Foliage Scalability Question

Hi there! This is actually my first post on the forums. My name is Andrew and I’m currently developing a 3D platformer game.

I absolutely love Unreal Engine so far, but there is one persistent problem I’m having that I can’t seem to figure out. My game has a lot of foliage (one map might have 200K+ grass instances etc.) Of course, I’m using aggressive LODs and foliage density scaling for optimization. However, I have found that when I change the foliage scalability settings in-game, either PIE or a cooked version, there is a huge lag (> 1 minute, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes) for it to adjust to a lower foliage quality setting. For example, going from Ultra preset to Low preset actually takes minutes, where the game appears frozen and then minutes later finally confirms the new settings.

So a few questions: is this normal? (I doubt it, but what do I know?) What do I do about it? If it’s not normal, I should probably submit a bug request, unless it’s actually a problem with my setup. My grass uses foliage types with the density scaling checked. When I uncheck it, obviously no foliage scaling occurs, but changing graphics settings in-game takes seconds rather than minutes.

Thank you so much,
Andrew

As a bit of a bump, but also to add information, I am also having the issue of the foliage going back to 100% density on load level or restart level. I read that this was supposedly a known issue with 4.18 and was supposedly fixed on 4.18.1 (but obviously not). This is a huge problem, so I look forward to hearing about a solution. Thanks again!

Bump nobody else has had this problem?