Well - this question is a good one…
Does anyone have any experience running instances of the editor in the cloud? For instance on Amazon EC2 or google compute.
Questions I have at this point are very highlevel:
Using an EC2 micro instance I’ve got UnrealPak.exe running (took some installation process to get the right dlls on the virtual machine).
The micro machine is able to run the launcher too, and I’m currently trying to install 4.11p7 on it (had to expand the storage volume from the original installation). Stuck at 9% right now… Looks like the unreal installation process is using a lot of CPU and I’m capping out. 10% now, might take a few days to run this installation.
CPU usage was pretty good running my own c# app packaging data using UnrealPak.exe but I see that it’s hit pretty hard running the installer I have concerns over running the editor (needed so that a custom plugin can import assets and cook them on demand) on the VM luckily it doesn’t need to be hugely responsive so I can probably implement a sleep state.
Questions for minimizing CPU usage on a VM: Is there a way to run:
Dur. Minimize the installer for much better CPU usage and continued download… working theory now that a thread sleep in my plugin and minimized editor might also be fairly acceptable. Installation up to 70% now so will find out soon.
And… fail. Editor crashes on launch. Expected now I read about running on machines with basic graphics cards. Annoying in I don’t really need any graphics, just the logic loop to run.
There’s a box and I’m always stepping out of it…
It would however be very nice if the basic import native format to uasset process could be run from the commandline… Would make the system closer to efficient automation.
Was able to run the project on an EC2 g2 instance - that’s the $20 per day per-machine cost level (though some indication that by paying ahead of time you can drop that cost a lot).
Summary of what I’ve found: