I am trying to set up the Cooked Data Snapshots for Zenserver and the documentation ( Cooked Data Snapshots with Zen Storage Server for Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.7 Documentation | Epic Developer Community ) describes how to set a path to store the snapshot descriptors.
The snapshot descriptor can commonly be represented as JSON, as a file on the filesystem or in another storage medium.
Despite the “… another storage medium” part, the actual property “NetworkSnapshotDescFileRoot” seems to be designed specifically for a network filesystem.
In our organization, we do not have a shared network drive - we use Google Drive for daily work - and we certainly don’t have filesystems shared between our developer machines and our build machines that run in AWS.
Are there any alternatives to a network (or local) filesystem path to store the descriptors?
Is there work ongoing to allow these to be stored and provided by Zenserver or perhaps Horde instead?
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Hi Jacob,
So I can speak to the alternative we’re using to network filesystem storage of file descriptors, but I want to make sure that I’m clear up front that this is experimental and undocumented at this point (but is something we will be documenting in the future ahead of wider release).
I’m seeking to have less reliance on network file shares and instead allow for secure systems on cloud/public internet infrastructure. When it comes to storage of snapshots, that means using Unreal Cloud DDC to store the snapshots themselves, but also to offer a build index in Unreal Cloud DDC that provides the means to list builds available in Unreal Cloud DDC whether those builds are:
- Cooked Data Snapshots
- Staged Builds
- Packaged Builds
This extends the Unreal Cloud DDC beyond what is implied by its “DDC” naming, so I expect some change may happen to the naming. Interaction with this more general builds API is done on the command line via the zen.exe utility command (which can communicate with the Unreal Cloud DDC server).
-> Engine\Binaries\Win64\zen.exe builds --help
Manage builds - list, list-namespaces, ls, upload, download, prime-cache, diff, fetch-blob, validate-part, pause, resume, abort
...
And the command line utility is also invoked from a cross-platform Slate UI tool named Build Storage Tool that provides a UI for browsing available builds and invoking downloads for them (whether they’re cooked data snapshots, staged builds, packaged builds, editor pre-compiled binaries, or other types in the future).
I’ll re-iterate: this is all pre-release, but that’s the path being explored for eliminating the need for snapshot descriptors on a file share. It is being exercised internally before public release.
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Hi Zousar,
Thank you for the response and clarification.
I am happy to hear there is work in progress for alternatives to network file shares, and UC DDC sounds like a good solution that already has modern authentication options.
Since we are only experimenting with Cooked Data Snapshots at this point, is there a way for us to also experiment with the build index in UC DDC?
If there’s a development branch, with the updates to the zen.exe utility or UC DDC which we can build ourselves, this could be useful, even if it’s not in a stable state.
If not, any rough estimate on when this might go into some sort of public preview? Months? Quarters? Years?
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Hi Jacob,
If you choose to try them out early, you need to expect that it is unsupported and undocumented at this point. zenserver (and the zen.exe utility I noted in my previous response) are possible to take new releases of from our the EpicGames github repos:
https://github.com/EpicGames/zen/releases
Those releases can be unzipped into your source tree and are backward compatible. Similarly there are Unreal Cloud DDC releases available for you to try as documented here:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en\-us/unreal\-engine/how\-to\-set\-up\-a\-cloud\-type\-derived\-data\-cache\-for\-unreal\-engine
As for a rough estimate of when this will start becoming documented as a preview (not a commitment) I’d ballpark by the end of 2026, but that’s very much speculative.
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