unreal-engine

Unreal Engine Conda Package Recipe

Overview

This recipe packages Unreal Engine for use in the AWS Deadline Cloud ecosystem. It uses UE 5.6 as an example, but you can adapt it for any UE version, including custom source builds.

Unlike other recipes in this repository, this one is designed to be built locally on a machine where Unreal Engine is already installed.

UE 5.6 requires packaging ~80,000 files totaling 20+ GiB. If you submit a conda build job to AWS Deadline Cloud:

• Without compression: You'd upload a 20GB zip file as a job attachment, and workers would need to download all 20GB before building.
• With compression: Compressing takes time and can reduce the file size to ~10GB. Workers must then spend more time decompressing it before building.

Either way, the upload/download/decompression overhead makes submitting UE as a job attachment impractical. Building locally on a machine with UE already installed avoids this entirely.

This approach is especially useful for studios using custom UE source builds that aren't available for download.

Prerequisites

1. Unreal Engine installed on your Windows machine

   • Unreal Engine installed via Epic Games Launcher (e.g., C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.6)
   • Or your custom source build location

2. rattler-build installed locally

   # Using conda
   conda install -c conda-forge rattler-build
   
   # Or using pixi
   pixi global install rattler-build
   

3. Enable Windows long path support

   Follow the Microsoft documentation to enable long path support.

4. AWS CLI configured with credentials that have write access to your S3 conda channel

Adapting the Recipe for Your UE Version

Before building, update recipe/recipe.yaml to match your Unreal Engine installation:

1. Update the version:

   context:
     name: "unrealengine"
     version: "5.6"  # Your UE version

2. Update the source path:

   source:
     - path: 'C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.6\Engine'  # Your UE Engine path

   For custom source builds:

   source:
     - path: 'D:\UnrealEngine\Engine'  # Your custom build path

Publishing the Package

1. Publish a conda package by running rattler-build:

   rattler-build publish <path-to-recipe-file> --to <publish-conda-channel>
   

   The build process will:

   • Copy the Engine directory from your UE installation
   • Exclude non-essential files (documentation, source code, build artifacts, etc.)
   • Create a conda package in the channel and re-index the channel
   • For building a test package, use the package-format option to reduce compression level and speed up the build process.

   --package-format conda:0
   

   The channel can be on prefix.dev, anaconda.org, an S3 bucket, a local filesystem folder (or network mount), or a Quetz or Artifactory instance. See the rattler-build publish documentation for details.

   The build may take up to 90 minutes depending on your disk speed.

Uploading a locally built conda package to S3

The rattler-build publish command can upload directly to S3 and handle indexing automatically. If you need to upload a pre-built package manually:

rattler-build publish <path-to-conda-package>.conda --to s3://...

Recipe Details

Excluded Files

The recipe excludes the following to reduce package size:

Category	Patterns
Directories	Documentation, Extras, Samples, Templates, FeaturePacks, Intermediate, DerivedDataCache, Saved, Build, Source, Restricted
Build artifacts	*.ipdb, *.iobj, *.exp, *.ilk, *.obj, *.log
Source files	*.cpp, *.c, *.inl, *.hpp, *.cs
Dev files	*.vcxproj, *.sln, *.filters, *.user, *.rc, *.manifest, *.pdb, *.lib

For custom source builds, you may need to adjust these exclusions based on your build configuration.

Troubleshooting

Build fails with "path not found"

• Verify UE is installed and the path in recipe.yaml is correct