Hi! This has always been an issue for me and I don’t know what it is. Perhaps RAM? I have 8gb, going to upgrade soon anyways.
What happens is, that ANY asset that I import from somewhere (.uasset ones), such as a content pack from the marketplace or simply somewhere else on the web, is painstakingly slow until I touch it for the first time.
Let’s say I imported a mesh. The thumbnail is there, nice and pretty, sitting in the content browser. I’d like to place said mesh onto my level. AS SOON as I click it and move anything, UE4 freezes, and it freezes for anywhere from 10 seconds to a few minutes, and a couple of times it has LITERALLY frozen my entire computer and had to force restart through the physical button on my computer. It’s not only click&drag, it also happens when I double click it, or even right click it. Can’t be hardware aside from RAM, everything else is top-notch. Running on Windows, by the way.
This is actually necessary and can happen on some meshes depending on their complexity and texture resolutions. When the asset is opened for the first time it’s writing to the DerivedDataCache to make it’s load much quicker when reopening the project or asset.
As an example, if you were to grab the Open World Content that Epic released for free a couple months ago that is just some sample assets from our Kite World demo it explicitly had the warning in there that the initial load of these assets could take a while to open while the DerivedDataCache is written.
Largely this can depend on system specs to a certain extent. That content, even on our machines here at Epic that are high-end, can take a little while to load the first time.
I understand and I can confirm, next loading is very fast. However, in other engine models loading just in seconds or less. I have very comfortable work in UE when coding etc and I love it, but loading assets like this is pain. I have no top end pc and sometimes it loading really long, worse - here no info nor progress bar. I think it should be done different way, I can’t imagine how to work with large count of assets even on top machines like yours.
What can I upgrade in order to make this go faster?