How do I prevent the "Preparing Shaders" text from appearing every time I start a standalone game from the editor

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Hi, I have to take a few dozen visually accurate screenshots for my bachelor thesis, but every time I start the game from the editor in a standalone window, I have to wait for the message “Preparing Shaders” to go away before I can take my screenshot.

Is there a way to prevent this message from showing up in the first place?

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You need to let it finish, then it won’t happen again…

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did you change something in the game? because if you add different materials or stuff (for example those quixel objects) unreal needs to prepare the shaders.

preparing shaders means it takes the game data and creates files that the GPU understands.

I can’t give precise indications but if you use unreal only for your local work and you don’t want to redistribute it you could try to cut out the shader compatibility you don’t need. Because in the wild unreal will find many types of GPUs it creates a lot of different shaders that can swap depending of the user machine.

the reason you get that message when you play in standalone window is because unreal will build the game. So playing in standalone window is similar with building the game and run it outside the editor

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I don’t use materials from quixel, but I do have one global shader and a couple custom materials in my game (both surface and post process materials).

Disabling all targeted shader formats except D3D13 SM6 in Settings → Platforms did not reduce the number of shaders that have to be prepared each time each time I start game in standalone mode.

Or did you mean something different when you said cut out the shader compatibility you don’t need?

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If only it were that easy… I have to let it finish anyway to be able to take my screenshots, but it still happens every time I lanch the game in standalone mode from the Unreal editor.

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so you want to go full screen to take the screenshots, why you go to standalone to take screenshots?

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Thank you so much, I didn’t know I can just hit F11 in the viewport to make it full screen :grinning:
That also solves me the trouble of waiting for my game to cook every time I start it :smiley: