For our projects, I’ve set up Jenkins to automate all of our builds and deployment of those builds. At the moment this is mainly for a project using 4.5.1, but newer projects will be on 4.16+
This includes:
Syncing from P4
Building the engine
Building the game
Packaging each as standalone builds
Uploading game builds to steam
Zipping builds for in-house storage and deployment
Gathering and compiling localization
At the moment I am using older macMinis and iMacs for these builds, and as can be expected, some of the build times are less than ideal. We are ready to purchase new equipment to use as our build farm, but we had a few questions about what sort of hardware we should be focusing on.
How much does a good graphics card help during builds, specifically when cooking during the packaging stage?
For CPU, should we focus more on speed or number of cores? Is there a minimum for either?
What is the point of diminishing returns with adding more RAM?
We’re ideally looking to go for a rack based solution and would appreciate any recommendations.
Nothing specific. We just ended up using a PC with the same configuration we buy for our team. We realized pretty quickly that a rack solution was way outside our budget.
Seems like fast hard drive and speed/quantity of cores are the biggest gains. For the hard drive we have a 1TB M.2 SSD and for the processor an Intel i7-7700. 32GB RAM. I don’t think the graphics card is doing much, but we have one in there - GTX 1080.
Our game builds went from 5.5 hours down to 2.5 hours when moving from an iMac to this machine. That includes syncing from P4 (39.5 → 7.5 minutes), unzipping a copy of the latest engine build (17 → 5 minutes), building the game (34 → 28 minutes), packaging the build (104 minutes → 28 minutes), uploading to Steam (54 → 46 minutes), and finally zipping the package for local storage (80 → 33 minutes).
Our engine builds (which were on macMinis) went from 2.5 hours → 1 hour.
Nothing specific. We just ended up using a PC with the same configuration we buy for our team. We realized pretty quickly that a rack solution was way outside our budget.
Seems like fast hard drive and speed/quantity of cores are the biggest gains. For the hard drive we have a 1TB M.2 SSD and for the processor an Intel i7-7700. 32GB RAM. I don’t think the graphics card is doing much, but we have one in there - GTX 1080.
Our game builds went from 5.5 hours down to 2.5 hours when moving from an iMac to this machine. That includes syncing from P4 (39.5 → 7.5 minutes), unzipping a copy of the latest engine build (17 → 5 minutes), building the game (34 → 28 minutes), packaging the build (104 minutes → 28 minutes), uploading to Steam (54 → 46 minutes), and finally zipping the package for local storage (80 → 33 minutes).
Our engine builds (which were on macMinis) went from 2.5 hours → 1 hour.