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.
More
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.
More
Some quick fixes for mini bugs. A superfluous for loop, and some visual tweaks to comment bubbles!
More
While hunting down some mysteriously vanishing UObjects we stumbled across a more fundamental problem in the garbage collector.
More
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
More
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.
More
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
More
In this post our MD, Robert Troughton, starts his story about how he got into the games industry
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
The sixth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
More
A really small bug fix is presented here - with a lot of Trekkie banter to fluff the piece out... and why not?
More
A common programming mistake is fixed here, this time in the FBX importer
More
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
More
The fifth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
More
In this post we present an optimization coming from removing some pointless null pointer checks. The way that we found this was quite interesting
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
Here we present several small code fixes and improvements in a nice little package
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
The fourth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
More
We take a look at some list generating code with UE4 - and why it was completely pointless
More
We use the debugger's disassembly view to look at FPaths::IsRelative() after it shows up in our profiling tests. Then we optimize it
More
The third part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
More
We present here a way to improve cook times by reducing the frequency of garbage collection
More
We found CreateExportHash() was showing up in profiling the cooker - so we optimized it. Our findings and changes are presented here
More
The second part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
More
We present an optimization that removes a significant amount of memory churn from the animation code
More
The first part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
More
Here we implement a scratch buffer to reduce temporary memory churn passing through PhysX
More
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
More
We present a tiny little fix for a simple - but serious - coding error in the UE4 codebase
More