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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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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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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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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Some quick fixes for mini bugs. A superfluous for loop, and some visual tweaks to comment bubbles!
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While hunting down some mysteriously vanishing UObjects we stumbled across a more fundamental problem in the garbage collector.
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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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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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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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In this post our MD, Robert Troughton, starts his story about how he got into the games industry
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 sixth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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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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A common programming mistake is fixed here, this time in the FBX importer
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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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The fifth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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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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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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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() 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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Here we present several small code fixes and improvements in a nice little package
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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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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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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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The fourth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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We take a look at some list generating code with UE4 - and why it was completely pointless
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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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The third part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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We present here a way to improve cook times by reducing the frequency of garbage collection
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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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The second part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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We present an optimization that removes a significant amount of memory churn from the animation code
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The first part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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Here we implement a scratch buffer to reduce temporary memory churn passing through PhysX
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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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We present a tiny little fix for a simple - but serious - coding error in the UE4 codebase
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