Tom Looman

Unreal Engine 5.5 Performance Highlights

The following Highlights are taken from the Unreal Engine 5.5 Release Notes and focus primarily on real-time game performance on PC and consoles. My personal highlights have some commentary on them and at the bottom...

New Course: Complete Game Optimization for Unreal Engine 5

It’s finally here! My new course about Game Performance & Optimization has launched! It’s called: Complete Game Optimization for Unreal Engine 5 What’s included? We cover everything you need to optimize your game, from deep dives with the profiling...

Setting up PSO Precaching & Bundled PSOs for Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine titles have faced stutter issues on PC with DirectX 12. These hitches primarily stem from inefficient handling of Pipeline State Objects (PSOs), which preconfigure GPU states but suffer from on-demand compilation delays. Unreal Engine 5.1 introduced PSO Precaching to preemptively compile PSOs, but issues persist with partial coverage. The article details implementing PSO Precaching alongside the older Bundled PSOs approach for better frame pacing.

Unreal Engine C++ Complete Guide

Getting started with Unreal Engine C++ can be a bit of a struggle. The resources online have no clear path to follow or fail to explain the Unrealisms you’ll encounter. In this article, I’ll attempt...

Unreal Engine Game Optimization on a Budget

Companion text version of the Unreal Engine Game Optimization talk I presented during JetBrains GameDev Days 2022.

Easily Add Custom ‘Project Settings’ to Unreal Engine (.INI)

You might be placing all your settings and tweakable options in Blueprints or even hard-coded in C++. Unreal Engine does have the option to easily add more configuration settings in the INI config file system...

Why you should be using GameplayTags in Unreal Engine

You may or may not be familiar with GameplayTags in Unreal Engine. It’s heavily used in Unreal’s Gameplay Ability System, but can be used stand-alone in your game framework. In this article, I will introduce...

Unreal Engine C++ Pro Course is Available Now!

Master Unreal Engine C++ Game Development with this university-grade course. My Unreal Engine C++ course has just launched! It is packed with high-quality C++ and gameplay-focused lectures totaling nearly 30 hours of videos and 7...

Unreal Engine C++ Save System (SaveGame)

Introduction For your game, you’ll eventually need to write some kind of save system. To store player information, unlocks, achievements, etc. In some cases, you will need to save the world state such as looted...

Async Blueprint Nodes (to fetch JSON data)

For my upcoming game WARPSQUAD, I was curious how easy it is to fetch data from a web service to be displayed in-game. The initial use case is a simple Message of the Day (MOTD)...