There isnt a ton out there on phones overheating with mobile dev. The general consensus seems to be to make the game as lean as possible. I am at the point now where all of my textures have an LOD bias of 3, and the project looks like i should just quit.
Ive read some stuff about cutting out dynamic lighting, so i have simply set all of my lights to not cast shadows and static. Ive also read about cutting out shadows. I have literally cut that from everything except my directional light, which doesnt work if i turn off shadows (the whole world is dark without it. Honestly, why does the engine even allow you to dev for mobile? What am i missing? I am exhausted from putting so much work into a game and then just cutting it down into almost garbage to find that its still not good enought. Among my test devices is an S22 ultra, so its difficult to blame the hardware. If anyone has any experience or input id be so grateful.
You need to reduce the complexity of your game by using lower quality textures, fewer polygons, and simpler shaders. This will help reduce the workload on the device and minimize the chances of overheating.
By limiting the frame rate of your game, you can reduce the workload on the device and help prevent overheating. Also, as you have already done, reducing dynamic lighting and shadows can have a significant impact on the performance of your game. You can also consider using pre-baked lighting instead of real-time lighting.
Use a profiler to identify any performance bottlenecks in your game and optimize accordingly.
Making a mobile game is hard because of the limitations it creates. I highly suggest you look at other mobile games made in Unreal Engine to figure out the base standard of what is possible and not.
@EliasWick so i think ive got down the polygon and textures. But maybe i need some help with shaders. I dont even know how to start with reducing those. Do you have a link to a tut or anything that can teach me how to do that? Thanks for the reply btw.
@ClockworkOcean thank you for always coming to my rescue whats the best way to link it? Sharing a project is also something ive never done before.
Yea as soon as i was done with that comment i checked project size and the total folder size is 7 gigs. Ill do what you said and get it copied and trimmed down a lot and see what i can come up with! Get you a link soon!
If anyone is still here in 2025, I spent a lot of time optimizing my game, as indicated by other posts on this thread. I had stripped to the bare minimum and could not get anything to work. Texture sizes were astronomically low and everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) was optimized. My game scalability settings were perfected, some settings even taking the frame rate to below 30 fps.
I finally broke through this curse on day that I was working on my character BP. I noticed that as the blueprint grew in size, it would take longer and longer to compile.
On a hunch, I started collapsing logic all over the place. Whole groups of nodes, dedicated to certain things, all became a single node. To my surprise, the BP would now compile much faster, almost instantly.
So, I went through my entire project, looking at BPs with a ton of logic, and began collapsing chunks of logic down to single nodes. One that seemed to help tremendously was my HUD.
I compiled everything and built out my game to test, deploying both as sideload and from the play store. The game now runs flawlessly with no heat on milder settings, and very little warmth on max settings. The battery drain is practically eliminated as a result of this.
Engine version is also important.
Ue5 is compromised trash where just rendering frys your motherboard even when things are turned off.
If you go back down to something like ue4.18 even a potato phone is then able to run a basic scene.
Ita mostly got to do with the internal process of the rendering pipeline - i guess one can try ue5 in forward renderign for mobile, but i believe the result would be much of the same (insane cost/drain/heat to say the least).
Native resolution on the mobile device also plays a big part to this. Even in older versions.
For instance, one of the latest galaxy phones that renders double res 2k is essentially trying to run a 2k output.
Since the engine is barely capable of running 1080p at 60fps off a proper GPU. The phone is going to obviously struggle.
The only way to know what works for sure is to benchmark as many devices as you can - and you can guarantee support for those devices, while providing users with a best guess on other devices in terms of what settings to apply.
And yes, you often end up stealing the mobile device of just about anyone you see or employ, pop it in dev mode, and test… if you care
Should be noted that 99% of app developers for mobile do not.
Hey Clockwork! Been a while since I caught up with you! You’d be proud to know I published my game!
By colapsing, i simply high-lighted/selected chuncks of nodes, right clicked, and then clicked “colapse nodes.” I would select chuncks dedicated to certain things. Further, where there was a lot of logic in some colapsed node, i would colapse even further, making it like a file system in the blueprint. Not sure how this helped at all but it is literally night and day.
Ill try to shoot you a message soon. If you have an Android, id love to know your initial feedback on the game. I know it isn’t your style. Its in the playstore and called The Legend of Alastor.
I actually just bought a crap ton of phones which was expensive but worth it. The only one i didnt test on was the pixel 8, and sure enough, some of my testers showed me unforseen rendering problems.
Another headache is that google is requiring 16kb page file compatibility by november, which is fine for newer phones, but im told makes your app useless on basically the entire population of phones made before 2025. I cant seem to find a lot of info on that, but surely google doesnt have a death wish. Im hoping they will update api 35+ to be backwards compatible.
As for benchmarking, there is a “run hardware benchmark” node that is built into blueprint that mitigates a lot of this. And if you are lucky enough to get the thermal APIs working, youre in even better shape. But thats a ROUGH road.
I don’t understand why it does, but it does. In my top down char BP, a compile used to take up to a minute. Very frustrating. but now that my insanely large BP is now just a set of about 20 collapsed nodes, the compile time is about 1 to 2 seconds. I have no idea why this matters at all. but it also made both Frame and Game significantly lower. I did no other changes in my game to see this difference! let me know if you see anything in the game that is awful and needs to change
It’s probably just something else that’s wrong with Blueprint?
Why don’t you just “graduate” to C++ and try doing the same exact thing directly via Visual Studio (or another compiler if you don’t like that one).
On average - Stuff runs 30% faster than when using blueprint. And you can still prototype in blueprint if you set things up correctly.
whats the best way to link it? Sharing a project is also something ive never done before.
