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The studio attributes part of its success to IncrediBuild.
The Coalition Studios shared the challenges it faced while working on Gears of War.
Both Gears of War 4 and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition were released on PC in 2016. According to the studio, the development didn't go smoothly as it was slowed by excessive wait times for shader and code compilation of the intricate levels, characters, and vehicles.
"We use Epic's Unreal Editor 4 as a primary tool for content creation such as levels, characters and vehicles...The editor needs to compile all shaders beforehand, opening a level can take up to 30 minutes in some situations," said The Coalition's IT Manager, Joe Vogt.
So the developers had to spend nearly a third of their day waiting just for the level to open. Additionally, some of the studio's partners were smaller organizations that lacked the machines necessary to compile shaders and effectively utilize UE4, so the company had to find a solution to speed up the process.
To solve these problems, the developers used IncrediBuild – a software that helps accelerate computationally-intensive tasks by distributing them over the network – and its process level virtualization technology to scale Microsoft Azure performance capabilities. This way, The Coalition could deploy 700 cores, significantly reducing shader and code compilation times for themselves and their partners.
The Coalition then outsourced Azure and IncrediBuild resources to help its partners.
"We deployed around 160 cores to a public-facing Azure datacenter and configured a site-to-site VPN with the partner location." Vogt explained, "This allowed the small number of local Unreal Engine users to benefit from the IncrediBuild farm capacity in Azure to accelerate their work."
You can learn more about The Coalition working with IncrediBuild on Microsoft's website. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.