Unreal Build Accelerator

This blog is about things that go wrong with UE 🤦‍♂️. Honestly, a lot of info online just doesn’t work, and this time was no different. So here’s what not to do.

I needed to do a Unreal Engine project for Oculus. Since UE 5.1, the engine stopped supporting the OculusXR plugin and switched to OpenXR. So I had to compile an Oculus version of UE. Spoiler: I never managed to successfully compile UE engine, including this time 😅.

I decided to try a remote server. Hetzner offers servers you can rent by the hour. At first, Gemini & ChatGPT suggested using Fastbuilder. After setting it up, the build system ignored it and used Unreal Build Accelerator (UBA) instead 🤷‍♂️.

Then I learned that UBA needs a Windows server, even though Gemini and ChatGPT both said it is made for Ubuntu to compile. Lesson learned: not everything online is true 😬.

But it’s not all lost! %AppData%\Unreal Engine\UnrealBuildTool\BuildConfiguration.xml saves your build settings. You can tweak things like how many cores to use. Paid 30 cents to learn this little tip… still no successful build 😭. Looks like I’ll just switch to the OpenXR plugin.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Configuration xmlns="https://www.unrealengine.com/BuildConfiguration">
    <BuildConfiguration>
        <MaxParallelEntities>6</MaxParallelEntities>
        <MemoryPerActionGB>8</MemoryPerActionGB>
        <bAllowLowPriorityWorkerThreads>true</bAllowLowPriorityWorkerThreads>
    </BuildConfiguration>
    <ParallelExecutor>
        <MaxProcessorCount>6</MaxProcessorCount>
    </ParallelExecutor>
</Configuration>

Sad, paid 30 cents and no progress.