How do you set ETC2 format when Launching on Android?

I’m developing a product for the GearVR. The Unreal GearVR documentation says that you should use ETC2 format for the textures. If you hit the launch button on the editor with my GearVR selected as the device, however, it always cooks for the ASTC texure format. If I package the project I can select ETC2 format, and it works fine. If I use the Unreal Frontend the default is ASTC, but I can select ETC2.

Is there any way to change the default launch format for the editor to ETC2? I have tried de-selecting every format except ETC2 in the Multi Texture Formats section of the Android Platforms, and have set ETC2 to priority 0.9 and ASTC to 0.0 in the Texture Format Priorities section, but it still always cooks for ASTC.

ASTC seems to work OK on the GearVR, but it takes a really long time to compress the textures, and there probably is some reason why Unreal says to use ETC2.

Hello ,

After looking into your issue, I found that changing the texture format priorities is currently the expected work flow. If this is not working for you I have a few questions that will help narrow down what issue it is that you are experiencing.

Quick question:

  1. Can you reproduce this issue in clean project?
  2. If so, could you provide a detailed list of steps to reproduce this issue on our end?
  3. What device are you currently using?
  4. Could you provide the current OS that is being run on the device?
  5. Could you provide screen shots of the issue that you are getting?

Hello ,

We have not heard back from you in a few days, so we are marking this post as Resolved for tracking purposes. If you are still experiencing the issue you reported, please respond to this message with additional information and we will offer further assistance.

Thank you.

Hi, and thanks. I found that, as you suggest, changing the texture priorities works. I thought that I had tested this and it didn’t, but I noticed later that it was working. I think maybe I had to exit the editor and re load the project.

The “launch on device” action will use the platform/texture setting of the last (successful?) run, which for me might have defaulted to Android_ASTC probably due to initial texture priority settings. I changed the texture priorities to 1.0 on ETC2 and 0 on the rest afterward, but at this point it had already cached the Android_ASTC platform as my “last run” choice.

So I had to go change the saved settings in the ini file directly:

\Saved\Config\Windows\EditorPerProjectUserSettings.ini
LastExecutedLaunchDevice=Android_ASTC@84B5T15B03009817
LastExecutedLaunchName=Nexus_6P (84B5T15B03009817)

And change to the following line:
LastExecutedLaunchDevice=Android_ETC2@84B5T15B03009817

Now when I click the Launch button it properly builds for the ETC2 platform, as intended.