Textures in paks cannot be chosen in Material editor? AssetCatalog.xml slowing down Editor?

Lumberyard Discussion Other Support
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#1

So I run Lumberyard 1.2 beta and so far so good. Like that it starts up so fast!
Have two issues though that seem related:

  1. I’m currently working using the GameSDK project +Woodland asset pack.
    Everytime I want to create or modify materials in Material Editor the textures inside the paks (e.g. dev\GameSDK\texturesgeneric.pak) are not showing up. Only when I extract the textures manually into their appropriate subfolders do they show up and can be specified in material slots.
    Is there a startup cvar I’m missing?
    Also material editor always uses the path of the asset cache as root for when you create new materials or try to specify a new diffuse/normalmap/spec texture

“C:/games/Lumberyard/1.2.0.0/dev/cache/gamesdk/pc/gamesdk”
which doesn’t seem correct right?

  1. I seem to have constant ongoing disk access (floppy disk symbol in viewport) related to “assetcatalog.xml” being built? Framerate is cut in half due to that but it never finishes. Framerate is really low like 20-30fps due to that.
    If I delete that file and stop the asset processor I get easy 60fps in editor!
    This slowdown goes away when I jump in game but it is still irritating when working in the editor as it seems everything is compiled already and there doesn’t seem to be a reason for that performance hit and constant disk access.
#2

Thanks for the reply. Looking forward to next release!

The other issue I have I can only work around with extracting all Objects/textures etc from the paks that reside in GameSDK.
Really weird that assets get loaded when they are already specified in the level, but if I want to search for something that resides in a pak file (either in Material Editor or when choosing which model to load for certain entities), I cannot get any of those .pak assets to show up.
Any ideas would be really helpful.

#3

Hi @Woodchuck

I can’t speak to anything else, but there is a known issue whereby the Asset Processor constantly rebuilds assetcatalog.xml. There will be a fix for that in an upcoming release.

#4

@Woodchuck

After discussing this with some of the other developers here, the work around you’ve found is the best thing to do.

All of our newer examples ship with unpacked assets, which is what you should (and have to) use in the Editor. The Editor currently does not support browsing for assets that are stored in pak files.

GameSDK is legacy, and we don’t have the original source assets to ship with it.

Hope that explains a bit more at least.