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The Improved Terrain Generation Pipeline

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      The past two weeks I've been working to multithread and optimize the terrain generation in Mini Solar System and it's finally paying off. I left off last week with a mostly optimized but partly functional system, and I'm pleased to say this week I have ironed out most of the wrinkles and the terrain generation is almost ten times faster. Setup     As previously mentioned , the old system would use one thread per terrain face, but now we are calculating the same face in parallel with multiple threads. I settled on an approach with the task graph system where one task would be launched to calculate the vertices, UVs, and tris for the mesh as well as the normals and tangents. Then that task would be used as a prerequisite for another task back on the game thread that would compile the terrain data from each thread and build the final mesh once all threads were finished. It had to be done in two separate tasks like this because the procedural mesh component ca...
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Multithreading Saga Continued...

      This week I grappled with Unreal Engine multithreading some more. I'm trying to make the terrain generation as efficient as possible for the planets, and that has consisted of lots of trial and error, and several rewrites, which means learning!      I came across this great Unreal Fest Gold Cost talk from 2024 which explains UE multithreading and how to use it. I'm surprised I hadn't come across this before because it has lots of great info. The biggest revelation I had was that I was using the wrong method of multithreading for what I wanted to do. Before this week I was using an FRunnable to calculate the terrain. In the talk however, Alex explains that these  FRunnable s  are meant for larger lifecycle tasks and are intended to be kept running. For my use-case though I want more fire and forget type functionality. Give a thread some info, let it run its calculations, and give the resulting data back to the game thread whenever it's done...
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More Multithreading!

      This week I decided to try my hand at optimizing and improving the multithreading that is used in the game. I wanted to make it faster because the way it was implemented would cause the initial level load to take minutes if you had many terrestrial planets or cranked the quality level up in the settings. Background     I first added multithreading to the game in early October of 2020, and I covered the process of doing so in the "Multithreading Hell" post. I remember it being a frustrating ordeal at the time, but with years more experience under my belt by now I figured it would be a good a time as any to go back to it.     Multithreading is only utilized for the generation of terrestrial planets. Terrestrial planet meshes are made by evaluating noise at coordinates on a sphere. The sphere is made by taking points on a cube and normalizing them from the center. The sphere can then be neatly divided into six faces. The old approach would use one ...
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Slow & Steady

     This week was another of incremental progress on Mini Solar System. There's still lots that I'm doing in my personal life which means I don't have nearly the time I would like to dedicate to MSS, though I did complete some tasks that needed to be done.  Organization & File Structure     The largest one of these tasks was to organize the file structure in the /Source directory. When I came back to the project one of the first things I noticed was that all the source files were just sitting in /Private or /Public and there were no subdirectories. This is in stark contrast to the other projects I have worked on in the past couple years where source files are organized and grouped by their use. For example all single use game related classes like game-mode, game state, game instance, save game, were all in a /Game directory. Player pawns and controllers would go in /Player, and so on. I grouped together classes related to the color generation as well a...
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Another Chapter

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      Hello again, it's been a while! A few years actually. I took a break from regularly updating this blog during my time working at Studio369. It was an overall amazing experience and I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity; I learned a lot and got to work with a bunch of really talented people. But sadly it seems my time there may in fact be coming to a close.       I've picked up Mini Solar System again and have resumed development. In the last two weeks I have upgraded the project to the latest version of the Unreal Engine (5.8.1) and setup a proper fork of the engine with the local changes needed for MSS. It was quite a slow process as I was using a hard drive for the project (I'm running out of storage and the RAM shortage has made new SSDs too expensive right now ;-;), but after shuffling some projects around and getting it on an NVMe development is now faster than ever!      I'm resuming development by correcting old mista...
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A New Chapter

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     This week has presented the biggest change probably since the release of Mini Solar System; I was offered a full-time position as a junior programmer at Studio 369 which I was happy to accept. I start on Monday and I couldn't be more excited to work with the team there! However, this did mean though that my priorities shifted quite instantaneously. I went from working full-time on "RPG_Game" to preparing for this new job. This mainly meant getting up to speed on networking as that is the one area of Unreal Engine I feel I have a lack of knowledge in (I'm already proficient in UI, AI, gameplay, materials, and general backend work), and since 369's specialty is networking I figured I would come prepared. I did do a little work on "RPG_Game" but it was minimal just to tie up some loose ends. Unreal's Multiplayer Framework      As explained by the Unreal Engine documentation, "multiplayer programming [is] inherently more complex than programmin...
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Polishing the Foundation

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     This sprint was relatively uneventful; mainly cleaning up the existing foundational elements of the game (the first person character and spell component) and continuing to improve the necessary elements of the game like the pause screen. Player Character & Spells      The improvements to the player character come in two parts; the ability to have, use, and change spells, as well as interaction via an interface. Both of theses are as simple as I could make them. Utilizing inheritance from USpellBase using the spells is only really a single line, and changing out the spells we can use the NewObject factory to make a new spell very simply. FirstPersonCharacter.h FirstPersonCharacter.cpp      As for the interaction interface, it only consists of two functions right now, one to fire an interaction event and one to check if the object can be interacted with. This second function is used mainly to show UI on the player's screen like...
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