Optimize Unreal Engine builds with BuildGraph and CircleCI

Vela Games, the developer of the multiplayer online co-op game Project-V, faced bottlenecks in their Jenkins CI infrastructure due to the sequential nature of their build pipeline, prompting a migration to CircleCI to improve efficiency. By leveraging Unreal Engine's BuildGraph technology and CircleCI’s dynamic configuration with self-hosted runners, Vela Games significantly reduced build times by up to 85% in optimal scenarios. This approach involves parallelizing build processes across multiple agents, facilitating faster compilation, cooking, and packaging of Unreal Engine projects, specifically demonstrated with a first-person shooter example. The tutorial outlines the setup of self-hosted runners using Terraform, the creation of a BuildGraph script, and a Python translation layer to convert BuildGraph’s JSON graphs into CircleCI’s YAML format, ultimately enhancing build automation and efficiency for Unreal Engine projects.