isabella232 / malioc-ue4

Mali Offline Compiler Plugin for Unreal Engine 4

Mali Offline Compiler Plugin for Unreal Engine 4

Using the Plugin

Inside the Material Editor and the Material Instance Editor, just click the Offline Compiler button to bring up the Mali Offline Compiler tab. This tab can be docked anywhere you want it. Then, choose which Mali GPU you want to see statistics for, and click the Compile button. This will begin compilation of your material.

When compilation is complete, you should see a compilation report. First, there will be a Statistics Summary. This shows a short list of the representative shaders for your material, and how they are expected to run on the Mali GPU you chose. With these statistics, you can experiment and see how changing the material affects performance without having to run your application on a real device.

Below the summary, there will be a number of expandable drop downs. Each of these drop downs corresponds to one or more of the Usage options selected in the Details tab of the Material Editor. Inside, you can see each of the shaders compiled for the material, for each and every situation that material might be displayed in.

Shader statistics are unsupported when editing Material Functions.

Building from Source

First, check out Unreal Engine 4 using git. You can do this by following the instructions at UE4 on GitHub.

Once you've got the engine checked out locally, navigate to the root folder, then, from your git shell, run:

git submodule add -f https://github.com/ARM-software/malioc-ue4.git Engine/Plugins/MaliOfflineCompiler

This will add the plugin as a submodule to Unreal Engine.

You might need to go into Engine/Plugins/MaliOfflineCompiler and checkout a specific branch for the version of Unreal Engine you are using.

Finally, follow the instructions at Building Unreal Engine 4 from Source to build the engine and the plugin on your platform.

Building for Launcher Distributions

The easiest, but still somewhat convoluted, method of compiling the Offline Compiler Plugin in a way that is compatible with builds of Unreal Engine 4 distributed through the Epic Launcher is as follows:

• Using the Epic Launcher, download the version of Unreal Engine that you want to build the plugin for.
• Launch this version of Unreal Engine. In the Unreal Project Browser, select the New Project tab, select the C++ tab, and select the Basic Code template. Name the project MaliOCProject, and click Create Project. Make note of where the project was created.
• The Unreal Editor and the IDE for your platform will automatically open after the initial compilation is complete. Close both.
• Go into the MaliOCProject folder, where the project you just created is located.
• Clone the Offline Compiler repository into MaliOCProject/Plugins/MaliOfflineCompiler.
• Launch Unreal Engine again, select MaliOCProject, and click Open. A dialog will pop up asking you to rebuild missing modules. Click Yes.
• The Unreal Editor will automatically open after the modules have been rebuilt. Close it again.
• Go into the MaliOCProject/Plugins/MaliOfflineCompiler folder, and delete the following files and folders:
  • .git
  • Intermediate
  • Scripts
  • .gitignore
• Archive the entire Plugins folder.
• Finally, to test that the build was successful, copy the Plugins folder into /Engine. There should already be a Plugins folder in here, so select Yes when asked to merge folders.
• Launch Unreal Engine via the launcher and validate that the plugin loaded successfully and works correctly.