After searching for about 3 months now, I have yet to find any information on this anywhere. I’ve contacted Unity support and their various groups with Unity and got absolutely no help and they didn’t appear to be very informed. And kept getting sent back to the guys that help non-tech savy people set up Unity (who then notify me that they are the wrong people for this over and over).
I have a build that has too many large textures for any of my local computers to handle, since the build requires the whole thing to be loaded into memory all at once as opposed to in bits.
I am trying to decide whether I need to invest in a powerful hpc with tons of vram/ram or if I can use the unity cloud services. Both cost money but obviously the cloud option looks cheaper and a safer approach should any hiccups come along the way. So if the cloud building pipeline is very robust I would probably prefer to go that direction. Although the api makes it appear like way too much devops baloney to be worth all the hassle. In which case if I can just buy an hpc and build and be done with it I’d rather do that. Can anyone with experience tell me what route I need to go?
We currently have a selection of buildmachines with different specs. the highest that is publicly available right now is 16cpus and 32gb ram running on windows. We do have the ability to increase those specs if that isn’t enough for your needs. You can get started by signing up for unity devops via the dashboard, and ask for help via a support ticket and mention “unity devops” in the ticket (It’ll get routed to me and the team building this product).
I’d like to learn more about your use case and see if we can help support you. It feels “strange” that you’re not even able to build locally though… how do you handle this today? do you build a smaller section of the project first or something different?
Thank you for responding, I’ve tried my best to understand what is going on in the build process. From everything I have found it does not appear that you can intimately understand what is going on (maybe the more expensive licenses allow you to see what is going on, I am on Pro) but at least from what I experience, it looks like the build is loading all the textures into memory I max out the VRAM and RAM (about 35gb total) and the whole computer becomes unusable. Sometimes Unity crashes and I get a bug report window but the report crashes too and is too big to send apparently. But I have identified that the issue is that our textures take up a lot of memory, probably somewhere around 64-100gbs.
As of right now I simply build the game with significantly reduced texture sizes. (I just run a script that iterates over chunks of the assets and applies about 1/4 the target texture size) So a lot of the assets are blurry/low quality in the build.
I suspect we potentially, maybe… Could just barely make the build size if we really optimize all the assets really well. I am sure a lot of assets have larger texture sizes than are necessary. However I suspect due to the sheer volume of assets we would struggle to do this with a small team. And since they do not have any real bearing on performance in actual game, only the build. I’d rather just use a more powerful rig to build as getting the game out is paramount for me over optimizing things that will add nothing to the player’s experience.
In short, our game has a lot of assets with a lot of textures (probably at many with larger than necessary texture sizes) and only a very small amount of them are ever in a scene at once. So it has no real bearing on the game itself, the game runs just fine on integrated graphics no video card, the textures for the entire game are just clogging up / bottlenecking the build.
You mention building smaller parts of the build, I am not aware that you could do something like this, as it was the first thing I was interested in finding information on as I would think you could build incrementally but I have not been able to find anything on that and support gave me very rudimentary links to resources that teach you how to build 101 for the first time and refered me to non-technical support who would repeatedly tell me I am at the wrong support for this.