the file is found but the sound is not playing coz the pak file is not loaded, we’ll have to restart the game so that the game can automatically load these pak files and match it with the asset label.

Here you go with your download and loas pak system and if you wanna load at runtime only the you should check Pak Loader Plugin in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace (unrealengine.com)

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