I have a laptop where I want to do some tests in small scenes, with no more than 20 objects. Laptop has Intel i5, 8GB, Win7 64. I can work decently with the Editor, but when I launch Lightmass Unreal crashes, and only can see a message from Windows that Unreal is no working anymore, with option to just Close program. Logs do not report anything of interest. I am using 4.9.1.
Is there any minimum specs for running Lightmass that I should consider? Another question is : is there a way to run Lightmass build in a project without the need to open the project and click in the Build button, a kind of console command?
There is no minimum spec that I’m aware of for running lightmass. Lightmass is handled on the CPU and is a very intensive process, depending on the complexity of the scene, number of lights that are used for calculations, Lightmap resolutions, etc. It will use a lot of the CPU to build lighting. When Lightmass is run the calculations are sent to Swarm Agent where all the brunt of the calculations are handled before exporting back to UE4.
When you say that you’re getting a crash is the editor closing completely without Crash Reporter window popping up, or is it just a window with the editor open that says “Lightmass Crashed” like the one here in this troubleshooting guide.
To answer your final question, Lightmass cannot be run without the editor that I’m aware of, or without some special setup, but to my knowledge that is not possible.
Excuse for posting this twice, do it in wrong place.
Thanks for your quick answer Tim.
The crash occurs after Navigation building completed, and during Exporting lighting data, when it has done 38% of that task. I can see the messages appear in the right bottom part of Unreal. Then a message from Windows appear saying (my translation from spanish to english) : Unreal Engine end working. The program end working correctly because a problem. Windows will close the program and notify if a solution exists.
I have two buttons in that message: Debug and Close the program, so no matter what I do I do not see log messages inside Unreal.
Is there a need for certain amount of cores in CPU? I do not know if my laptop has enough.
No problem. I went ahead and deleted the extraneous comment.
If the editor is crashing like that and showing the Debug and Close the program window then that is indicative with a crash within Windows that shuts the program down.
To investigate that I’ll need a few things from you.
I’ll need you to post your DxDiag here as a txt file. (Start Menu > Search > DxDiag > once it loads hit save as text file.)
Follow the steps in this Windows Event Viewer guide. Upload the information from this here. You may need to put it all in a .zip file to do so. If it’s too large you can always use a dropbox or google drive link.
With this information hopefully there is something in here that can be indicative of what is causing the crash to occur in Windows to shut down the editor.
CPU core count can be changed in Swarm Agent (Orange S icon in the taskbar near the clock). In the Settings tab you can enable Show Developer Settings to True. This will make a new tab called DeveloperSettings. In here you can specify the LocalJobDefaultProcessorCount which I think is set to use all but 2 cores. For instance, my computer here is using 12 cores and the default uses 10 for building.
Looking at the exception error 0xc0000005 that comes up, there are a few things that you may need to update drivers for to get this resolved. since this is not a error caused by UE4 specifically, although it may be the only program exhibiting the issue.
Looking at your DxDiag, it looks like your GPU is not being used, which indicates your Integrated HD GPU is being used. This also indicates that the Driver is 10.18.10.3412. This is an older driver since the latest drivers are around 15.xx.xx.xxxx. This should be upgraded and hopefully will remove any issues that are causing this problem.
I know that some CPUs will say they are on the latest driver, when in fact they are not, so you may have to research how to get around this issue to get the latest driver version installed if it’s telling you otherwise.
Thanks for the help. I have done the update of the laptop. Unfortunately, it is a Dell Latitude 3340, and updates come from the webpage from Dell. The latest version of GPU drivers are more or less the same I had, and when trying to update them from the webpage from Intel, they refuse to update the drivers and redirect me to Dell webpage. A manual update of the drivers is not a good idea for me because this computer is under warranty.
I will contact Dell for any tip on how to upgrade the laptop without any risk.
Let me know how that goes. Typically with Laptops and CPU drivers these will need to be updated from the manufactured rather than the original creator of the CPU itself, like you’ve found out.
Sometimes manufacturers can be slower to do this with laptops from my experience. I hope you get some good news and can update us here. This could be helpful information for others in the community as well.
