I installed UE4 today and have been looking around through the free assets and tutorials. While doing so I’ve been noticing that assets seemed to populate considerably slower than I expected them to. For instance, just dragging a material from the content browser to a box so that I could see what materials looked like when it was just a box and fixed light would cause a second of lag rather than be as instantaneous as I thought. And, the compiling shaders for loading the scenes in the pre-constructed scenes could take a good minute as I sat there staring at grey blobs slowly being changed properly.
I’m wondering if either my expectation is wrong or that perhaps the program isn’t properly using my hardware.
For reference, running a 3.4 ghz Xeon quad core, 16 gigs ram, and GTX 970.
When you first open the project, the engine loads the entire shaders & materials library so it’s understandable to make you wait a bit longer. However, after the first time, you shouldn’t wait for anything to load. You can put any material on instant after the first load process. If this happens every time to you then it may be a hardware or operating system issue.
This might sound dumb, but I never really went back to the same assets when once I’d seen things so I didn’t get that. But now that I’ve tried this out it works just as you say. So it was just I was being a bit unrealistic in how I expected things to be the first time around, just clarifying on that. Thank you.
Way ahead of you on that. I don’t have anything lower than my Samsung Evo in this machine.
will find the first time an object or such gets loaded into the game, there are file checking and processes that get ran to make sure shaders are updated, the object’s physics representation is correct, the object’s data it self is built properly etc. After it’s loaded that first time then it’s usually just drag drop and run with it.
I think it’s compiling every possible shader for that material when you load a simple model. Which is what seems far too much for me, I just wanted to get things loaded in quickly. But that’s just what UE4 requires because you could be adding e.g. several lights to the material at any time. Unlike previous simpler game engines. There might be some way of turning this off in the future, if we want basic level mockup scenes with simple textured, static lit shaders - this is something I think is worth suggesting to Epic, if it minimizes asset load time (it would be in a separate test project and the shaders would still be fully compiled if put into a ‘normal’ project…)