Bioshock 4

Bioshock 4

Action RPG
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Released: TBC
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC

Experiance

  • Learning and getting familiar with some of the new changes in UE5
  • Working on the MemFerrert tool project. A propriety memory profiling plugin for Unreal Engine
  • Adding support for Visual Studio 2022 to MemFerrert
  • Fixing data display issues in the MemFerrert output viewer
  • Adding a new function search feature in the MemFerrert output viewer
  • Profiling and optimising the game menus
  • Further developing the existing game options menu UI
  • Setting up the data for the game options using C++ meta programming
  • Setting up a modifiable outline effect that can be assigned to interactive objects in the game
  • Play testing new sections of the every month
  • Debugging the existing gameplay related issues
  • Knowledge sharing development tips in UE5 with the rest of the team
  • Presenting new feature work to the rest of the team
  • Reviewing code, blueprints and providing feedback

Biggest Challenge

The majority of my time on this project was spent investigating the performance of the game’s menus. This involved identifying all of the parts that felt slow from a user experience point of view. The construction of these UI screens was reviewed in the Unreal Editor, and feedback was provided with recommendations on how to improve the performance. I got to work soon after rebuilding the majority of these screen.

The challenging part of this work was trying to maintain the visual effects, whilst implementing optimal solutions. I did notice an extensive use of the UE Canvas widget. This is one of the complex UI components that has a high performance cost. I also noticed a lot of repetitions in parts of the UI hierarchy. Groups of the UI components were used in multiple menu screens. I moved these into new modular widgets. These were then reused, and could be extended in the future to add more functionality to them.