(Mac) Unreal Engine 4 freezing when applying materials/textures

My system info:

2010
2.66 GHz Intel Core i7
8 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 512 MB VRAM
Running OS 10.10.2 (Yosemite)

After a bumpy start (a few crashes when trying to install Unreal Engine 4) I recently installed Unreal Engine. Though I wouldn’t describe performance as spritely, it has so far functioned well enough for the very limited tasks I’ve attempted. I have been able to do everything required in the first 9 video tutorials of the initial “Basics” series. But in lesson 10, a new material is applied to the floor. Whenever I try to do this, the engine totally freezes up and all I can do is force quit. This has happened five times in a row now, so I suspect it’s hopeless.

I understand well that my computer is beneath the recommended [minimum] system specs, but I keep reading anecdotes of others using Unreal Engine 4 on similar or even less powerful Macs to varying degrees of success. Is my problem rooted in Unreal Engine, or am I simply asking too much of my computer?

This almost certainly isn’t a crash - we have a crash-reporter GUI that pops when it crashes - the Editor is just busy & not being very informative.

Let us check the project logs to see what it was doing when you forced it to quit by uploading the logs from: /Users/[your-username]/Library/Logs/UnrealEngine/[your-project]

You can hold the Alt/Option key while clicking on Finder’s ‘Go’ main menu item to reveal a quick link to the Library folder if you can’t find it.

I suspect it may just be compiling shaders & textures which can leave the Editor unresponsive for some time. You’ll see ShaderCompileWorker instances in Activity Monitor.app if it is shader related & if it is texture compression then UE4 will consume all the CPU & memory it can get its hands on. Both processes just take some time.

There are a few different logs in the folder. I chose the most generally-named one. If you need a different one, though, just let me know.

That looks like the log from your project - it just gets cut off mid-stream at the end. That suggests that the editor was busy doing something rather than having crashed, though it doesn’t have entries that would enlighten me as to what.

I suggest running the project again, while it is unresponsive open /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app which will show you all the running applications. Select the CPU tab, then sort the list by % CPU (greatest → lowest) so you can see what’s eating CPU time. If there are ShaderCompileWorker instances then it is busy compiling shaders so just leave it alone & it will eventually return. If UE4Editor is chewing CPU then click on its entry and then use the drop-down box with the gear symbol & select Sample Process. This log will show you what functions UE4Editor is calling & from there we can see what it is up to. It’ll probably be building textures & can again be left alone until it returns which could take a fair while on older dual-core Macs.

So sure enough I just let it sit for five or six minutes and eventually it worked. So I suppose the question at this point is: even if the editor works, is it even worth pursuing if certain processes take that long? Wouldn’t that seriously prolong any actual game development?

Thanks so much for your super prompt help.

There will be an update in 4.7.4 which should dramatically improve texture compression performance on OS X, which should hopefully make a huge difference to you in these situations.

Whoo! I hope it does! Thanks for getting following through after all this time, that was really cool of you. Any estimation at all for when that’ll be released?