One thing I don’t like about modern games are the huge file sizes. Is it possible to make an unreal 4 engine game of decent complexity and size and yet keep the file size under the 10GB mark? Obviously things like lower texture resolution will lower file size but what other measures can be taken? My game doesn’t need super fancy graphics so I am ok with them not being super high end. In theory how small can you make your unreal 4 engine game?
There’s Unreal game out there under 100MB download size.
Textures will always be the biggest culprit on file size.
Interestingly indies manage to often build cool games without any textures needed to make it look good. Good lighting have more visual impact than textures.
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You could also save a ton of space by re-using textures, materials, and meshes as much as possible. Take a look at the Statistics window in editor to see what is being a resource hog.
Additionally, you could also search something like “vertices > 100000” to find all meshes in your Content Browser that are exceptionally large.
I’m not a pro and my first game isn’t ready, but this topic is also really important to me. What I do at moment:
- I always make some backup files of my project.
- After that, I fell more safe and I can delete files I think my game will not use like the “test assets” not used in my game that I make after watching tutorials.
I also delete some of the free assets I dont use, and some of them are really large.
Just want to add that they have executable size reduction on their roadmap:
“Executable size is important for mobile games both to reduce download size and to reduce runtime memory usage. We are working to remove unused code, optimize code for size, minimize the size of object reflection data stored in the executable and more in order to minimize the size of the final UE4 executable.”
While it is primarely for mobile, desktop might also benefit from it.