Hi I currently have a computer with not the much space on its drive and the game I want to make requires me to modify the source code so I can add Mesh Material Shaders and Shader Models. I know this is probably a dumb question but is there a way to package the Engine once I’m done editing the parts of it? Kind of like how you package a regular Project. I just can’t handle 200 Gigabytes of storage if you have any other solutions that could solve the issue of this file size feel free to let me know. Any help is appreciated thanks!
Yes, you can build up an engine/editor instance and then use it without keeping all the intermediate object files on disk.
Studios frequently do this for artists, who don’t need to build the code from scratch, but instead just get the latest build occasionally.
That being said, I highly recommend getting a second disk – a 1 or 2 TB SSD to connect via SATA or M.2 (if your motherboard has an available socket( is pretty affordable these days, and will massively help. Something like this:
or this:
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Hi so I have a laptop and I’m guessing that kind of voids the M.2 and SATA options. I’ve looked it up before and if I remember correctly you can’t really compile stuff on an external SSD but correct me if I’m wrong.
As for the first part of your answer where you said it was possible; is there a tutorial out there? I’m assuming that it just involves deleting certain files but I definitely would not know which files to delete(I’m assuming I’d start with the intermediate folder).
One more question, would this same procedure of packaging my engine be possible on one of the AWS UE5 Machines?
You can totally build on an external drive, as long as the external drive is always available. You’ll want it to be formatted as NTFS, not as FAT32, though, so you’d need to re-format it after you unpack it. Doing this is inconvenient, though – one of the several reasons why people generally end up graduating to desktop workstations when they get deeper into UE game development.
If you already have an internal drive in a laptop, then you can buy a bigger drive, and clone all the old data to the new drive, and then extend the file system to have more space.
I don’t see why not.
I found a few links that go in that direction:
The later link has a bad SSL certificate, but it essentially recommends submitting /Game/Binaries/... and /Game/Plugins/*/Binaries/...
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You are a legend man! thank you so much this was extremely concise and to the point