ZenStore Incremental Cook Feedback

Hey folks,

I just wanted to offer some feedback on the incremental cooking feature. I tried it out for our project and figured I should let you know our results while it’s still in development.

Firstly, I enabled it by launching the editor and enabled the “Use ZenStore as cooking output” checkbox, which toggled “bUseZenStore=true” in DefaultGame.ini. That’s the only change to any ini files in our project that I currently have.

I then performed a full cook in the editor, and ran a Development Client build of our project, which ran successfully.

I then copied the command line args from the log of that cook run, and added “-cookincremental” to the end, and then ran that through Visual Studio. Using Development Editor, and putting those command line args in UnrealVS’ command line args box.

The results of this were that it appears to have made no difference to the time it takes to cook, or the amount of work done. Both full and incremental cooks took about 17 minutes. That was with zero changes to assets in between runs. Both runs processed exactly the same amount of assets, according to the logs. (I will admit, internally I don’t know if that means work was actually done or if they were just inspected and recorded.)

The log for the incremental one does have the following line present:

> LogCook: Display: INCREMENTAL COOK: -cookincremental was specified and global settings are still valid. Keeping previously cooked packages for platform WindowsClient and cooking only packages that have been modified.

So it appears that the settings are being acknowledged. I’d be happy to work with you folks to puzzle out exactly why it seems to have made little difference. If you think it’d help. Otherwise like I said in my opener, I felt like it’d be valuable to offer my experiences while the feature is in development.

Many thanks,

David

There is a log fired at the end of cook:

LogCook: Display: Packages Cooked: 3854, Packages Iteratively Skipped: 0, Packages Skipped by Platform: 222, Total Packages: 4076

(It will change to “Incrementally Skipped” in 5.6).

What does it say for your case?

It’s possible this is expected; I can’t remember the state of incremental cooking at the beginning of 5.5. We have made hundreds (thousands?) of bugfixes and performance improvements for it in 5.6 and it’s possible that something was broken when 5.5 shipped. It’s also possible that zenserver at that time was missing some features that the incremental cooker at that time relied on.

If you can, please get 5.6 preview once it is released and try it out there.

Roger that! I’ll keep an eye out for 5.6 when it drops so that we can investigate the same feature then. Many thanks.

Edit: I’ve actually lost the logs due to cleaning my workspace, but if I get the chance to re-run, I will check that line.

This can be considered resolved.