agents
Written on 11 November, looking back on 3 to 11 November. Times are Dutch local time.
Why a second PC
Our own machine has too little memory to run the editor, a cook and several agent sessions at once, so a friend lent us his PC for the jam. It stays his PC, so we work from a distance and write every change down.
The house rules
- One profile, nothing outside it.
- Nothing is installed without a human yes.
- Nothing starts by itself, so nothing goes in startup or a scheduled task.
- An emergency stop exists, and it works from a phone.
Unreal Engine 5.8 was installed at the PC itself, by a person. works
What we measured
On 4 November the first test run packaged an empty project and started it. works The same evening we moved everything of ours into one folder, so that tearing it down later is one decision instead of twenty.
| what broke | what fixed it |
|---|---|
| The first full run went straight for the standard build route, which needs a toolchain that is not on the PC. | Our own build targets and no build step; the standard route stays untested on purpose. |
| Our scripts only checked free memory when a job started, not while it ran. | A cap of 24 of 32 threads and a minimum of 8 GB free, checked at the start. Not watched during a run not proven yet. |
On the night of 10 to 11 November the village went through a full package: 729 MB unpacked, a 447 MB zip, and 27 to 35 s when the cache was warm. works The exe started and ran its 60 seconds, and the walk test passed at all five spots. works
$ pak.ps1 -Profile LowMemory -Workers 16 -MinFreeGB 8 -Zip
PAK [GREEN] 729 MB, 0.5 min, free RAM min 19.2 GBNot measured
A cold shader cache was never packaged, so the first build after a fresh install may be much slower. not proven yet
Day one
On Thursday at 06:00 the cap comes off for the jam week. The procedure: copy the scripts over, create the new project from a script that took half a second in a dry run, start the build lock, make one empty editor start, and commit that first change by hand.
Nothing in this setup starts by itself, and everything can be undone.