Resume 2026

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Progress Update #19

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  Orbit Debug/Visualizer Optimization     This week I tasked myself with optimizing the orbit visualizer. The reasoning behind this was that I couldn't render an entire orbit of planets with large orbit radii without the framerate plummeting to the low teens and that would need to change. Finding the Root Problem     The first thing I set out to do was to find out exactly why the engine was having a hard time with rendering orbits far into the predicted future. While looking for methods of debugging optimization in Unreal, I came across a presentation by the Unreal team on  Profiling and Optimization in UE4 . This talk introduced me to the stat unitGraph console command as well as the GPU Profile accessible with the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + ,     Through these methods of debugging I realized that the debug line method of rendering would hit the CPU render thread (draw) while the spline method would hit the CPU game thread. Baseline (0 step...
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Progress Update #17

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Asteroid Heightmaps in UE4     The task for this week was to make asteroids more interesting by having their meshes not be plain old cubes. The original plan was to basically copy the terrain generation system from the terrestrial planets, but instead I tried challenging myself by creating a world displacement material instead. Method of Terrain:     Starting out this feature I intended to copy, essentially line for line, the terrain generation process of terrestrial planets. This wouldn't have been terribly difficult but would defiantly have been very boring, so I looked for an alternative.      I knew from messing around in the editor that you can offset vertices of a mesh through a material, so googling that led me to a video which explained all the ways you can fake depth through a material. This video also introduced me to tessellation which adds more vertices to the mesh during the vertex shading stage of a shader (...
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Progress Update #21

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  Procedural Generation Runtime Compliance     Over this week I have made major progress on the packaging errors that effected the project; the majority of which had to do with the systems of generating procedural meshes and textures at runtime. The reason they weren't runtime compliant is that I was using functions and variables from the engine that were marked as WITH_EDITOR or WITH_EDITORONLY_DATA which are not allowed to be used in packaged builds of the game/ at runtime. Procedural Meshes:     With the main appeal of the game being the generation of planets I decided to start by fixing the mesh generation system. In the process of looking for a solution I came across two articles ( article 1 article 2 ) on the subject of runtime procedural meshes written by an employee of Epic Games. The first article was the one that I spent most of my time on but they are both very detailed on their respective topics.      After multiple days of trying to ...
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