SuperVGA said:
Please elaborate on how you'd go about reducing linking time by increasing RAM or cores (Or machines)?.
Sorry, I didn't see this part until now. As I said in the other answer: Split into .so files, use weak (late-resolved) symbols. There is still a final linker phase where they are all collected, but with weak symbols, that's pretty fast. (At the expense of making starting the game slower …)
frob said:
True, except for the ‘but not “hours”' part.
I was talking about the “re-build the code” part, not the “bake lighting” part.
You are absolutely corect: A full, production-level bake, on large, detailed levels, with full pre-computed GI, can take however long you want! I once poked at setting up a VPN link to Amazon to use on-demand compute instances for baking, but because I didn't have a big enough level for it to matter, I never followed through. And Lightmass, while being somewhat able to split work across nodes, doesn't scale anywhere near infinitely to available nodes. But you'd still get the benefit of the 128-core, 2048-GB RAM, 40-Gbps networked hosts on demand, which you probably don't have sitting around the studio. (Well, maybe EPIC does, what with making money hand over fist on Fortnite :-)