Shaders are reloading everytime I move a node or open a material, instance, or function.

Summary

When I open a material, a material function, or a material instance and begin moving nodes or clicking inside the editor, the engine lags heavily and suddenly starts compiling between 800–1,200 shaders, in an empty project with a normal-sized material that isn’t particularly complex.

This happens even if I’m only editing inside the Material Editor without applying any changes. Each time I try to add new nodes or adjust something, the engine immediately reloads shaders.

As a result, this constant recompilation not only slows down my workflow but also sometimes causes the engine to crash, resulting in lost progress.

Please select what you are reporting on:

Unreal Editor for Fortnite

What Type of Bug are you experiencing?

Stability

Steps to Reproduce

Open a material, a material function, or a material instance and begin editing it.

Expected Result

It was never like this before. Shaders only loaded when you applied your changes manually, not while you were editing them.

Observed Result

Shaders are reloading while you edit the Material/inst/Function

Platform(s)

PC

Please attach the editor logs to this bug report so we can investigate the issue: How to get your Fortnite logs

Hello,

This is expected behavior based on recent changes to the material editor. We’ve had many issues in the past with incorrect Texture Sampler stats under reporting the amount of texture samples actually used. Then when users go to cook the material fails to compile due to hitting texture sampler limits. Fixing this bug required compiling more shaders than before so we can properly check all shader types to see which one has the worst case number of samplers.

@TheCr0zySky, can you confirm this behavior by closing the Platform Stats window in the material editor and see if the performance improves for you locally?

Thanks,

Jason

FORT-962844’s status has changed to ‘Ready for QA’. A member of the QA department is investigating the issue.