I think it’d be useful to have a “reduce” option on the build process, such that it essentially strips out any content built that doesn’t have a reference in a level or in code. What I mean is that say I have 100 textures in my project folder, when I make use of the textures from that folder the final build should only incorporate the ones I’ve used in the scene, not all of them in the base folder.
I’m asking this because I did a quick demo build from one of the template projects just to try it out, didn’t include a lot of content and still already had 1gb of content incorporated. Most of that wasn’t used in any of the levels, so its clearly just packaging everything wether it is used or not.
Obviously this should be optional, with some method of marking assets as “build into project no matter what”, but everything else should be automatically reference counted and included in the build.
I asked around the team a bit, and this should already be done for you. It should only cook things that you reference, and anything you specify to ‘always cook’ via ini file or game callbacks.
Hmm, does that reference include being in the content browser? because it seems to be cooking everything I have as content. I’ll double check though and get back to you. Have you any idea how big a single level with no textures one box and a player start should come in at mb wise?
As Jacky mentioned, the Package option in the editor uses -AllMaps, so it will package content referenced by any map in your game. If you used the Starter Content checkbox when creating your project, one of the maps created references pretty much all of the content in the starter package. You can delete that map to dramatically reduce how much you’re packaging.
You can also use Unreal Frontend or the command line to explicitly specify how much to package, but those are still very much a work in progress in this release.
Thanks Michael, makes sense. I guess having a “maps to include in build” dialogue like Unity has would maybe be useful. Plus a “default map to use” thing. I appreciate the answer though, will look out for that in future.