Setting up development environment (Part 1/3)

Vanilla Engine Installation

After downloading tand installing the Epic games launcher, the menu navigation to installing the latest engine is pretty straight forward.

I would just have a few suggestions regarding the components to install. The basic idea is to avoid installing packages that you are never planning to ship to.

Also, the Editor Symbols for debugging can also be skipped. This component is required to debug the source code. We would need it only while working with heavy optimizations. For normal use, this is required only when the engine crashes and you have to figure out which variable is causing the crash.

For my personal use, I prefer multiple lightweight versions of engines installed.

It also helps that after dealing with a lot of errors, you can pretty much tell what went wrong from the error log without stepping through the code. In fact, my API kurisu indexed a huge list of errors you might encounter and suggestions to fix them.

In this module, we will be setting up the development environment for Unreal Engine 4. That means everything except the engine and editor itself. If you have a fast running PC with lightning fast compile times, then that is great. But a large segment of users use slower PCs/laptops and thus the engine gets a bad name for heavily resource demaning.

SSD/HDD/NVMe

When working with a project, we would have to read from the following three locations

• Visual Studio Installations
• Engine Folder
• Project folder

The bottleneck while various loading phases is going to be

• Coding/Compiling --> Visual studio folder
• Packaging --> Project folder
• Loading project --> Engine Folder

Loading project is the fastest step(except for when you are compiling the 5000+ shaders while changing settings/first-time use)

Install locations

TL;DR :

• Engine Installation --> SATA SSD/HDD
• VS Installation --> NVMe (Not needed if using VSCode)
• Project Workspace --> NVMe

If you have ample space on your NVMe, feel free to install everything there for maximum speed.

I install my engines in a hard disk(HDD) and compile the shaders through command line on-demand while I am away. I house my project folder in my NVMe for faster asset loading/cooking.

Back when I used VS primarily, I would definitely install it in an SSD for faster code iterations. Now with my switch to VSCode, I have moved my VS installation to a slower SATA SSD and have both my Engine and Project workspace in NVMe for fast raw asset loading.

I will show you how to compile shaders from command-line in VSCode set-up section.