I’m sure there must be an answer to this somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find it, so here I am, asking a question google failed to answer for the first time in… 4 years maybe?
Anyway, I’m building the engine from source (mostly to be able to optimize package sizes), and I need to create smaller builds for the artists. My repo is over 165 GB and counting; the one I downloaded from the launcher is 30 GB, so less than 20%.
I’m sure Epic has a tool or something for making the builds that they publish inside the launcher. It’s hard to imagine them hiding that specific part of the build pipeline when everything else in the engine is open-source. The question is, where is it?
Honey, I’m doing the same thing, Unreal Engine is too complicated for non-programmer artists. I’m now working on Unreal Modules as a pipeline engine, just like you install files, the artist just has to keep hitting “next” to make the project. I’m guessing that Epic might have a “module loader” or something like that, which can directly load and unload a module and other dependencies, similar to “reference viewing” in Unreal Engine.
Maybe we can discuss it, can you leave your contact information?
There are a number of intermediate files that you don’t have to include in an installer or download, no matter whether you ship a zip file or an actual installer. Make sure to exclude all of those (using whatever method you prefer – anything from installer maker scripts to .gitignore) and your built engine/editor will be the smallest necessary size.
That being said – once the artist runs the editor, and it builds/bakes/processes all the art, the actual disk usage will be quite big for artists, too. That’s just what it is to use Unreal Engine. If you need all the fancy bits of this engine, you have to live with the size explosion, because that’s what’s needed to deliver those.
