In the previous series of articles on hot updates, the process and packaging details of UE hot updates were introduced. In fact, there are some engineering practices for optimizing hot update patches that I think can be discussed in detail.
This article starts with the generation of Shader patches, aiming to reduce the size of shaders during each hot update. It will analyze some internal implementation details of the engine, address issues related to Shader patches in the engine, and automate the Shader patch process based on HotPatcher.
2021.11.02 UPDATE: HotPatcher now supports collecting all compiled shaders of Cooked resources in the patch and packaging them into a Shader Library, which can replace the Shader Patch mechanism. For more details, see the article: UE Hot Updates: Shader Update Strategy.