I got to the point of placing billboard grass foliage and I’m putting it really dense so it looks more like real grass. It works great, the performance is good, it looks great too. The problem is, now that I have millions of billboards, when I launch the editor it uses 12gb of ram for the first like 10 minutes. After a while the garbage collector or whatever cleans it up and brings it down to 1-3gb of ram.
Is this normal? Is there a way to manually garbage collect after launching the editor or manually do whatever is happening automatically to clean up this mess 10 minutes after opening the editor?
The big reason this is even an issue is that in UE5 the foliage tool loves to crash the editor, and during development I’ll probably run into other issues that lead to crashes until I resolve something. In all of these instances it sucks real bad to reopen the editor. I have 32gb of ram so I can handle it for a while until it gets too extreme, but I have one other person helping me make this game and he only has 16gb of ram and so it’s already becoming an issue for him.
Okay if it’s normal that’s just rough. I think by the time all the foliage is painted this project is going to consume 30-60gb of ram on launch until the garbage collector or whatever makes a pass or whatever it is that brings it down to 3gb after 20 minutes of having the editor open. I already know how to lod’s all my trees are super optimized and I have shadows off when possible to save on lumen overhead.
The big issue is by the end of this I’ll have probably like 100 million grass billboards placed on the entire map (not all in one spot obviously lol). I guess that ram is just going to suck on editor launch for the rest of the project, unless someone else comes in with some work around.
"The primary focus of Nanite for 5.1 is the addition of a programmable rasterization framework, opening the door to features such as masked materials, two-sided foliage, pixel depth offset, and world position offset. "
I already use lods, and culling. What is load levels though? Is it something that’s possible for one gigantic open world map? I’m imagining loading different levels like how old school video games work like final fantasy 7 and spyro the dragon.