I was intrigued by my downtime when working with Unreal. Shader and blueprints compiling very often and taking quite some time, packaging taking a lot of time for very minimal projects, opening projects… So I decided to sample ShowdownVRDemo to get an idea of how someone who works with the engine instead of against it would experience. So:
- I created the project and waited for it to start
- I waited for the shaders to compile (I thought the 15-20 min delay to start was because they were already compiling…)
(Not sure why Epic Launcher insist on hogging 25%, so I closed it after a while) - I waited the EXE to be built.
It was 61 minutes for that few meters scene on rails (it’s somewhat dense, but still very little content).
(i5 4590, 32gb ram, unreal and project on SSD, GTX 780, win 10, clean install)
61 minutes waiting and the lights were already built at least. Of course on a real use, you don’t wait all the shaders to compile at once, but the experience is similar. When designing shaders a change I try takes such a long time to give feedback that I lose reference to before the change. Trial and error seems very unsustainable, specially with lighting and packaging. So the question is: is this normal?
Is the human downtime with UE development a known issue, the lesser of a bigger evil, or user error somehow?
I know I shouldn’t compare with Unity and Quest3D, but trial and error in the workflow is kinda imperative, specially with so much redundant and retification learning content Epic releases every other day without indexing.
Bonus question: what’s the logic of the need to shader recompile if I imported the project someone already made?