Unreal Engine freezes on build lighting

sebalv70
Wed, 04 May 2022 20:42:33 +0000
Rendering

I’ve been trying to find an answer to this for weeks. I think I read every single post in this forum and others and still don’t have an answer, plus spending dozens of hours, and a company IT guy spending two hours and still not getting anywhere.

It appears that many people have this problem, but only one guy found a solution that worked in his case but for nobody else. What’s ever more weird is that this problem only happens in my company laptop, but not on any of my personal machines, Mac or Windows, with the same project and UE version, which in my case is 4.23. The laptop is a Dell Precision 7740 with an Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 card.

Basically, every time I change something in the level that gives me the red message that x objects require to build lighting, and I click on the Build button and then “Build lighting only”, it freezes Unreal and when I open the swarm agent and go to the log tab, I see this output:

4:13:32 PM: Starting up SwarmAgent …
4:13:32 PM: … registering SwarmAgent with remoting service
4:13:32 PM: … registering SwarmAgent network channels
4:13:32 PM: … initializing SwarmAgent
4:13:32 PM: [ERROR] Local agent failed to initialize with an IPC channel! Falling back to TCP…
4:13:32 PM: [ERROR] Local agent failed to initialize with a TCP channel! Fatal error.

This is an operation that takes less than a minute on three other machines, a home built PC from 2012, an iMac from 2015, and an Inspiron 15 laptop from 2016, and the Precision 7740 laptop is faster than all of them. But this freezes for hours until I open Task Manager and I kill the UE process.

I’ve been searching for a solution for weeks, and came empty handed. The only guy who had it and found a solution said it was caused by Webex, and that when he uninstalled it, he never had the problem again. So obviously after I read that, the first thing I did was to see if I had Webex installed. I do not.

Other than him, I found hoardes of people with the same problem, and no solutions. One of the many threads about this had some guy posting a file to download followed by some others saying it had worked for them. Since I don’t want to install viruses or some other nefarious content in my company laptop, I didn’t even bother, no more than I would reply to an email from an old lady dying of cancer that somehow decided to give me one million dollars if I give her my personal information.

So far I’ve done a lot of testing and confirmed it’s not a firewall issue. I clicked yes to every Windows Firewall prompt that popped up when using UE, although I don’t really understand why UE would need to connect to any network to build lighting, but OK. I even turned off the firewall for a minute to test this and still froze and the swarm agent gave me the same log.

And like I mentioned, last week a guy from my company’s IT department connected to my laptop for 2 hours and tried all kinds of things without success. He’s still doing research on this.

So I’m at a complete loss as to what is causing this. You might suggest that I try it in 4.27, which I already did, with the same result. Besides, we can’t use 4.27 because we need HTML 5 build support, so we’re stuck with 4.23.

If amyone has any siggestions, please shoot.

16 posts - 2 participants