I would like to see Epic focus a little more on mobile publishing.
Originally tappy chicken game was said to be done entirely out of blueprints and it was explained that the engine content did not consume more than 25mb of the entire build.
Later it was disclosed that the game wasn’t actually done entirely with blueprints, as a C++ developer had to strip engine features to shrink the build size.
Currently we do not have any way of controlling our build sizes if cooking from the editor.
For example my game is 35mb. Uncompressed. After building, Android weighs in at 120mb +. This is just with ETC1 textures. On IOS in weights in at 84mb.
Finding any real answers from Epic regarding this has so far been fruitless.
This is not a case of being impatient but more a case of being frustrated with not receiving answers.
Examples
My question was asked October 2014. That is 4 months ago give or take with little or no response or solutions from Epic other than stating we need to go to C++ and strip engine features and build from there.
If we really do not have a choice but to go this route.
Would someone at Epic be so kind as to write a guide, as in a step by step guide for non C++ folk, how to go about stripping parts of the engine that is not needed.
This alone would empower us to achieve builds that can be published.
Also would be really cool to have that quide done and keept updated for newer versions.
Or new publishing script that strips unnecessary bloat.
It is frustrating when i fight for every KB of my textures when unreal adds 30mb+ just for fun.
I am heading close to a release now myself and although my first target is PC … the Android / IOS ports will follow shortly thereafter. Please can you guys maybe do a Twitch stream on this or a series of tutorials … would really help us out a lot.
Would also be nice if you could update the Wiki with the steps required.
We are not saying that this is important just like that, there are actuall reasons behind all this. From warnings prior to downloading a heavy game from Google Play, to being the first candidate for removal during a phone clean-up after the install. This kind of things do really hurt mobile titles, they literally cost mobile devs their revenues…
The size of the downloads is a big concern. A second big concern is battery life on Tappy Chicken was silly. Has battery life improved in later builds? It’s been, what, a year now, and mobile is still a second class citizen? I wonder if I’m better off using Unity or Cocos2d. I really want to use Unreal; I love it. But I’m not 100% sure it’s a good idea for me to stick my kneck out on it.
Several months ago, I was ready to stake my future on saying that Unreal is going to take mobile seriously. Now I’m not so sure that they care about competing with Unity for mobile eyeballs. I hope I’m wrong, because I’d far rather use UE than Unity or cocos. (If there’s another, better option out there for making cross platform 2d and 3d games, I’m all ears.)
My concern is that even though we are seeing great content pushed out to mobile with UE4, going about it is somewhat still clouded. I was really hoping for a click package game solution. Here i am, months after literally risking it all on using UE4 and still no significant progress regarding mobile. As of now, i have no proper means to monetize my games made with UE4 on mobile without getting in a 3rd party coder. Then there is also the build size issues. And the ad’s and basically everything you would want to do with mobile you are left to use a C++ developer to assist.
I am bankrupt. Right now my only little glimmer of hope is the PC release of Xoi San. But having 3 working mobile titles and not being able to generate a cent from them is… somewhat discouraging.
Agreed this is an area we have work to do in. We’re currently working on plans to tackle this as part of our 4.8 release and will be able to share more concrete plans post GDC. Here are some of the areas of discussion at the moment…
Rendering features (lighting/shadowing additions primarily)
Overall device compatibility (specifically Android, but we’re making progress here working more closely with hardware partners)
We’re also updating Tappy Chicken at some point to use Paper2D which should be a better representation of what UE4 supports for that style of mobile app. Blueprint performance is an ongoing focus not specific to mobile, and I know quite a few improvements have been made in recent versions so it’s worth updating to investigate if you haven’t already. We’ve also had quite a few mobile service plugin providers reach out to us around analytics and advertising, so there should be many more options to choose from if that’s an area you’re interested as well.
Some form of dynamic shadows would be awesome on Mobile.
Definitely package size. Even if we just have a tickbox to say exclude what from the engine… i wont even mind a low level system where you have to select files or folders not to include. In fact i would prefer this. Do not care much for automation, as long as i have control.
The only draw back with this approach would be Epic support staff having to constantly answer users who accidentally did not include required files.
Things i would love to see
Control where ads are rendered. (IOS for example at the moment is top or bottom) Perhaps having a draw box in Widgets that specifies only draw ads in this area. So that you can design a hud where you would have a permanent ad displayed. For example plague
Documentation or guides on how to implement IAP for IOS. (i only read now that since 4.6 IAP should be working with IOS and truthfully i haven’t tried n tested it for myself)
Guides on how to split game content so that you can deploy a game with minimal content and only download the rest of the game later. Like you see with Plants vs zombies etc. (this makes it easy to work around the 50mb limit of the play store)
Those 3 points will help us small dev’s to quickly monetize on our products, and in doing so… generate some extra revenue for Epic.
Win win.
To Davis:
I have heard this several times, still dont see any progress.
2D and mobile has been stalled for several months.
The package size issue is something which literally kills any 2D casual game for mobile.
Android crashes are everywhere and I have already given up in posting answershub. I only enter there to help some folks If I can.
I really hope some effort will be put here, I have had to implement a lot of features myself and I do not have enough spare time to do engine stuff + games.
My list of concerns (general concerns):
improve package size for mobile. We need a way to reduce the engine footprint at minimum. Look at your main competitor, Unity games carry only 8mb engine footprint.
**splahscreen support ** for android. I have heard 4.7 will bring startup movies but I have to see it working
sprite batching (Michael Nolland told me 4.8 so it will be great)
more support for online services. Right now we can have only 1 online subsystem.
improve google play services support: it only supports android (why???), it has only 4 services supported and it crashes on some versions (ie. 4.4.2 android crash when you go back from a leaderboard UI). I have had to implement google play savegames myself