Are you ever going to optimise the engine toolset

When I started with UE4 I had a quad core cpu with 8 gigs of ram, a nvidia 650ti and 2 tb worth of space. Not many things were slow back then, the engine ran great. Now, thirteen versions later, I have a 8 core 4mhz cpu with 24 gigs of ram, a nvidia 970/1050 and about 12 tb of space. Operations have slowed down throughout the last couple of years.

I just tried to cache 25 new assets I added to project and it took about 20 minutes. They are not high res objects. This is getting dumb. It use to be that you could place the object -that you wanted- in the scene and after it would load the mats and such. Now it just sits there and mocks you. One low poly asset takes anywhere from 30 secs to 2 minutes to load before I can place it, then, AUTOSAVE takes another chunk of time right after, to add insult to injury.

I use to work on my game about 17 hours a day. Now I just force kill time lags and call it quits for the day. Shutting my game time down to about 30 minutes a day. My tolerance is really gone having endured this kind of ■■■■ for years now. Upgrading further (with no real promise it will better the memory lag) will cost thousands of dollars, just to use your product. My machine has no issues with other bloatware.

Please, tell me you are working on your toolset optimization, or after all these years my team and I going to take our money (that we use for the marketplace check my purchases sometime), to a new engine.

Another thing… The launcher is also out of control taking up as much memory as the tools half the time. Do you think this is a good idea? I mean you automatically open up videos OF YOUR GAMES in it automatically for shameless… Dirty… Crappy… Advertisement… YOUR GAMES are not more important to me than the one I am making on UE4… Make a separate game launcher for yours and your partners games like everyone else does…

In conclusion I still feel that the engine is superior or I wouldn’t be using it. But the memory issues I am constantly facing in many crucial tools is making it difficult to continue. And then there is the every two version update that changes everything and enforces a new learning curve… How is anyone that is a small team suppose to get anything accomplished?

Having worked in UE4 on and off since it was initially released to the public, on a wide variety of project sizes, I haven’t noticed any slowdown from the editor or engine, are there any more specific details you can give? An example workflow perhaps? Have you checked the health of your HDD? When I was using my old HDD I was having major productivity issues similar to the ones you’ve described in all of my tools (not just UE4 editor), after switching to a new HDD (and then later to an NVME SSD), those issues have all but disappeared.

In response to your launcher concerns, I totally agree, it should be separated from their consumer products. If it really bothers you and it’s possible/practical for your team, consider switching to building from source and distributing the engine & editor binaries to your team’s machines.

Lastly, consider sticking to a specific engine version if your team is having issues with the tools changing too often to stay productive. It’s quite common for a team to stay on an older engine version for the sake of not disrupting an entire team’s workflow.

it’s probably your 4mhz cpu; that really doesn’t cut it any more. i’m kidding, i know what you’re saying.

on a more serious note, i have never encountered issues such as you describe and as such i suspect it’s something relating to your project. if you’re interested in trying to get it working again then more information is needed. if you just want to rant then that’s fine but this isn’t the place for it.

Maybe I just need to reinstall. My projects are on the last HDD I bought about 4 months ago. It should be fine. As for the sticking to one version thing, we are planning on it. But we are waiting for the new animation system to be put in. As far as I know I can’t build that from source yet.

I thought it was the derived datacache for along time, because I have had all kinds of issues with that beast. But there is plenty of space. So I am really scratching my head. It seems these problems started around 4.14 or so and I have reinstalled the engine about 3 times since then.

On one occasion it seemed to clear out whatever was going wrong. But since then it hasn’t. I did have versions from 4.10 up installed so I removed everything accept 4.15 to current.

What I think is the real issue is when I add assets from the marketplace. I go through the directories and select all off them to and move the mouse to cache them all. Like I mentioned before, this use to not happen. I could place an item in the map and it would be untextured while the shaders and materials loaded. Now that doesn’t happen. So when I do this to the mats separately from the models this is when the huge time drains happen.

HDDs seem to be fickle little ■■■■■■■■, I’ve had bad luck in the past with big slow downs after just a few months of buying & installing a new one.

From what you’ve posted it does sound like the same issue I had, disk speeds accessing and writing to the derived data cache were slow, so when loading a new asset the editor would spend ages writing to the DDC. Took me hours to open all the kite demo assets, for example. If you have one, moving the derived data cache to an SSD can help a lot, as that’s where the editor will do most of it’s disk-based work afaik. Even moving it to a HDD that isn’t being used by other programs while you’re working might help, so the editor doesn’t have to contend with the OS & others for file access.

Other than that I’m not sure there’s much you can do to avoid that particular issue. Wish I had better advice on that, I know how much it sucks and destroys productivity.