Unreal Build Agent - versions and features compatibility

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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Hello,

I have a few questions regarding UBA; I thought that this place might be the best where to get some insights or pointers to other resources.

  1. Can it be used to compile shaders? If so, can it do that out of the box and with what versions of unreal?
  2. Does it work for versions older than 5.5, and if not, can it be backported easily?
  3. Can it work for Unreal 4.27, or is written in a fundamentally incompatible way?
  4. Is it advisable to start a distributed compilation on a build agent, or should they be used only as remote workers?

Thanks in advance for your attention.

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Hey there,

  1. Yes - it does work for shader compilation. This is viable on UBA 5.5.
  2. We rolled it out internally at 5.4, but it was in an experimental state and the APIs have changed quite a bit since hten.
  3. Not to my knowledge, no.
  4. You absolutely can have your build agent using UBA (we do internally)
    1. There are some best practices here - segregatae your UBA pools such that the build agents use one, and user invoked builds use a separate pool. They have different scaling characteristics.

I’ve covered more detail in a recent GDC presentation here. I’ve also written a KB article here on how to debug UBA (should you need to). It’s recommended that you use Horde’s coordinator capabilities with UBA to make setup as simple as possible (but you can use UBA without).

Kind regards,

Julian

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Hello Julian,

Thank you very much for your answers and your pointers, I appreciate your availability. I’ll take a look at those links as soon as possible.

Kind regards,

Alessandro