How To Reduce Packaged Game Size | Unreal Documentation - Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial

hey guys and welcome back to the religion 4 tutorial in today's video i'm going to be going over how you can reduce the package game size for your game so sometimes you might package the game and it might be quite big or it might be over a gigabyte so if you're uploading to 8g or gamejolt they tend to have a one gigabyte size limit so you might want to just reduce it a little bit so i'll be going over some top tips on how you can do that now so some of these are my own ways but a lot of them will be from the unreal documentation on it because some of them i thought these are just ones which i knew i couldn't remember where i got them from since i found out about them a while ago but i think they're probably from the documentation since they're on there as well so i'll be running you through how to do them on there so i'll leave a link to it in the description down below this will just be a visual representation of going through them and using the first couple methods one of my games which i made for game jam i reduced the file size by about 60 to 70 percent i can't remember the exact value but i know it was between 16 and 70 percent file size reduced so let me get right into it and i'll show you how we're going to be doing this so we're going to be doing this through the project settings so i'm going to go to edit project settings there and you should see here we should have packaging so at the very top under project we have packaging there this is where we're going to be changing all of our settings now i don't really have too much in this project version at the moment it's just a test but i don't need anything so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to be compressing the cooked content so obviously you're going to build and cook your game before you package it so we want to compress that so to do that that's very simple all i'm going to do is want to hit the show advanced here so under packaging i'm going to go down show advanced i'm going to scroll all the way down again until we find create compressed cooked packages here we're going to take that so it is true while we're here we want to also cook only maps so we're going to tick that as well that means it's going to cook the maps which we want which again will help lower the package size as obviously we don't want to cook everything then again go down underneath this you see here we have a list of maps to include in a packaged build we're going to add the array elements to here so i'm going to hit the plus element there open this locate my third person bp maps and you see here we have the third person example map so i'm going to put that in so you want to put in your actual map your main menu any other maps you have now this is good for a reducing package size and b also to make sure that you do have those maps in the package build as well so we're going to scroll all the way back up and you should see that we have share material show you the core and shared material native libraries now these are already ticked for me but they might not be ticked for you you want to make sure that they are both ticked so you might have it looking like this and take the top one take the bottom one you will need to restart it but you can restart it later once you finish these settings but you will need to restart the engine now this does help with reducing the package size but it does slightly increase the loading times but it shouldn't be too much and obviously you just weigh up whether you want bigger file sizes or slightly longer loading times so just have a think about it do you want a slightly longer or bigger file size and obviously i say slightly longer because it isn't that much you probably won't notice what we also want to do is we want to exclude editor content so we want to only include the stuff which we've actually used in the game and this just means it won't package anything that you don't actually use in your game so if you have 53 assets you only use 10 of them the other 40 won't be included which will obviously help a lot with reducing package size so again we're going to scroll down into these advanced settings here which we've already opened if you haven't again you just press this little arrow here for show advanced and you should see here we have exclude editor content when cooking so we're just going to make sure that we tick that and then you can also exclude the movies as well if you do that you're going to want to make sure you choose which movies to include so you might have 10 movies but only use one so take that hit the plus array element there specific movies to package and you just insert and choose one which you have obviously i don't have any here so i can't do that but that's what you do sorry you actually just type it in there you just type in the name of your movie there and then just above this you can see we have cook everything in the project content directory what we're going to do is we're going to take that and this just allows us to specify which maps and content we want to actually package in the game so we only want to include what we want so sorry we want to leave it unticked not take sorry so we want to leave it unticked so it doesn't cook everything so for you it might be ticked by default that's where i was getting that from that's what i meant so it might be ticked you want to have it unticked so we don't want to cook everything and then obviously here we can specify what we do want to include so what we do to cook so the specific movies which we set up the maps that we want to do the directories to never cook that's also a good one so directories which you never want to cook which again cooking just increases the size file so again i've shown you how to do this with the maps you hit the plus array element there hit the three dots and then you just locate and open what you want to include so i'm just going to remove that one delete that there that's essentially the project settings done so we can close that that's all you need to do make sure to restart your engine once you've finished that so what we can do is we can remove plugins which we aren't using so to do that you can go to edit plugins and you can see we have all of our plugins here i don't have any i only have one but obviously you might have a lot more and you might not be using any of them so what you want to do is just have it unticked if you're not using it if you are using them keep them enabled but if you have them enabled but you aren't actually using it just untick it because it's just taking up unnecessary space and then we can also do the same but with actual content so you can choose what to include in the package but there will still be a tiny bit of file space there so instead what i'm going to do is i don't want to use any of these folders i'm not using any of them in the game and i never will so i'm never going to use them so i can just delete them so just select all the ones you want right click and delete or hit the delete key and then they won't actually be included at all so choosing which ones to exclude and which ones to include via the project settings is good if you think you might use these in the future you've just got them there you might use them if you know you're really not going to use them there's no point having them so you can just get rid of them you can just delete them that way it again massively reduces file size and so i think that'll be it we've gone over the kind of the basics of reducing file size in your game and also make sure that you actually zip up the folder of your package game at the end as well so let me show you an example of that so if i open up my folder i'll just do some here for the game which i did package so you can see here i have the long commute home packaged and it's got that icon there because it's zipped and you can see here we have the unzipped so all we want to do is zip it you want to right click on it send to compressed zipped folder and what it's going to do is it will just again zip it meaning it's going to be reducing the file size so that way it can be more lenient with uploading it to itchy or whatever then when the user and the player downloads it they can just unzip it and play their game so normally when you download something it might be like this so you should be used to that so let me know in the comments down below if you have any other tips other suggestions on how other people can reduce the file size again with a lot of these tips i would use mine from about 60 to 70 so it might be different for each person obviously especially if you have more stuff it might not be as big or if you have more stuff it might be bigger so let me know how it works in the comments down below and again if you have any other tips for other people but this is just a kind of basic rundown of the documentation almost using the package file size for your games so i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you found it helpful and if you did make sure to like subscribe down below so thanks so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Matt Aspland

Views: 38,398

Keywords: ue4, unreal engine 4, unreal engine, tutorial, ue4 tutorial, unreal engine 4 tutorial, how to make a game, how to, 3d modelling, blender, unity, games design, graphic designer, ue5, unreal engine 5, package, packaging, packaged, export, exported, finish, finished, game, too big, big, large, file, size, reduce, ue4 reduce file size, compress, itch, itchio, 1gb, gb, ue4 reduce package size, ue4 reduce game size, game size, project, settings, content, easily, quickly, easy, quick

Id: ofWiHPnkkU4

Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021