Hi all,
I’ve just started my adventure with UE 4 and, to my big surprise, it doesn’t look good on mobile!!! In UDK, mobile map “Epic Citadel” was “out of the box”. When I launched it on my iPhone 5 it looked great.
But in UE4. “Sun Temple” project looks really awfull. It looks like there is no AA, or the map is scaled up from smaller resolution. And the lighting is terrible either. It looks like the Lightmass settings are even less than “Preview”. Black, blotchy spots where the shadows should be.
I’ve also tested on mobile one of default maps “Minimal_Default” found on one of DT course. Very simple map: the sky, a table and two armchairs. And the same result: HORRIBLE. On iPhone 5 it looks like it is at most resolution of 320 x 240 and scaled up.
So what is wrong? Maybe I didn’t set the project for mobile or what? Materials not optimised for mobiles / iOS devices?
BTW, last thing. When I use “Launch” button, I must use “All_iOS_on_MyMachine”. When I use “Launch - My iPad” there is a crash / error during deployment.
I’m looking in to it now. It looks like there are no device profiles set up for Sun Temple and so it is using all of the defaults which result in it not using the retina resolution. I’m still looking into other issues, but the lighting may be because we use a fast compression by default for all of the textures including light maps.
What are the devices profiles? And what is the meaning of them? So, when I build game for iPad Air 2 it’ll llok awful on iPhone 4??? It doesn’t make any sense at all.
But let’s leave “Sun Temple”. “Minimal_Default” map on iPhone 5 looks like on Commodore 64 or Amiga with default settings. I’d like to know what I’m doing wrong
The default settings for mobile are set to Preview setting on lightmaps and fastest compression for textures so that people can immediately get up and running. However, this doesn’t look the best on device. Especially high end devices. You can change those by changing the light map settings in the Build drop down menu and the compression for textures is in the Project Settings under the Cooker section. Change the PVRTC compression from 0 to something like 2 (higher number is better quality compression but slower cook time up to a setting of 4).
The device profiles are configuration settings for each device type so that you can tune the game to run well on all of the devices. This means you can specify no post-processing for iPhone 4, but have it on for iPad Air 2. Sun Temple never had any created so it was using the defaults which are set to allow decent performance on lower end devices. I added some device profiles for Sun Temple yesterday and they will be in the 4.6 release. You can also look at the DefaultDeviceProfiles.ini file for the Tappy Chicken example to get an idea of what they are.
I didn’t notice that lightmass settings were set to “Preview” on Sun Temple map. I also changed PVRTC compression to 2 and it looks really good.
I mentioned problems with starter map “Minimal_Default”, but when I simply copied DefaultDeviceProfiles.ini from Tappy Chicken and paste it into my project, the problems with low resolution also disappeared. But I don’t understand the begining commands from .ini file, for instace: