Just updated to Hurricane Ridge and noticed I can no longer change the “Items at a time” to a value greater than 4.
It was set to 30 previously in my file, and seems to respect that if I don’t touch the UI, but I wanted to raise it to fully use my RAM to improve my build times by doing more parallel tile rendering. I’m doing a tiled build, so I can easily do up to 40 tiles concurrently and still keep everything within memory.
My world is too large to not do a tiled build, and changing the tile size (from 2048 to 4096 or higher) is not possible due to the needs of the project. Is there another way to use my excess RAM to speed up my build times, and/or is this something that can be changed back to the old behavior?
Thanks!
-Ryan
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I know that only WM Standart/Indie have limit in items and cores of CPU that you can use limited by 4
But if you use Tiled Build - it means that you have WM Pro - so may be it is bug of the ui that you should report to Dev here on forum or write message on E-mail
You can edit that number without UI, directly inside of .ini file of your WM instance, - maybe that could help
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Ah, thanks for the suggestion! I just looked in the world.ini and didn’t see any entry that seemed to map to that setting, though. And yes, I am able to use more than 4 CPU cores successfully–I’m just hoping to be able to tune my exports with a bit more control for the tiled part.
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@Stephen looks like he/she/they need help
Okay, so I found another world.ini in my AppData/Roaming folder whose values reflect what the UI shows! Changing that value does cause it to update to the desired number of concurrent operations–thank you!
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TL;DR : You’re right, there is still value in having extended range on that slider for tiled builds (that isn’t available currently).
The “items at a time” setting controls both the number of simultaneous tiles built and also the number of simultaneous devices built.
The maximum was reduced because of the latter case - for single-file builds, it is now counter-productive to build more than ~2-4 devices at the same time. This is because all individual devices can now effectively use all of your cores.
Tiled builds are a little different though. The optimum I’ve found experimentally is roughly 1-2 cores per tile at a time, if you have the memory for it. This is mostly due to the fact that writing files to disk is inherently slow and single-threaded.
The intention was actually to seperate out these values from each other and let you configure them independently… but the control knob for tiles at a time was never exposed!
I will fix this in the next bugfix release. In the interim, the ‘Build_thread_max=’ line in the world.ini file controls this value and WM will respect larger values if you manually set them.
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Awesome! Thank you so much!
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Just an update - I was able to expose this setting for the 4047 bugfix release.
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