Using In-Game Terminal - Compile times

[Vaughan_MacEgan]

Hello all,

I couldn’t understand how the terminal worked so I went through and decided to add my own terminal went through and was tearing my hair out thankfully I have a fair bit to start with, anyway, after finally figuring out that the terminal was around the wrong way, I got it working. Then went to compile the code for the BullCowCartridge to get the first line printed to the Terminal:

and it was compiling for a long time, over 2 minutes after that I stopped it. I did have some commenting in the code, erase that, compile again, nothing, put the code in exactly as the lecture compile again, nothing. Put the comments back in now it works almost immediately. Change the code back to the way I had it, compile no problems. Made a text colour change to the Text Renderer, compile no problem. Change the comment code to reflect what I did, no compile, Tried it again, no compile, tried it again and then it worked. Moved a curly brace down a line and back up and and just left it to compile, went to the toilet got a drink and after 10 minutes it finally compiled. Did it again worked almost immediately .

I am using Visual Studio Community because absolutely none of the extensions work in MS Code is there anything I can do to ensure faster compile times? Or, is this something I am stuck with?

Another thing I have noticed in the collision detection that was working with the main actor and other objects is no longer working (I checked that was collision capsule on the main actor) and the main actor appears to be floating after going up a hill at first the character look like it is sinking into the ground then stays at that height till stopping the game?!? It’s a little different to Unity so I hope this is explained in future game exercises.

Any help is appreciated.

[beegeedee]

The short answer here is no. C++ is a powerful language but unfortunately it comes at a price.

You can use C++ on any machine but ultimately, having your code and Unreal on an SSD, as well as a decent CPU (high clock speed, >3Ghz, multi-core, 6+ and ideally with threading) and a decent amount of RAM, >8GB, will make a difference.

GPU here makes little difference, even when compiling shaders as that’s done also on the computer’s CPU.

As it happens, 2 minutes isn’t that long for C++ compilation times. The projects I work on which are not unreal take 5-6 minutes to compile.

There are a few things you can do to optimise your machine. First, set your anti-virus to ignore your development folder. There’s also a few key folders Studio community uses that you can ignore too which you can google.

First and foremost however, ensure UE and your project are on an SSD.

[Vaughan_MacEgan]

Aha.

Looks like a computer upgrade might be in order. I have an older machine it runs/ran Unity at a decent clip, but, that isn’t as performance driven as Unreal.

Thanks for the reply.

[beegeedee]

Unity is quite light and more accessible in many ways, in comparison to Unreal Engine, but the end results - no comparison. Unfortunately that does come at a cost.