HLODs kill project size and cannot be reduced

General Issues and Bug Reporting
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1

Please select what you are reporting on:

Unreal Editor for Fortnite

What Type of Bug are you experiencing?

UI/Tools

Summary

So I am making an open-world game and I need to build HLODs so things don’t pop in and out of existence. However, when building HLODs initially, my project went from 78% to 104%. So I am like “alright, well I ll start taking some actors out of the HLODs to reduce its size”, and I started doing that.
However, this somehow made things worse. I ve set the landscape not to be included in HLODs (since you cant derender it with world streaming, another bug), and around 15k actors. Then I deleted the HLODs to be sure the ones are correct, but the delete button did not work so the HLODs stayed in forever. After multiple attempts and a restart of UEFN, the delete HLODs buttons worked and project size went down to 77%, similar to where it was before enabling them.

So now my expectation is to see the filesize of the HLODs be smaller when built (I assumed most of the filesize is due to the landscape). However, to my surprise, the HLODs built now raised the project size even more than before (from 77% >> 109%). No idea what happened, and I checked that the HLOD folder was empty before rebuilding. Even 5% is excessive considering I optimized 220 textures to an average of 60% texture size reduction in filesize and only saved 3% of the project.

So not only it increases project size immensely, it doesn’t allow us to reduce it either

UnrealEditorFortnite-Win64-Shipping_hWXkvbm2hJ
UnrealEditorFortnite-Win64-Shipping_hWXkvbm2hJ758×359 33.1 KB

Also, everytime you delete and rebuild HLODs, even with no changed, the size of the HLODs increases (1st time was 104%, second 109%, third 110%)

Without HLODs:

766×705 44.6 KB

Steps to Reproduce

Load up the survival island template (with props)
Note the project size (Tolls >> Project Size)
Build HLODs
Check project size again
Delete HLODs (Build >> Build HLODs >> Delete HLODs)
Ctrl+A and untick “Include Actor in HLOD”
Build HLODs again
Check project size

Expected Result

Project size should reduce massively on building HLODs without the landscape (in theory)

Observed Result

HLODs actually increase project size when you exclude actors from it

Platform(s)

PC

2

Hey did you fix this?

3

Yes, I optimized the oblivion out of every custom asset I had, so HLODs can fit. Terrible experience and I don’t think I ll make another project with HLODs any time soon

2 Likes
4

The status of FORT-736602 incident has been moved from ‘Ready for QA’ to ‘Closed’. Resolution Reason: ‘Cannot Reproduce’

5

Also some extra context since this post is old now:

  1. Devices have HLODs enabled by default

  2. Some props with HLODs enabled will not render them (like the crane top from Neo Tilted, lighthouse roof top, and PowerTower02)

  3. Cannot set landscape not be in HLODs (?)

  4. Editing any actor in the viewport will reupload the entire HLOD file to live edit, not the chunk, causing insane load times everytime you push changes to live edit (20+ mins in project shown, VDSL connection)

  5. There is no straight debug toggle to see HLODs in editor, you have to fiddle with some other weird settings to manage to see them in UEFN.

  6. Setting a default new HLOD profile, will reduce their size by around 20%. We don’t have the settings exposed to know why that happens though.

6

Is there any way to check what assets take a lot of space (missing lods) in HLODs?