When you have a large map with 5,000+ meshes, it takes hours to build lighting. My recommendation is to add a feature to automatically turn off computer once lighting build is finished to save power consumption.
Nice idea to have.
Also very cool would be an option to interrupt/pause the light build and continue at a later stage. Tis way you could build light whenever you dont need your PC.
One step further: Create a background service for lightmap builds. In my old days I used to crunch SETI workunits in the background. Why not have a little client where you can queue projects and maps and the light build is done in the background even when you are not working with the editor.
I like this idea, good for when you have to leave the pc on overnight or when you step out. Would be very useful.
I guess it wouldn’t hurt anyone, but is this really something that needs to happen?
A few hours of idle consumption before you wake up is probably going to take a while to add up.
Isn’t there some kind of remote desktop from phone apps around?
Would accomplish the same thing but better.
My PC’s been on nearly constantly for the last 6 years or so.
I see it more as a quality of life improvement and not an urgent feature.
I probably shouldn’t have even posted, the only time I’d be against it is if for some reason the rendering guys had to spend time on it =p
Here are some scenarios of usefullness.
You are in the middle of a lightbuild running for an hour and will take another hour. While you were letting the build run in the background you edit some sound assets in Audition to kill the time. Then you realize. Oh, i get skips and lags in the final mix. If you could then pause lightmass to have temporarily all resources back, make your mixdown and continue with lightmass.
Altough spreading the workload would be an even better solution, but somehow I find Swarm™ a bit awkward to use when setting it up for multiple machines (vulgo: renderfarm).
So here is a stunning proposal: I hope one of the Epic guys catches it 
- Abandon Swarm™ and make a workload distribution based on BOINC.
As I said, I used to have the SETI client and the BOINC version and the lessons learned there in terms of distributed computing could be beneficial to UE4. What Im saying is: BOINC is really stable, has an excellent scalability and has a non proprietary license.
ps: This would also allow studios to buy rendering time as needed. For example the final build before shipment with extra quality.
Oh being able to pause Lightmass is something I could get behind =]
I was just questioning the importance of UE4 being able to shut down your PC after building.
Indeed. What good would it be anyway. At least the project should also be automatically saved before shutdown… :rolleyes:
Hello -
The engine purposefully does not have access to higher functions of your CPU. We currently have no plans to change this in the near future.
Thank You
Are you referring to the original request of shut-down option?
But what about a pause-lightmass option? That wouldnt require any access rights to stuff like power managment, etc…