Looking for clarification on how maps and their dependencies are gathered for builds when [Project Settings > Packaging > List of maps to include in a packaged build] is or isn't populated

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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Hi Everyone,

We want to know how maps and their dependencies get cooked in relation to this setting. If it’s empty, how does the cooker determine what to include in the package? And how does this behaviour change if the list is populated?

For some background, we had an unexpected increase in package size which we realised was caused by removing the single map we had specified in the “List of maps to include in a packaged build” setting.

I don’t think the details are relevant here as they are specific to our project, but we have hundreds (300 ish) levels in our project, and when “List of maps to include in a packaged build” is empty, our build size increases from around 20GB to 90GB. I’m still going through the process of cooking our data and diffing across diferent builds, but clearly something extra is being added.

Edit: I’m still investigating this but I’ve just noticed that while the contents of the PAK files is pretty much identical, the size of the wwise assets increases dramatically when we dont have any maps specified… For example a 575B asset becomes 117MB. No idea what’s going on there but I’ll continue to investigate it… Though it does look like some wwise code is referencing UProjectPackagingSettings::MapsToCook so it could be bugging out somehow?

Thanks,

James

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Hello!

The behavior of the cooker does change depending on the list of maps. When it’s empty, it will cook all the content of the project. When you specify levels, the cooker start from those levels and cook their full dependency chain.

There are actually a few ways to specify a list of levels like the Map Ini Sections or the -map argument. https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en\-us/unreal\-engine/cooking\-content\-in\-unreal\-engine

There are a few other ways to control what is included (or not) in a package. The settings are in the same section that the list of maps. Look for “Directories to never cook” and “Additional Asset Directories to Cook” .

I can’t really comment on what can affect the size of the Wwise asset so I recommend that you contact their team.

Regards,

Martin