I have been using UE since the UDK. I was subscriber for unreal engine 4 until it went open for everyone. Throughout the years, I have been watching it fail over and over as each version comes out. It just seems to get slower and slower at doing anything at all. Sometimes things just don’t work, like my latest rage quit. I placed a navmesh bounds volume on a small landscape. It only has two houses and three trees in the map. The navmesh agent didn’t show up when I pressed P. I have noticed this behavior before, however it usually works after I select another asset and click back on it. This time it just refused. So, I tried to restart. Yeah, can not save map. None of this type of C R A P happened in 4.17 and before.
Loading anything new in the editor is overly slow, the shader complier now takes up so much memory that it is difficult to do anything while shaders are building. Sometimes loading a new imported marketplace asset takes an upwards of five minutes (a lot of the time). to load.
Btw this was a new map I created after I got sick of waiting to move the D A M N landscape tool. I had to repaint my main map and set the tool as big as it would go to place a default texture across the entire map. At this rate that map is going to take months to paint.
I don’t have the most lightning fast machine out there, however neither do my players. So, I always develop for mid to upper range machines. To do this I use a upper mid-range computer, to make sure everything is developed fine. I have also noticed that the GPU usage in 4.21 is much higher than 4.20 making it very difficult to test anything easily, as I have to constantly use play in standalone browser. Yeah, that is difficult when working with world composition and a day night cycle.
I concur, as I also experienced the engine becoming slower with each new build. It seems to me that so much stuff is added to each new version, but optimization is just forgotten about.
Which is especially bad for indie devs who often don’t have the best high-end machines to work on.
The landscape tool seems to be really unoptimized in the latest builds, so much that I never use it. I use a third-party voxel tool instead, which is much more optimized.
I don’t know why the landscape tool is so slow, it’s a cool feature in theory but I find it to be unusable.
By the way, I also noticed that the engine seems to get slower the longer you use a project. When I move all the assets to a brand new project, the engine is much faster than before, even though I use the same amount of assets from before.
I’ve also noticed something weird like this as well. What exactly is going on with this? Things become slower to load even loading up an empty map or opening a blueprint. I also feel like it’s linked to how much content you have as well, but there’s also certainly something linked to the longer you have a project.
It really is frustrating dealing with 10-20+ crashes a day because of bugs with the editor and then having to wait 10-15 minutes even just to load up a completely empty map, then double that amount of time to load up your actual game level. This is usually routine for me every day I’m using the editor… I’m honestly not exaggerating either, I am very serious.
A tip I have is, even though autosave should in theory help save things after a crash, I noticed I had to just disable it because it would freeze up the editor constantly, not to mention not being able to always click the pop up buttons.
I feel like it doesn’t matter what hardware you use to run the editor, it just is not made that well unfortunately, and to be fair a lot of work has gone into making it and it is certainly not an easy thing to make or fix, it’s also better than a lot of the competition so that just shows you where we are at with this currently…
@Pine722
I never had such terrible experience in years and didn’t notice my coworkers would suffer this way.
Are you using Unreal on HDD? Although 15 minutes too load your map is still too long. Could you describe your machine specs?
Also 10-20 crashes a day could come from some experimental feature? Or one faulty feature of editor or your own C++ code?
Whatever is the reason, you should provide callstack from Crash Reporter - otherwise nobody will be able to help you.
I’m curious if you ever tried to clean project’s cache - “Saved” folder or/and content of Unreal’s DDC folder?
Does it make difference in your case?
I should mention this is happening on Linux. I’ve done testing and crashes happen on Windows to just not as often. Also it is WAY faster to load on Windows. but could also be from SSD? I think I could literally boot into a level(with no content) in 20 seconds or so with Windows, but on Linux sometimes it is about 15 or so minutes(with content)!
On HDD it is taking 15 minutes yes, and testing on SSD it is taking seconds.
The hardware is more than good enough.
I’m not sure what to do because content takes up hundreds of GB, and most SSD don’t hold a whole lot… I can’t use a SSD for unreal because of this, unless theres a way to put project content on a HDD and the engine itself on a SSD, would that be possible and fix the issue? I haven’t tried it as I assumed everything had to be on the same drive.
I’m not using any custom code as of this time.
I have no experimental features enabled.
I never cleaned the saved folder or the DDC folder. Is that recommended for this? Is there any drawbacks to doing so?
I have real time previews disabled.
As I haven’t done so before, how do I provide callstack from the Crash Reporter? Is there a way I can find logs even if it was turned off?
Is it normal that my unreal engine folder itself is over 210GB? I’m not talking about the projects folder. It seems like way to much, I have no idea why that is either. It’s in the Engine folde, the Saved folder almost 30GB, Source folder 12.8GB, Plugins 12.7GB, Intermediate 23GB, Deriveddatacache 112GB!
DDC folder should have similar size to your Content folder, not like few times larger. I’d recommend you re move entire engine’s cache, you probably got lot of old stuff there.
Remove everything from Saved except /Config - the rest of it it’s just autosaves, cooked assets, etc.
Content eats hundreds of gigabytes? Either you’re working on AAA or tens of freelance projects - you should invest in huge SSD. It’s worth every penny.
If this content is just examples or marketplace stuff, couldn’t you get rid off it?
My engine folder on Windows takes 28 GB, but that’s everything with debugging symbols.
Compiled GitHub version eats whooping 60 GB…
Yes, you can put engine on another drive. Probably you already have engine and project in different locations…
Still… all Unreal stuff should live on SSD, otherwise you gonna waste lot of time.
After cleanup, download debugging symbols for your version of engine via Options in Launcher and then you should be able to provide callstack.
IIRC Crash Reporter has been added to Linux version in 4.21.
I rebuilt entire engine onto a SSD and now it is loading my actual levels in less than a minute, but I can say before it was as if it was compiling things every time because initially on this start up it took 25 minutes to fully load the level the first time(which is similar to how long it would take each time on the HDD), but now it is less than a minute.
#1 helps a bit but only while actively using the content browser #2 only helps if you never touch the master material again. but once you have a master material applied to hundreds of assets, changing the master material will result in a really long shader compilation task. and still, this only ever helps with shader compilation time, not general editor performance #3 I am welcome to keep using an editor that is way slower than its 2-year-old counterpart
in general I agree with the line of thought that UE4 is a powerful development tool that requires powerful hardware. but seeing its general performance become worse as new features are added is a bit discouraging. seeing some stuff be moved into plugins was a promising start, but it seems it didn’t go far enough to have any impact on editor performance
Well, I’ve seen commit on GitHub making shader compilation up to 3x faster (by better memory allocation).
4.20 got faster cooking. I guess they finally have enough engineers to care about optimizations.
