Hi all, I am brand new to Unreal Engine so please forgive me if this is the wrong section to post this.
I start a blank empty C++ project without Starter Assets, it is over 1GB. The other project I made which has a cube and sphere in the scene is nearer 2GB.
This will actually be quite inconvenient to me because as I am learning i like to store old projects so I can see how i fixed things, but with this space I will soon have to delete old ones (or at least buy a conventional HDD and move them to it)
Is there a way to change the editor code to not include some of the files or are we stuck with huge project files forever?
Content wise, there is not much you can do.
Assets contain a lot of editor specific data which will remain there until they are “cooked” for the final packaged game.
Source wise, you can remove the .vs, binaries, intermediate and saved directories to trim things down considerably.
This will mean you have to regenerate the solution file and wait for shaders etc later, but it could free several gigabytes of space, depending on the size of your project.
thanks for clarifying this. But am i to assume from this that you cannot set UE4 to automatically drop (or not create) those derived folders and simplt rebuild them each time i need them (and maybe just auto-delete them on exit) ?
Deleting the derived/intermediate folders is going to make iteration times so slow; I doubt you’ll be able to work like that. Your only options are to not include any starter content.
Your only REAL option is to simply buy a larger HDD, or don’t be a pack rat with older projects
The Unreal Build tools will only build what needs to be built and reuse whatever is in your binaries, intermediate and/or saved folders to avoid long build time.
The engine itself has like 30+ gb of saved data in it’s binaries and intermediate folders to avoid having to rebuild the engine every time. Building the engine can take a long time, even a good PC can take up to an hour just to build it.
Not only that, but the more platforms you are building your project for, the more space it will need.
This being said, deleting those folders should only be in case of possible data corruption or if you aren’t planning on using the project for a long while and need the space. It’s also safe to delete the folders for versioning and only keep the folders on the latest version you are working on since you are unlikely to be rebuilding older versions.
You also don’t want to have those folders in your source control or for sharing has they take a lot of space.
For a small project with nothing in it, it might not seem like a problem to rebuild the whole project, but as soon as you start adding stuff to your project, a full rebuild can, and will, take a long time.
