I feal your pain! We’ve been working on our project for 8 months and as we near the end of the project there are major issues Epic needs to work on but I also might have some tips for you.
URC - Oh how I hate URC, after having our project scrambled with mysterious transforms being reset to 0,0,0 inside blueprints and destroying weeks of work I had to get my hands dirty on the very very undocumented command line features. Epic needs to add extensive documentation to this or enable these features in the GUI, like restoring a deleted file, not alone a bunch of them is an exercise in frustration. I’ve been a server security admin for 20+ years and Linux for 30 so command line is not something I’m afraid of, but undocumented features on source control is not acceptable.
After dealing with said URC issue we finally gave up and moved to perforce helix (it’s free for teams under 5). I put it on a sever here in our studio (you could run it on the same or second pc you’re using) and let me say after a fairly decent learning curve and some performance tweaks it’s worlds better!
Slow everything - Boy so true, all our systems are already pretty high spec, 64gb ram, AMD Ryzen 7 7090x, RTX 3080’s and SSD and we were stil running into delays. Just upgraded the main system to Ryzen 9 9950x, with a 4090 and 192gb of ram and 4tb PCI5 NVME corsair storage and UE5 flies, UEFN, just maybe 10% faster. If anything give your systems the most ram they will take, doens’t even have to be fast, older DDR4 is fine just buy the max as UEFN will use it and it will help.
Which brings me to my next tip, use UE5 for everything you can, use tools (or write them, you can execute python to do mass things like merging materials or setting parameters in bulk). You can build your map or building in UE5, migrate the map over, copy everything over and paste to your main map or put it inside a BP Actor. We can’t do level instances (yet) and scene graph is getting there so it’s a decent work around. UE5 really speeds things up but obviously this depends on your gameplay and what you’re doing, we’re not using any of Fornite’s materials, props, assets, etc.
Anyway we’re a two person team as well so I can understand the overwhelming amount of work and with the big move to bringing in more players for revenue it’s going to make it even harder for small bootstrapped studios to get going. Hopefully they address this soon, Helene made me cancel my trip to Unreal Fest but I’ll be at the next one. Cheers!