Hey there, I recently had an issue with the lighting of my map not building and tried numerous fixes to no avail so eventually copied the map into a new one where the lighting building worked, problem now is that I have severe performance issues in my game, which seems to get triggered by running up stairs and having any sort of contact with the geometry, the map also runs worse the longer I play on it. It’s completely unplayable now, I did however manage to copy the files into an older version (UE 4.14) and it seems to be running okay (albeit a lot of my materials/meshes and such don’t work with it) but it will be sad if I am unable to continue development using newer builds, this has completely thrown me off working on my game. Any ideas what could be the issue here?
The one thing I DON"T like about this engine it is the random Crash screens that appear up without any warning, saying ‘We’re terribly sorry’
and its off again to Epics Troubleshooting Department of Technical Programmers to fix it, but I don’t have a troubleshooting department of professional programmers and that’s why I come to these forums to try to sort out all the technical troubles I’m having with this engine and these crash screens can appear when you are importing in something, it can appear if you are doing something else in the engine and the engine gets stuck on caching something and just gives up and up pops a crash screen. I’m running Unreal 4 on 16 gigs of ram, and I get a crash screen pop up once every two or three sessions like there’s a problem with its caching like its looking for extra memory to store its cache or its index and when it don’t find the extra memory that it wants, to hog the editor just crashes.
As for lighting, well, you might have to drop the texture quality and the lighting settings down for the map, depending on the size of the map.
as I think all that best lighting and textures stuff was designed for more doing small map areas with instead of large areas… I made a test level with those static and bsp brushes from the engine’s own mesh and geometry tools and found it slowed the engine all down to a crawl. But when I got rid of those BSP brushes and used imported meshes instead, the engine stopped most of that heavy lag.
That has happened to me a few times too, it’s a great and stable engine compared to others out there for the most part but this is the first major issue I’ve had using this engine, lost me 4 days of work so far.
Hmm it might be my Nividia driver making the engine unstable as I do have issues with the UI windows not always opening up when i go to the content browser if the content browser window is caught behind another unreal window then it won’t always respond, or float it to the top of the window stack as I’m running Nividia drivers with Geforce 8400. So the UI has a problem of its windows getting stuck.
I’m sure its to do with the way that editor wants to handle its resources, it don’t like other programs as I have about 10 programs loaded up in memory I have Legacy, Gimp, Audacity, Game Script file, Csv Data table file, Blender, Notepad and Firefox, so it huffs and puffs and then
blows all out and crashes, so i think you need more than 1 machine, 1 machine for this stuff, and another machine for the editor.
This is a crazy mixed up engine, I had to Join my commander’s eyeball to his main mesh before exporting him out of blender as his eyes were on a separate layer… Otherwise Unreal Engine just
imports him in with missing eyes. (it don’t import the separate eye layer with the mesh)
Now I have the issue of his eyeball texture not wrapping the right way around in Unreal.
You should be using Lightmass Importance Volumes (LIM) if you’re using “limited” hardware. (I put it in quotes because for most people 16GBs is more than enough, but not for us game devs.) If i try building a 4km map with landscape LOD of 0 or - 1, and not using LIMs, you bet you’re a** it’s going to crash, and my system is running 28GBs of RAM. Baking so many lightmaps of that high resolution is insanely memory intensive. That’s because the lighting calculations that are backed into lightmaps are FAR more accurate than real-time dynamic calculations. If you’ve ever used an unbiased PBR Photorealistic renderer like Indigo or Maxwell you wouldn’t be surprised by this at all. Those are truly photorealistic rendering engines and a single image can take several days to calculate. real-time lighting uses countless amount of concessions and tricks in order to make it look realistic, but such things are actually extremely inaccurate when compared to the kind of sophisticated ray-tracing algorithms used in non-realtime engines, and lightmass too.
So, you also as the developer, need to be able to split things up in order for your system to be able to handle such dense computation. Thankfully, Epic has gifted us with LIMs, Cull-Distance Volumes, and Volume lighting sampling.
No game engine in this day is going to be able to do such things when hardware resources just aren’t there, something has got to give.
Also, Distance Field Shadows and GI would also be useful if you’d like to bring down those build times