New Course Lessons, C++ State Trees Code Samples and More

Progress continues to be steady on the courses, including continued work on the open-source Project "Orion" which feeds back into the courses and tutorials with advanced topics on C++ and Performance.

13 New lessons for 'Professional Game Development in C++ and Unreal Engine 5'

Since the last newsletter I have added 13 new lessons including some performance profiling, a new buff system, GameplayTag hierarchies and the latest Assignment #6. You can find the first new lesson here. The lessons center around a coin pickup system where we spawn and iterate thousands of coins in a frame without any noticeable impact on performance.

New Lessons (Sections 18-20) Watch Here​

• Developer Settings & Async Load
• MetaSounds Pickup Trigger
• Profiling - Adding Cycle Counter
• Profiling with Unreal Insights
• Applying C++ Optimizations
• ActionEffect: Stunned Debuff
• Player Stunned Animation
• Stunned Sound Playback
• GameplayTag Delegates & Action Cancellation
• GameplayTag Hierarchies
• Assignment 6 - Minion Burning & Stunned from Damage
• Assignment 6 - Solution Walkthrough
• UObject lifetime and Garbage Collection

If you haven't recently checked the curriculum, you can find other new lessons marked with the 🆕 icon.

State Trees in C++ (Code Samples)

There were preliminary plans to include State Trees in the C++ course curriculum. It ended up overcomplicating things and were not a good fit. So I am leaving it on the backlog until a potential course "DLC" in the future. However, the code I prepared and experimenting with is available in Project Orion to explore yourself!

The assets including the State Tree and some Blueprint Tasks is under "Content/ActionRoguelike/World". The C++ code is available at "Source/ActionRoguelike/StateTree/..".

At the moment it's a mix of Blueprint and C++ to explore the possibilities and workflow for State Trees, especially managing data in C++ has a lot of domain specific gotchas. Keep in mind it's a work in progress, but it may help you get started.

Smaller Updates

• For the Optimization Course I am improving lesson flow by including smaller learning paths. For example: "CPU - Collision, Queries & Physics" to help find all relevant lessons when hitting a specific problem related to collision.
• Optimization work continues on Far Far West, expect more Case Study lessons to be added to Complete Game Optimization Course as a result.
• Unreal Engine 5.8 has hit Preview status, another Performance Highlights will be available once that hits full stable release.
• 21 new commits for Project Orion "Action Roguelike", this time mainly focusing around course lesson preparation, C++ state trees, and stability.

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