Hi,
Working in the VFX industry, I’m very confused with how Unreal Engine works as an application on disk. I have never before come across an application that generates data inside it’s installation folder, but then again I’m not in the game industry so maybe there is a very good reason for this that I don’t understand yet.
My attempt is to install Unreal Engine centrally on a file server, and then let all users run it. We do this with all of our other softwares (e.g. Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Mari) and by doing a new install for every version we would like to use, it also gives us the flexibility to go back to a previous version if we need to. And by installing the software just once, means also that we don’t have to fill up each machine’s hard drive with unnecessary data.
This however proves to be very difficult with Unreal Engine. We run Linux in our office, so we have to build Unreal Engine from the source code. I have so far noticed that DerivedDataCache and Intermediate folders under the **Engine/ **folder gets filled with data during the launch of Unreal. For DerivedDataCache, I was able to change a lot of values in BaseEngine.ini in order to relocate that folder to another place. However, I’m still stuck with the Intermediate folder. And as I read the documentation, it appears there are additional folders in the install folder that will have data written to it depending on if it’s building, autosaving etc.
Is there a way of just moving all this kind of data outside the install folder? Other applications usually solves this with storing data in the user profile folder. I do get that the generated shaders and temp data are meant for the project you work in, but isn’t there a better way of doing that? Again, I’m sorry for not understanding the game industry 
/A confused pipeline developer