Help - Out Of Memory During Build

Unity Engine
1

What can I do to reduce memory usage during the build process?

I’m watching the process’s memory usage during the build, and it allocates and frees memory for a while as expected, then suddenly jumps up past the magical not at all arbitrary 3.7G memory limit and immediately crashes.

Can I delete files? Which files are most likely to be influencing this?

Should I make things not be linked to things?

Yes the project folder is more than 3.7G, but Unity does not load that all at once, does it?

I’ve even tried building with no scenes in the build dialogue - just one completely empty scene created from “New Scene” menu option - and there’s no observable difference.

2

Usually happens when Unity loads textures to convert them into the format needed on the device. As an experiment, set the max texture size to something small, and see if that lets you make a build.

3

Changed the quality settings’ Texture Resolution to one-eighth, no change; wen through and changed allllll the textures to max import size of 256, still no change. These are silly-large artists’ PSD files; is it worth trying to batch-convert them to reasonably-sized jpgs or something?

Does Unity load all of something at once? Like all the textures or all the models? Does it load all the everything?

I have an object which is just a data store so we can find prefabs, it’s got links to a couple(?) thousand objects. We took it out of the project and tried to build but no observable difference; I’m not sure if having a few thousand links would cause issues.

4

Try converting them to PNG. Jpegs and PSD files take alot more room compared to PNG.

5

When is png smaller? jpg is lossy and has no transparency, png is pixel-perfect and has alpha transparency. Also I just saved one of each, my png was 80% larger.

6

Quality settings is a run-time thing, so won’t reduce build memory usage. Maybe back up the project, save it somewhere safe. Then safe it somewhere save elsewhere. The take a copy on a USB stick, take that to you bank, and ask them to look after it. Did I say back up the project? Then resize all the texture artwork in your game using photoshop. Just reduce all the artwork by 25%. Then try.

7

One of my clients just ran into this issue. Definitely a problem on larger games. Here are a few things that can help:

  • Have an empty scene active when you build.
  • Delete anything you don’t need from your project.
  • Put your largest scenes at the start of the build settings list.
  • Build by calling Unity from the command line, not the GUI.

Good luck!!

8

This is worse than useless, since the source files are not used by Unity anyway (after the import, of course).

–Eric