Small Mobile Game are very easy to reproduce when they released to market.
There would many hundreds of the same gameplay games even with similar names.
How would users will chose between the same game when the package size is 60MB and 3MB?
The googleplay is not avaible in China. There are so many android markets. The distributors are the leaders of mobile games market. They will make many conditions for game developers. The package size is one of them. If you don’t obey their rules, they will say no, no, no, no, no to your games. Even though, some small games distributors accepted your games.
But don’t be happy with these. The similar games would come in few days. There will reproduce your games in Unity or Cocos2d-x. These games’ package size would normally be within 3MB, and have many other features yours don’t have. So the distributors will make them to the rank list’s top.(The distributors in China are very happy to do these. They only see profits. The game well satisfied their conditions will be consider as profit maker.)
Your game will soon sink into sea bottom forever, nobody will know you are the really original game creator.
You would not understand these serious situations in China. If you come to China, you would understand why there is no guys using UE4 to develop Mobile Games. Almost every guys in China know that if they develop moblie games with UE4, there will not be one distributor will accept their games.
I heard many Chinese developers’ Harsh words to UE4’s mobile games developing features. They said if you chose UE4, your games will certainly failed.
There are many millions of Unity and Cocos2d-X developers in China. It is easily to hire Unity and Cocos2d-x developers.
My partners asked me a serious question some time ago, and I fell into silence.
"UE4 has high hardware requirements, bad android compatiblity, huge package size, not well official supported, fewer developers and solutions(many problems they have to solve them alone), and low performance. The distributors will not even accept our UE4 games. We can’t choose Game Engine that make mobile games with so obviously riskies. So why will we choose UE4 since there are so many disadvantage compared to Unity and Cocos2d-x? ", my partners said.
So using UE4 developing Mobile Games is just my hobby.
I just hope UE4’s android features will become better.
So I will use it develop commercial mobile games with my company’s Colleague together someday.
I have to agree with this. Anything over 100 MB is asking for a lot on a mobile device. I have a 60 GB external SD card on my phone but most apps are not installed on their by default and only some apps can be moved there. In addition, since I can re-download the app at any time from the google play store, it makes more sense to just delete it rather than make room for it.
Whereas if an app is around the 20-50MB range, I would not be in a hurry to get rid of it as soon as I’m done with it.
When I look at games on the play store, the ones over 100 MB are usually triple AAA titles in the 500 MB - 1 GB and don’t look all that different from other titles which are literally 1/10 the size.
Try compressing your file like in this AnswerHub thread. Note that any read operations will be slower though, so disabling texture streaming will help to avoid hitching after deployment.
Empty project (no assets at all) has apk:28 + obb:36 MB size.
I think compiled shaders for sophisticated light models and PhysX binaries have a big part of it.
This is useless for mobile. It could be nice to have a way to exclude it totally from project.
More over, PhysX has small CPU load when doing nothing.
Box2D or its descendant would be more usefull for Paper2D.
First off, it’s normal that you will get a bigger APK/OBB with UE4 compared to Unity and especially coco2D. But i’m surprised that with only 1MB content, you are getting a 64MB file. I’m doing my project in 3D, I have over 24MB of content. I haven’t optimized the textures yet and in development mode, I get 60MB APK/OBB file size.
I would suggest that you use the link, in a previous post, above to package and this link as well, will help you reduce the file size. But you have to take into consideration that you need to optimize your assets as well.
I know that my file size, in the end, will be considerably bigger. But considering my game and it’s comparable on Google Play, the APP Stores, etc, it’s something that will be acceptable for me.
As far as compatibility is concerned, I can get my game working, on a phone that is nearly 3 years old (MOTO X 1st gen), at over 50+ FPS and more often then not at 62+ FPS (It’s seems cap even with vsync off).
From what I can gather, blueprints and your assets are what will take the most space. Maps and C++ files , in my case anyways, don’t seem to increase as much. So if a blueprint takes too much place, I transfer it in C++. (BTW I had no prior experience with C++ before, only C# and I manage to get everything working like I want.).
So keep at it and I know that Epic will improve on this.
Thank you. I understand what you say.
The most serious problem is that UE4 mobile’s base package size is too large(near 60MB). not a problem that user’s custom assets would increase package size heavily.
So it is worse when the game is smaller.
Hope Epic will reduce the base mobile package size in next UE4 release.
If your texture is not a power of 2, it will not be compressed. If you texture contains an alpha, it will not be compressed. Also, for my menus, I’ve reduced the size of 2 or 3 textures while keeping the visual quality and I was able to save 1 to 2 MB easy and I have over 42 textures for the menus alone. So I know I could easily get another 5 to 6 MB right there once everything is optimized. As for my in game textures, Right now I haven’t optimized those either. They are all separate textures. I will be combining them into in atlas and I know that I will, there again save at least 2 to 3 MB. It’s little bit and chunks like this that will allow you to reduce the package.
I’m glad to hear that. I’m surprised that this does not come as an option in the packaging settings. One of my colleagues heard about this trick in one of the Twitch streams as a “by the way” comment, yet it is so useful.
