I realize there is a LOT of data in the dev kit. I downloaded it from the Unreal Launcher and it 65GB. However, whenever I cook a very simple mod it takes a long time it seems. Like 10 to 15 minutes. Yes this is on a HDD as the dev kit will just not fit on my main SSD.
Is there a way to speed this up? Like some sort of preprocessing of things that will not change? I am making mods for now. My goal is to make sure they are stackable and so far I am using assets that come with the dev kit.
The only way is to use a “better” machine.
Better is separated there because it depends on some things. Loading the DevKit relies mainly on the storage speeds - same with loading assets, until you get to needing to compile shaders and “build” reference trees and hierarchies which is where the CPU’s power is required - these two are also required in tandem for cooking to be faster.
RAM capacity and speed comes into play largely when dealing with maps - seriously the more the better here - but also when dealing with graphs and having multiple assets open at any given time(remembering that once an asset is opened it’s cached into RAM for a time(likely until the DevKit is closed from my own experience).
Lastly, when you get to working with graphs, GPU’s are a key thing to not overlook. Because blueprinting is a visual language, the entire graph system is a rendering - the larger it is/they are or the more content packed within them the more lag and bogged down the DevKit will become due to insufficient graphics power. UMG(UI’s) also requires a combination of the above - though requiring more from the GPU than all else because the entire process is almost exclusively GPU driven - to be even tolerable to work with(back when I had a single GTX 770 my UI-intensive mod became unbearable to work on because of the sheer size of the graphs and the amount of widgets in the UI’s themselves).
-WM
That is what puzzles me. I have not done anything except work in simple configuration portions of the mod so far. Everything seems to be storage bound. The CPU has not so much as sweated and I have no idea how to see how loaded my GPU is. I have used UE4 and done quite a bit of blue printing and never saw the slowdowns I see with the Ark dev kit. I just had chalked it up to database searches through the large amount of data. Yes, I have seen it chew through ram, but it has not yet exceeded the ram on my machine. I am planning on getting a better GPU as well. I should look into bumping my ram up to 32GB instead of 16GB too.