Hi,
Is it / will it be possible to use linux swarm agents to speed-up building light/etc…?
Do you think this will work even if the main system is on windows and the agents are e.g. running linux/OSX?
Thanks!
As far as I know you can’t do that right now and no idea whether it will ever be possible, at least for light baking.
Basically what you are asking for is distributed/network rendering. It would require that all clients/agents have access to all the assets so they could render their assigned portions of the level, then send them back to the server/main system.
Which means it would also require fast storage, fast networking, etc, just like distributed 3D rendering in general…
If we could off-load these tasks to a graphics card, then I would see a value in having several graphics cards in the system to speed things up. Once again, requires implementation etc.
EDIT: Turns out there’s a 3rd party solution (seems Windows based) called Incredibuild at https://www.incredibuild.com/ so I stand corrected that it couldn’t be done, just that it’s additional cost.
I’ve only tried on OS X, with mixed results. It was working mostly OK under OS X 10.8.x and Mono 2.10.x, but I couldn’t make it work in a reasonable time under Mavericks/Mono 3.2. That’s why currently on Mac you can build lighting only locally, without Swarm. You may have better luck on Linux, though.
We plan to port Swarm/SwarmAgent to C++ later this year and then it should work on OS X and Linux, but I have no idea when will that be and how long will it take.
I have it successfully working by using a Windows VM under Ubuntu. Not ideal but there you go.
There was talk in 2014 of the Swarm code being updated to use more cross platform friendly libraries but I am not sure where there went.
Note that if not installing the full Unreal Engine on the remote node, Lightmass (not Swarm) will require Directx 9 redist and the Visual C++ runtime to be installed.
Has there been any progress on this to allow devs to use linux machines as swarm agents for distributed builds?