QUICK DEV TIP #67 UE4 / UE5 - SAVE HARD DRIVE SPACE

Here is a great little tip that I saw from @HighlySpammable on Twitter (a great source of UETips)

Did you know you can save a bunch of hard drive space by turning off platforms you’re not going to be using in your engine?

If you would prefer to watch the video version, check it out here

Today we are working outside of the unreal engine editor, instead, in the Epic Games Launcher. Open up the launcher and go to your Library tab. Here we can see all the engine versions you have installed. We want to pick one and hit the drop-down and open up its options menu.

 

If we scroll down to the bottom of these options you will see the Target Platforms section.

 

Towards the bottom, we can see the total size the engine is taking up. In my case 48.35GB. If we then turn off each platform you can see that the required storage space is greatly reduced. In fact it’s now less than half as much.

 

It’s important here to think about what you use this engine for though, as you may infact need some of these on. For example, if you are doing any server stuff you will probably need linux on, if you are doing any Occulus Quest development you will probably need Android on. So have a think about what you need.

 

When you are happy with your choices, hit the big Apply button at the bottom. Let it do its stuff and watch your hard drive space come back!

Go through each of your engines to maximise the amount of hard drive space you can get back and just remember some things you shouldn’t turn off based on your projects. This is going to save you a lot of space. Think when I did this I saved at least 50 GB of space across all my different engines.

If you want more quick tips & tricks FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER @cbGameDev

Also, check out the parkour game I'm solo developing called Freerunners. Give it a wishlist if you like the way it looks!: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1430330/Freerunners/