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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In this post our MD, Robert Troughton, starts his story about how he got into the games industry
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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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