Coconut Lizard welcomes Ryan Holt, Associate Programmer to the team!
October 25, 2024
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Ryan Holt, Associate Programmer to our growing team! To mark Marek starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Marek Kočvara, Associate Programmer to the team!
October 24, 2024
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Marek Kočvara, Associate Programmer to our growing team! To mark Marek starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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TAGGING ALL THE THINGS!
October 23, 2024
.lib file has a finite size. 65535 entries in-fact. This sounds like a lot, but it quickly gets big when you use the _API tag on a class and not functions the whole class is tagged. And when the limit is reached you get an error: LNK1189 "library limit of 65535 obj exceeded
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Seth Crowther, Programming Intern to the team!
August 20, 2024
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Seth Crowther, Programming Intern to our growing team! To mark Seth starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Michael Lindsay, Technical Animator to the team!
April 9, 2024
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Michael Lindsay, Technical Animator to our growing team! To mark Michael starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Robert Flitney, Graduate Programmer to the team!
March 21, 2024
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Robert Flitney, Graduate Programmer to our growing team! To mark Robert starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Stephen Storrie, Lead Build Engineer to the team!
January 23, 2024
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Stephen Storrie, Lead Build Engineer to our growing team! To mark Stephen starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Ben Pearson, Associate QA Tester to the team!
January 23, 2024
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Ben Pearson, Associate QA Tester to our growing team! To mark Ben starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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New Project Announcement! Exoborne
December 8, 2023
All of the team at Coconut Lizard are excited to announce that we are working alongside our sister studio, d3t and the team at Sharkmob on Exoborne. Find out more within.
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Louise Brand, Office Manager to the team!
November 14, 2023
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Louise Brand, Office Manager to our growing team! To mark Louise starting, she has shared a few things about herself. Read more within...
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New Project Announcement! EA SPORTS FC 24
November 8, 2023
All of the team at Coconut Lizard are excited to announce that we have been working alongside our sister studio and the team at EA on EA SPORTS FC™ 24. Find out more within.
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Coconut Lizard recognised as a GamesIndustry.biz Best Place to Work for 2023
September 30, 2023
We're excited to announce that both Coconut Lizard and d3t have been recognised by Gamesindustry.biz as a Best Place to Work for 2023.
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Aiman Khan, Graduate Programmer to the team!
August 25, 2023
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Aiman Khan, Graduate Programmer to our growing team! To mark Aiman starting, she has shared a few things about herself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard and d3t achieve silver in the Mind Workplace Wellbeing Index
June 30, 2023
Coconut Lizard is delighted to announce that we have been awarded with Silver in Mind’s Workplace Wellbeing Index for 2021/22. Read more.
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Dovydas Šimoliūnas, Graduate Programmer to the team!
June 20, 2023
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Dovydas Šimoliūnas, Graduate Programmer to our growing team! To mark Dovydas starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Jason 'Jax' Whitaker, Senior Programmer to the team!
June 14, 2023
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Jason Whitaker, Senior Programmer to our growing team! To mark Jason starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Carl Rutter, Programmer to the team!
May 30, 2023
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Carl Rutter, Programmer to our growing team! To mark Carl starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Shining the spotlight on Game Designer, Corey Smyth
May 18, 2023
What does a Game Designer within the games industry do, and how can I become one? Find out as our very own Corey details his journey, along with his top tips for those looking to enter the industry.
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Animation Budget Allocator
April 28, 2023
We demonstrate the minimal setup required to use Unreal's Animation Budget Allocator. This plugin allows the equivalent of LODs to be applied to skeletal mesh animations.
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New Project Launch Announcement! Dead Island 2
April 21, 2023
All of us at Coconut Lizard are excited to announce that we have been involved with the next instalment of the much-loved zombie saga, Dead Island 2, which launches today (21/04/2023). Read more within.
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Daniel Jorden, Graduate Programmer to the team!
April 4, 2023
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Daniel Jorden, Graduate Programmer to our growing team! To mark Daniel starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard welcomes James Charsley, Programmer to the team!
February 28, 2023
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome James Charsley, Programmer to our growing team! To mark James starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Shining the spotlight on Regional IT Systems Administrator, Paul Rowland
February 17, 2023
What does a Regional IT Systems Administrator within the games industry do, and how can I become one? Find out as our very own Paul details his journey, along with his top tips for those looking to enter the industry.
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Stephen Archibald, Associate VFX Artist to the team!
February 14, 2023
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Stephen Archibald, Associate VFX Artist to our growing team! To mark Stephen starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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New Project Announcement! Dead Island 2
September 8, 2022
All of us at Coconut Lizard are excited to announce that we are involved on the next instalment of the much-loved zombie saga, Dead Island 2. Read more within.
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Shining the spotlight on Associate Programmer, Tia Ylinen
August 9, 2022
What does an Associate Programmer within the games industry do, and how can I become one? Find out as our very own Tia details her journey, along with her top tips for those looking to enter the industry.
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Ben Scroggins, Lead Programmer to the team!
July 4, 2022
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Ben Scroggins, Lead Programmer to our growing team! To mark Ben starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Shining the spotlight on Senior Producer, Daniella Zelli-Lim
June 20, 2022
What does a Senior Producer within the games industry do, and how can I become one? Find out as our very own Daniella details her journey, along with her top tips for those looking to enter the industry.
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Peter Skager, Technical Artist to the team!
June 4, 2022
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Peter Skager, Technical Artist to our growing team! To mark Peter starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Darron Atkinson, Programmer to the team!
June 1, 2022
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Darron Atkinson, Programmer to our growing team! To mark Darron starting, he has shared a few things about himself. Read more within...
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Coconut Lizard welcomes Florina Panaite, Programmer to the team!
February 17, 2022
Coconut Lizard is excited to welcome Florina Panaite, Programmer to our growing team! To mark Florina starting, she has shared a few things about herself. Read more within...
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Find Blueprint Info Direct From Visual Studio With This One Neat Extension!
October 20, 2021
We describe a Visual Studio extension that allows developers to search and find references to elements contained inside Unreal Engine Blueprints without launching the editor.
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Editor Feature: Recent Assets Menu
June 21, 2021
We add a recent assets menu to the UE4 editor to complement the recent levels menu.
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Strings and Other Things
June 3, 2021
We untangle the Unreal string types, and outline how to choose the one you need!
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A Collection of Little Fixes
March 2, 2021
Using static code analysis, we look at some of the easy-to-miss, tiny little bugs/mistakes in Unreal Engine's codebase.
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The Consequence of the Missing References
February 25, 2021
We delve into Sequencer, looking for optimization opportunities using PVS Studio, a static code analysis tool... with some interesting findings.
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Slate 101 – Building a Leaderboard
June 10, 2020
Figuring out the basics of UE4's Slate syntax is sometimes daunting for programmers when they first use it. In this post we discuss some core concepts in order to help out new Slate users, and possibly refresh the memories of those who don't use it all that often!
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Getting Into Games Dev – Part 2
March 24, 2020
So, yeah, I started writing this story in July 2017 with Part 1 ... and intended to finish it a month later. It's now March 2020 ... nearly 3 years have passed ... and the world has most definitely moved on from wondering what happened next in my route to the games industry!
So, yeah, let's pick right up where we left off...
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The Curious Incident of the Archive Corruption
October 2, 2019
During an optimisation pass on an internal project we spotted a few areas in UE4 deserialization code that could be hardened up. This post presents those fixes.
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Blueprint Extension: Hide Unrelated Nodes
February 13, 2019
This is a new feature for both the blueprint editor and the material editor. When selecting regular nodes (except comment nodes, document nodes and the material output node) in the editor, this feature will fade out nodes which don't affect the selected nodes and nodes which are not affected by the selected nodes to make sure that users can focus on the nodes which are related to the selected nodes.
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Loops and Bubbles
June 19, 2018
Some quick fixes for mini bugs. A superfluous for loop, and some visual tweaks to comment bubbles!
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Be Vewwwy Vewwwy Quiet, We’re Hunting UObjects
May 23, 2018
While hunting down some mysteriously vanishing UObjects we stumbled across a more fundamental problem in the garbage collector.
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Trash Compactor
April 12, 2018
We recently found a huge leak in the UE4 garbage collector, particularly rearing its head on dedicated servers for large open-world games. Servers for arena type games with short play times (<1 hour) seem to be little affected, and clients don’t see the problem much either. “Huge” is not hyperbole here – we’re talking the garbage collector alone using up to 10 GB of ram in under 24 hours of server operation!
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Placating The Natives
January 8, 2018
In this article we delve into Blueprint Nativization, a relatively new feature of UE4 that offers significant performance improvements for many projects. Sadly, it often doesn't work out of the box - we've spent some time fixing and improving it for a particular project that we were working on. We have a LOT of changes to present here - some of which have already been implemented into UE4.
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PhysX: The Case Of The Leaky Cloth
August 28, 2017
We found quite a large leak within Apex 3.4 (currently used in Unreal Engine 4, amongst others) - in a relatively short run of the title that we were working on, we saw over 150mb of leaked memory. Here, we present some changes that will fix this
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Getting Into Games Development (Part 1)
July 26, 2017
In this post our MD, Robert Troughton, starts his story about how he got into the games industry
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So Long MAX_PATH… And Thanks For All The Fish!
June 30, 2017
Almost every developer that we've spoken to seems to have, at some point, encountered the MAX_PATH limit problem... this post talks about how to PROPERLY fix it
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Is It A Drive? Is It A Directory? No, It’s…
June 28, 2017
In this post, we look into why IPlatformFileCreateDirectory() was responsible for nearly 1 million allocations during a full cook of KiteDemo and why FPaths::IsDrive(), a huge 100-line function, is being used just to determine whether a filepath begins with a drive mapping... all for the purpose of further speeding up Unreal's cook process just a little bit more
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Cache-ing Up, Cache-ing In
June 22, 2017
As part of modifying the file profiler we looked at the file IO activity on starting the UE4 editor with one of the lightweight sample projects, noticing that certain files were being read multiple times. Each was being read in their entirety up to 200 times simply opening the editor. In this post we show you why this was happening and how it can be fixed
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The Quickening Of The Light Map UV Generation
June 19, 2017
Lightmap UV generation in UE4 can take a considerable amount of time. Here, we take a look at it and present some optimisations that can yield 5x faster performance
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The Improvement of the File Profiler
June 19, 2017
UE4 has a little-known profiler for analysing file operations (with the intention that this information can then be used to make optimisations). In this post we take a look at that - and we make some improvements to make it (even more) useful
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The Case of the Locked File
February 27, 2017
We were seeing frequent file IO errors in relation to temporary files created during cooking (particularly when compiling shaders). Our findings for why this were happening were surprising. Here we present a clean way to fix the issues
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The Long and Winding Path of the Cook
February 27, 2017
Long file path problems are commonplace when cooking with UE4. We took a look at it - and found that the engine was being too aggressive with its checks for whether or not a path really was too long
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It’s A Size, Jim, But Not As We Know It, Not As We Know It…
February 24, 2017
A really small bug fix is presented here - with a lot of Trekkie banter to fluff the piece out... and why not?
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Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 6)
February 24, 2017
The sixth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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Sign Of The Times
February 23, 2017
PVS-Studio pointed us toward some code with suspiciously mixed signed/unsigned math. This was actually causing some issues - and here we tell you how to fix them
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Clear And Reset Danger
February 23, 2017
A common programming mistake is fixed here, this time in the FBX importer
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Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 5)
November 20, 2016
The fifth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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The Sadness of the Ignored Null Pointer
July 14, 2016
In this post we present an optimization coming from removing some pointless null pointer checks. The way that we found this was quite interesting
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Speeding Up The Time Limit Controls
July 13, 2016
When a process takes a long time to complete, it makes absolute sense to put some time limit checks in so that you're not starving other work. What you don't want to do, of course, is to have those checks slow your original task down further by any considerable amount - here, we found that exactly this was happening .. so we present a solution
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The Battle of the Lean and the Inlined Bone Functions
July 12, 2016
We took a look at the inlining of a certain part of the codebase and were shocked with what we found... we then went about improving it
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ToString() Or Not ToString()… Wait, What’s The Question?
July 6, 2016
ToString() is one of the most commonly called functions in UE4 - certainly across the editor, the content cooker and such. Here we take a look at it and make it over twice as fast
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Tiny Code Fixes – Part 1
July 4, 2016
Here we present several small code fixes and improvements in a nice little package
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Package Versioning… How It Works… And An Optimization
June 29, 2016
UE4's Package Versioning is a bit of a dark art for most.. here we try to remove some of the confusion around it - while, again, offering some improvements through optimization
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Portrait Of A Serialize Perf Killer
June 21, 2016
With performance critical editor and cooker code, it's well advised to consider performance when adding tests for rare errors. Here we take a look at this and show by, by considering the CPU pipeline and code cache, a simple change can yield a significant performance improvement without reducing stability
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Sweeping Up And Disassembling A Physics Macro
June 20, 2016
Macros can often be useful to make certain programming tasks simpler - but they can also cause hidden performance headaches that might otherwise be avoided. Here we look at one of those - and how to improve it
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Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 4)
June 6, 2016
The fourth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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When Are Shopping Lists A Waste of Time?
June 3, 2016
We take a look at some list generating code with UE4 - and why it was completely pointless
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Using The Disassembler To Highlight Optimization Targets
May 23, 2016
We use the debugger's disassembly view to look at FPaths::IsRelative() after it shows up in our profiling tests. Then we optimize it
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Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 3)
May 16, 2016
The third part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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The Cook, The Resave, His Garbage And Her Optimization
May 4, 2016
We present here a way to improve cook times by reducing the frequency of garbage collection
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The Case Of The ExportHash String Monster
April 29, 2016
We found CreateExportHash() was showing up in profiling the cooker - so we optimized it. Our findings and changes are presented here
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Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 2)
April 27, 2016
The second part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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Patch Content Early – NOT At Runtime
April 25, 2016
We present an optimization that removes a significant amount of memory churn from the animation code
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Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 1)
April 19, 2016
The first part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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A Huge PhysX Memory Churn Reduction
April 18, 2016
Here we implement a scratch buffer to reduce temporary memory churn passing through PhysX
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The Smallest, Coolest Optimization
April 17, 2016
While profiling a game's runtime, we found that 40% of memory allocations were coming from a single function. The fix/optimization involves adding a single character
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The Clue In The Code Comments
April 17, 2016
We present a tiny little fix for a simple - but serious - coding error in the UE4 codebase
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