Large game projects?

I’m working on a large project. Trouble is, it’s taking up, like, all my memory. I don’t want to reduce quality and make it low poly as I used to, and performance is a must- this one has to look good. Are there ways to reduce its size or a place that can store big projects?

textures are likely taking up the most room. you can store the source files (full res) in dropbox or google drive or git LFS or something like that, and keep the local ones for your project at a lower resolution.

could also get an extra hard drive too. They are pretty cheap and its nice to have an extra physical backup.

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I mean game projects in general are huge. If you are using lots of HQ assets etc and the game is large in length, it is normal to see a project of 100+ GB.

If aiming for AAA quality or even AA quality, you can easily get to 2-300GB + for the project (considering an actual compressed built game when downloaded by the user may be 100+GB, it makes sense when you think about it).

All that data you are using takes up space :wink:

There is lots you can do to compress the build, much less for the project unfortunately (without impacting workflow that is).

Invest in an extra SSD just for all your dev work, I keep 1 spare to keep my main project on and literally it just has that on it.

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Do you mean in the editor or the build?

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In the editor.

I’ll have to try that SSD idea then and see if that works. Thank you.

Curious, though, if I ever move a project it always breaks the game. Is there a way to move it safely?

How much RAM does your PC have?

163 MB left.

I just grabbed a USB with 256GB.

That’s not memory, though. Sounds like what you’re talking about is disk space. That’s an entirely different matter.

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So, disk space… But how do I transfer the project? Each time I try, I end up breaking it to the point that the project never wants to open up again.

Unity tends to use a lot of small files, so depending on the formatting settings of your drive they could be taking up way more space than they need.

For windows NTFS formatting allows allocation space settings in KB.

Also the folder properties will show you the size of the files and the size on disk, if you see big differences between these then maybe reformatting with a smaller allocation size could help.

Unity itself generates lots of files some of which can be old and redundant or not needed/used in your project you could try packaging up the project and saving it then opening it up in a new Unity project.

Also trimming any unused Packages/Assets can save a lot of space.

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Either way, I would still risk breaking the project by moving it to a backup file. I may sound annoying when I say this, but the last project I moved was ready for launch, but my PC needed to be updated. I put my proj on a USB, transferred it to another machine, and the project permanently did not reopen. Is there something I need to transfer with the project or a code to use to keep it from breaking?

You should never move the Library folder, let it create a new one. Other than that I don’t know of any problems, cloned my projects to different machines so far and never had problems.

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So, delete a certain file, then?

Let’s be honest here. Computers haven’t been shipping without hard drives for a few years now. Chances are he needs more than just an SSD.

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You just copy the entire project folder. You’ll have to add the project again to the Hub’s list of projects, since it won’t be in the same location it was before.

For a list of files you can safely delete, find any Unity forum thread on the topic of gitignore.

256GB is an extremely small amount of disk space if you’re developing large projects. 1TB internal SSD’s are under $100 USD now.

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I’ll do that, then. Thanks!

The amount of storage on the USB is more than double the PC for now so it will give me a little more time, useful for continuing updates as I wait for the SSD. After I finally transfer everything to that, I could then use the USB to store smaller projects.

I’m kind of curious how your project has ballooned to that size of it’s not a AAA project.

Also, try getting an asset clean up tool and run it on a backup.

You probably have a LOT of unnecessary and unused assets to hit a file that big.

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Have you ever tried targeting 4K? :stuck_out_tongue:

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If you’re having trouble fitting the project in local storage then how are you handling version control…?