
In this post our MD, Robert Troughton, starts his story about how he got into the games industry
MoreUnreal Journal is an online blog focusing on the work that we do at Coconut Lizard, primarily in relation to development of Unreal Engine and games built upon it, but also several other topics that we feel may be of interest to the community. We will try to update regularly.
Please feel free to comment on any posts and contact us with feedback, as we're very keen to hear everyone's thoughts.
In this post our MD, Robert Troughton, starts his story about how he got into the games industry
MoreLong 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
MoreWe 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
MoreThe sixth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
MoreA really small bug fix is presented here - with a lot of Trekkie banter to fluff the piece out... and why not?
MoreA common programming mistake is fixed here, this time in the FBX importer
MorePVS-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
MoreThe fifth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
MoreIn this post we present an optimization coming from removing some pointless null pointer checks. The way that we found this was quite interesting
MoreWhen 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
MoreWe 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
MoreToString() 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
MoreHere we present several small code fixes and improvements in a nice little package
MoreUE4'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
MoreWith 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
MoreMacros 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
MoreThe fourth part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
MoreWe take a look at some list generating code with UE4 - and why it was completely pointless
MoreWe use the debugger's disassembly view to look at FPaths::IsRelative() after it shows up in our profiling tests. Then we optimize it
MoreThe third part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
MoreWe present here a way to improve cook times by reducing the frequency of garbage collection
MoreWe found CreateExportHash() was showing up in profiling the cooker - so we optimized it. Our findings and changes are presented here
MoreThe second part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
MoreWe present an optimization that removes a significant amount of memory churn from the animation code
MoreThe first part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
MoreHere we implement a scratch buffer to reduce temporary memory churn passing through PhysX
MoreWhile 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
MoreWe present a tiny little fix for a simple - but serious - coding error in the UE4 codebase
More