The New C++ Course, GPU Optimization Videos, JetBrains GameDev Day, and find out What's Next

There is a lot of news to share! The biggest being the relaunch and five-year anniversary of the Unreal Engine C++ course.

Rebuilding My Unreal Engine C++ Course for UE5.6+

Rebuilding the entire course took me more than a year of recording, including research, and editing. It has finally launched last week and I am very proud of the result! Please consider sharing the relaunch with a friend or colleague as word of mouth has always been important for the course’s success.

Today, the C++ course has around 6000 students. Well over one thousand work at AAA studios, and more than 150 game studios have at least one employee enrolled. Some studios have enrolled between 300 and 400 employees, which is far beyond anything I expected when I released the original course.

You can read more about the course relaunch in the announcement post.

Rebuilding from the ground up let me include some new topics I find increasingly valuable, such as Data-Oriented Design, encouraging students to look beyond Actors and object-oriented patterns when designing gameplay systems.

New Course Subject: Data-Oriented Design

Thousands of pickups don’t need thousands of Actors. By making a coin pickup system using plain data arrays rather than Actors we can add thousands of coins to the world in microseconds, not milliseconds. The code remains simple to understand and easy to maintain.

How it works: We use synchronized data arrays to define the coin location, credits reward and instanced mesh Ids from a single Instanced mesh component to represent many thousands of coins in the world. It replaces the usual approach of using Actors and is significantly faster to process with less memory overhead as we can skip the bulk of data we would inherit from Actors and Components.

Below you can see how the coin data is stored. Three arrays, kept in sync, otherwise known as 'Structure of Arrays'. During the lessons we go into detail on how and when to apply data-oriented design and you will see how this can be applied in your own gameplay systems.

While DoD is nothing new, it’s something I see developers often learn very late in the process as Unreal Engine is so heavily biased to OOP (object oriented programming). OOP is convenient, but not always the right approach. In the C++ course we explain and apply both.

JetBrains GameDev Day 2026 on September 28th.

I took part in the JetBrains GameDev Day a couple of years ago with 'Game Optimization on a Budget' Talk. This year there will be a short segment showing some of my work including the relaunched Unreal Engine C++ Course and my Project Orion Sample Game.

There will be a couple of Unreal Engine oriented talks (View the Agenda) this year that I am looking forward to such as 'Death by a Thousand Ticks: Why Gameplay Systems Become Slow' by Konrad Słoń from Fool's Theory. Tune in Live at September 28th, 12:00 CEST​

Inside Unreal: 'Far Far West' Game Optimization Livestream

Last month I was Live on the Unreal Engine YouTube channel talking about game optimization in 'Far Far West'. We talked about a variety of topics including memory leaks, Nanite, Collision...

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YouTube: Real-World Optimization: Lighting & Shadows

In this follow-up to the Unreal Engine livestream, we dive deeper into optimizing lighting and shadows in 'Far Far West' with UE 5.8.

Using real production examples, I walk through the tools and process for auditing lighting and shadows, showing techniques you can apply directly to your own levels.

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What's Next?

My next focus is a dedicated Multiplayer Programming Module as an add-on to the C++ Course, covering Unreal Engine replication, Iris, multiplayer gameplay architecture, testing, and debugging. It is expected to launch toward the end of 2026. (If you own the C++ Course before 30th September 23:59 UTC, you receive this module at no additional cost)

The 'Complete Game Optimization for Unreal Engine 5' course remains in Early Access status. Throughout 2026 it received a slow stream of new content, this will ramp up now that the C++ course rebuild has finished. Thanks to everyone who has previously enrolled in the course, there are many more free updates being worked on!

P.S. The C++ Course relaunch at the same time as the Five-Year Anniversary, you can get $100 off during this relaunch event until September 30th, 23:59 UTC.