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Two hidden Unreal optimization features

Unreal comes with lots of tools to improve performance, but usually it’s hard to find them. I’m gonna show you 2 systems that you can use for performance optimization.

Animation Budget Allocator

The Animation Budget Allocator allows you to specify certain time requirements per Game Thread frame and Unreal will try to spend only that amount of time updating skeletal meshes.

You need to inherit from USkeletalMeshComponentBudgeted for this to work, but once you do that mesh will be inside the system.

By default the score it gives to meshes is calculated based on distances to controllers, but you can override that to give them the Significance score yourself.

Really useful if you want to keep Skeletal Mesh performance in-check.

Niagara Effect Types

Niagara Effect Types are a kind of asset you can create that allows to set different scalability settings for a group of effects.

Once you have created the asset, you can go to any Niagara System and specify which Effect Type to use, that way you can have presets for Environment, Enemy Effects, Player Effects, etc.

Inside the Effect Types asset you can configure cull distance as well as different settings depending on both scalability level and platform type.

Feel free to play with the parameters to achieve your desired game performance.

🎓 GameDev Knowledge Videos 🎓

If you are interested in fast paced action combat I recommend watching this talk from a past GDC by the creators of Dreamscaper.

They work through the process of creating a satisfying combat system on a small indie team, focusing on the design, feel and workflow needed to achieve success.

I highly recommend watching it.

🌱 Small Indie Games Spotlight! 🌱

In this new section I will highlight some small indie games created by small developers.

Being a solo developer or a small studio is a really challenging feat so I want to help other devs to grow and be able to follow their dreams.

In this case @Zoroarts_Dev is a 20 years old solo-gamedev that has worked on his first Indie game "Makis Adventure" over the last 2 years.

You can find his game Makis Adventure on Steam.

And that’s it for today!
As always if you have any doubt don't hesitate to contact me.

See you next Saturday! 🐱