New Optimization Article, C++ Course Lessons, "Orion" Sample Game Updates

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

New Article: Adding Trace Counters to Unreal Insights & Stats System

The original post about adding new cycle counters for Unreal Insights and the Stats System has been overhauled enough to consider it an entirely new article.

The new tutorial focuses on the common cycle stats and counters you can add to your C++ game code when using either the Stats System or Unreal Insights. These two systems share some overlap, but use distinct Macros that need some clarification of the differences.

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

Since the last newsletter I have added new lessons including some on Data-Oriented Design for building simple and highly performant systems. 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

• Data-Oriented Design Introduction
• Coin Pickups using Data-Oriented Design
• Iterating thousands of Coins
• Coin Pickups - Instanced Meshes

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

"Project Orion" Updates

The “Co-op Action Roguelike Sample Game” for Unreal Engine 5 continues to evolve. It has been open source on GitHub since 2020 and deserved a proper Codename, which became ”Orion” to refer to as the aforementioned description is a mouthful. (Orion is in reference to the original internal codename for Epic's game Paragon)

The game now has it's own evolving Project Landing Page to highlight the many cool features to explore and dive into. In the past few months it received dozens of updates, here are some notable additions:

Niagara Data Channels for projectile impacts

• Experimental with Decal Rendering so far, NDC significantly reduce the overhead of particle systems by sharing a single Niagara instance for many hit impacts.
• Look for RogueProjectilesSubsystem::SpawnImpactFX

Data-Oriented design for Projectiles & Pickups

• All Projectiles completely Actorless instead using simple data arrays
• Includes networking support and client side predicted projectile spawning (WIP).
• Coin Pickups - spawns thousands of coins from dead enemies using DoD rather than Actors.
• Look for RogueProjectilesSubsystem.cpp & RoguePickupSubsystem.cpp

Object Pooling

• Monsters now ragdoll using a special class “MonsterCorpse” that is pooled and the original Monster Actor itself is hidden (will be pooled in the future, including networking support) the animated pose is copied to the ragdoll instance and a single class can be used for all types of monsters.
• Look for RogueMonsterCorpse.cpp

The features above are experimental and will continue to be worked on. Besides these larger features, the project continues to receive tons of fixes and improvements, a lot of which become a part of the Unreal C++ Course Upgrade. You can read more about the project on my blog.

Smaller Updates

• Work continues in the background for the Optimization Course with new Case Study lessons using Far Far West currently being produced.
• The Course Platform has received styling polish which should make the texts and code samples more pleasant to read and navigate.