Starting with Unreal Engine

Some interesting news. I got a connection with someone working in the game industry, and he offered to join forces with him to develop a game. He already has something very serious running, and I will be joining for free, to gain experience. We've decided that I'll start with playing with the Unreal game engine and if I see that I like it and I'm comfortable, I'll join them. This is great news for me. This way I'll be able to get the experience needed for game development, I'll be able to show off what I did, and I'll be able to see if I really like it, as I think I will.

So, starting with Unreal, first I need to download it. I'm usually working with an ubuntu machine, so I tried downloading it, but they offer only build from source. I didn't want to go to that path (for now), so I booted to windows and downloaded it from this site.

The hard part about almost anything regarding development is deciding where to start. Find the right tutorial, or buy a course. There are millions of resources online and each has its own benefits.

I looked into unreal subreddit and into game dev subreddit or Game development subreddit. I heard about a guy on Youtube called "unreal sensei" and started watching his video about unreal 5. It's a good overview of the unreal 5 programs, going in-depth about how to navigate the screen and more. I'm now stuck on minute 27 because Unreal keeps crashing, something about the GPU kept crashing and I found unreal docs talking about it.

I also got a suggestion from my friend about 3 Udemy courses:

I think soon I'll need to buy a new computer that is more suitable for this, but for now, I'll need to struggle with what I have. It would be silly to buy a new computer just to realize it's too big and heavy and I have nothing to do with it because I didn't continue with game development. I also started to look into game dev machines in the cloud. In the past, I worked with a cloud machine to develop things that my local machine couldn't handle, and it should be much cheaper than buying a new machine. I found Azure has something I'll try it out.

This failed for now, as there are no available instances for the required machines, or I didn't figure it out correctly. and after applying the changes from the link above, my unreal instance still crashes because of the same error.

After a few more searches, I found this video that showed me how to use lower-quality settings. Some graphics won't show, but at least it works. After 1 month of working this way, I can work my way to having a working VM, and after a few months of savings, I can buy a new computer.

The changes I did were:

Adding the keys TdrDelay and TdrDdiDelay to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers with decimal value of 60 - Still Crashing.
Updating their value to 120 - still crashing.
Going to the project root folder, and in Config/DefaultEngine.ini - add r.ReflectionCaptureResolution=128 under [/Script/Engine.RendererSettings]. Possible values can be 256, 512, or 1024. I took this low value to make sure it works. I can always test if changing it will work.
In UE, under settings, I opened "Engine Scalability Settings" and chose "Low" for everything.

Both 3 and 4 work for now. I'll need to see how we progress from here.

Oh, another thing. every time I start UE it warns me about the version of the graphics driver. At first, I upgraded the driver, but then I saw they actually want me to downgrade. I'm now waiting for the driver to download it and see if it helps.